1Graywolf Press
A non-profit literary publisher with a prize record that embarrasses houses many times its size, and one of the reasons Minneapolis is a serious literary city.
The 11 Best Book Publishing Companies in Minnesota
Minnesota publishes more significant literature per head than any state in the country, and it is not close. Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press and Milkweed Editions all operate within a few miles of each other in Minneapolis, and between them they publish a share of American prize winning literature that would be respectable for a mid sized New York house. Two of them sit in or beside the Open Book building on Washington Avenue, alongside the Loft Literary Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
This did not happen by accident, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it explains what a state can do deliberately. Minnesota built a funding structure, through private foundations and later through a constitutional amendment dedicating sales tax revenue to arts and culture, that lets non-profit publishers make editorial decisions without a sales forecast attached. A press that can publish a first book of poems because it should exist will, over thirty years, accumulate a list that a commercial house cannot match.
11
Publishers listed
1996
Publishing since
Featured publisher
Western Reflections Publishing Company
Western Reflections Publishing Company has published from Colorado since 1996 and works with authors across Minnesota on regional history, biography, memoir and general non-fiction. Nearly two hundred books are in print, most of them still selling years after publication, which is what a small house can do that a large one cannot.
Every submission is read by a person and answered in writing. Where we would not acquire a manuscript, editing, cover design, formatting, printing and marketing are quoted as fixed fees rather than bundled packages, and the author keeps copyright and every production file.
Contact
The listings
Book publishers working in Minnesota
Listed with the contact details each house publishes itself. A detail we could not confirm is left out rather than guessed.
2Coffee House Press
A Minneapolis non-profit publishing adventurous fiction, poetry and essays, with a residency programme that puts writers into unexpected working environments.
3Milkweed Editions
A non-profit literary publisher in the Open Book building, with a nature writing list that produced Braiding Sweetgrass, one of the most sustained bestsellers in recent American non-fiction.
4University of Minnesota Press
A scholarly press with international standing in critical theory, geography, media studies and indigenous studies, alongside a regional list that keeps Minnesota history in print.
5Llewellyn Worldwide
The oldest and largest publisher of body, mind and spirit books in the English language, founded in 1901 and independently held ever since.
6Lerner Publishing Group
One of the largest independent childrens publishers in the United States, family owned since 1959, publishing across picture books, non-fiction and young adult through a dozen imprints.
7Capstone
A major childrens educational publisher producing books, digital reading platforms and library resources for schools, and one of the largest publishing employers in Minnesota.
8Minnesota Historical Society Press
The publishing arm of the Minnesota Historical Society, covering state and regional history, Dakota and Ojibwe history, memoir and the Borealis Books reprint line.
9Holy Cow! Press
A small literary press on Lake Superior publishing poetry, fiction and anthologies rooted in the Upper Midwest, running since 1977.
10Beaver’s Pond Press
A Twin Cities hybrid publisher, working with authors who fund their own projects and keep the rights, with production and local distribution support.
11Free Spirit Publishing
A publisher of childrens and teen self help, social emotional learning and classroom resources, founded in Minneapolis in 1983 and acquired by Teacher Created Materials in 2019.
Status update: Acquired by Teacher Created Materials in 2019 and now operates within that group rather than as an independent Minneapolis publisher.
Local context
Professional Book Publishers in Minnesota
The state produced two of the defining American writers of the early twentieth century within a few years and a hundred miles of each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on Laurel Avenue in Saint Paul in 1896 and finished This Side of Paradise in a house on Summit Avenue, the street he then spent a career using as shorthand for money and its disappointments. Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, wrote Main Street about a town everyone recognised as Sauk Centre, and in 1930 became the first American awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The town now advertises itself as the original Main Street, which is a resolution Lewis would have found funny.
What followed was a literature attentive to small places and to who is inside and outside them. Robert Bly wrote and translated from a farm near Madison and won the National Book Award. Tim O’Brien came out of Austin, Minnesota and wrote The Things They Carried. Louise Erdrich has published a Pulitzer winning body of work about Ojibwe life from Minneapolis, where she also runs Birchbark Books, a shop that functions as a centre for Native writing in the city. Kate DiCamillo has taken two Newbery Medals from Minneapolis. Patricia Hampl effectively taught American memoir how to think about itself.
The infrastructure is the part other states should study. The Loft Literary Center is the largest independent literary centre in the United States and has been teaching and paying writers since 1974. Rain Taxi has reviewed books nobody else reviews for three decades and runs the Twin Cities Book Festival. The McKnight and Bush Foundations have funded individual writers directly and consistently. In 2008 Minnesota voters passed the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, which dedicated a fraction of the state sales tax to arts and cultural heritage. Very few American states have made that kind of collective decision about literature, and the density of publishing in Minneapolis is the visible result of it.
Routes in
Getting Published in Minnesota: Who Reads Directly, Prizes, and Where Books Launch
The routes into Minnesota publishing are specific and worth learning precisely. Graywolf does not read unsolicited manuscripts; it acquires through agents and through its own prizes, including the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the Africa Prize. Coffee House and Milkweed open reading periods and announce them on their sites; a manuscript sent outside a window is not read. University of Minnesota Press, the Minnesota Historical Society Press and Holy Cow! Press take proposals directly. Lerner works through agents and Capstone commissions most of its list. Beaver’s Pond in Edina is a paid hybrid. Knowing which of those applies to your book saves a year.
The support structure for writers is the best in the country and most of it is free or funded. The Loft Literary Center at Open Book teaches hundreds of classes a year, runs the Mentor Series for emerging writers, and administers the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers, which pay twenty five thousand dollars to each of several Minnesota writers annually. The Minnesota State Arts Board gives Artist Initiative grants funded by the Legacy Amendment. The Minnesota Book Awards, run by the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library since 1988, are announced each spring and matter to regional sales. Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Book Festival each October is the state’s largest literary gathering. The Minnesota Center for Book Arts, in the same building as the Loft, teaches printing and binding and publishes an annual Winter Book. Hamline and the University of Minnesota both run MFA programmes.
Minnesota buys books, and its independent shops are where they launch. Magers and Quinn in Uptown, Moon Palace in Longfellow, Milkweed’s own shop at Open Book and Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark Books in Kenwood serve Minneapolis; Wild Rumpus is the childrens shop; Subtext and Next Chapter hold Saint Paul; Content in Northfield and Zenith in Duluth cover the rest of the state. The public library systems in Hennepin County and Saint Paul are among the heaviest users of OverDrive in the country, so an ebook listed for library lending reaches readers here that it would not elsewhere. A title that has been through the Minnesota Book Awards, the Twin Cities Book Festival and those shops has reached the readership that sustains the state’s publishers.
What we do
Book Publishing Services We Offer in Minnesota
Every service is quoted on its own, so you buy the stages your manuscript actually needs rather than a package built around the ones it does not.
Editing
Developmental, line and copy editing, plus proofreading, quoted by manuscript length and condition.
Learn more →Cover Design
Original cover artwork and typography, supplied as layered source files you keep.
Learn more →Formatting & Typesetting
Print ready interiors and reflowable ebook files built from one typeset source.
Learn more →Printing
Short runs, offset runs and print on demand, with paper and binding specified to the book.
Learn more →Marketing & Promotion
Launch planning, retailer metadata, review outreach and regional bookshop campaigns.
Learn more →Ghostwriting
Full manuscript writing from interviews, notes or a partial draft, published under your name.
Learn more →Why Minnesota Authors Choose Western Reflections Publishing
We are honest about when a Minnesota press is the better home
If you have written literary fiction or poetry, Graywolf, Coffee House and Milkweed are among the best publishers in the country and we will say so. We work with the regional non-fiction, memoir and history they do not publish.
Direct reading, written response
Every submission is read by a person and answered in writing. The state’s literary presses mostly cannot do this at the volume they receive; being smaller lets us.
Fixed fees and full rights retention
Services quoted individually, copyright and production files retained by you, no perpetual royalty share taken in exchange for production work.
Distribution into an unusually strong bookselling market
Minnesota supports a dense network of independent bookshops and an active library system. Books are listed with the wholesalers those buyers order from, on terms they will accept.
Our Book Publishing Process for Minnesota Authors
Step 1
Read and direction
An honest assessment of the manuscript and of where it belongs. For literary work we will frequently point you at a Minneapolis press rather than at ourselves.
Step 2
Plan and quote
A written scope of only the work the manuscript needs, priced per stage, with a schedule you can hold us to.
Step 3
Edit, design, produce
Structure first, then line and copy editing, then cover and interior typesetting, with proofs at each stage.
Step 4
Print, distribute, launch
Print on demand or a run, wholesale and library listings, and launch support built around regional bookshops, libraries and reading series.
Questions authors ask
Frequently Asked Questions: Book Publishing in Minnesota
Why does Minnesota have so many important literary publishers?
Because the state decided to fund them, and then kept doing it for fifty years. Graywolf, Coffee House and Milkweed are non-profits supported by foundations, individual donors and public arts funding, which means they can publish a book on the judgement that it deserves to exist rather than on a projected sales figure. The Legacy Amendment passed by voters in 2008 dedicated sales tax revenue to arts and cultural heritage, and the McKnight and Bush Foundations have funded writers directly for decades. Density of that kind is the result of sustained public and philanthropic decisions, not of a literary climate.
Can I submit to Graywolf, Coffee House or Milkweed directly?
Graywolf does not accept unsolicited manuscripts at all and works through agents and through the prizes and fellowships it participates in. Coffee House Press and Milkweed Editions open and close reading periods rather than reading continuously, so timing matters and the current guidelines on their own sites are the only reliable source. All three receive far more submissions than they can publish, and all three have a distinct editorial character that is worth studying in their recent books before you send anything.
What does it cost to publish a book in Minnesota?
Nothing at the non-profit and university presses, which carry production costs and pay royalties, though advances are small. Hybrid publishers in the Twin Cities charge the author and can be a reasonable choice for a family history, a business book or a memoir with a defined readership, provided you treat it as buying services rather than receiving an offer. Expect three to eight thousand dollars for a competent edit, cover and interior on a full length book bought from freelancers.
Who keeps the rights, and what about Native and community owned stories?
Copyright stays with the author in any legitimate arrangement, and the contract licenses specific rights for a specific term. Minnesota raises a question many states do not, because a great deal of significant writing here concerns Dakota and Ojibwe history and community knowledge. Some stories are not the author’s to license regardless of who wrote them down, and the Minnesota Historical Society Press and Birchbark Books have both done serious work on consent and community review. If your book touches that ground, build the permissions conversation into the project from the start.
Which formats suit a Minnesota book?
Trade paperback for literary fiction, poetry and regional non-fiction, which is what the independent bookshops and the library system here buy in volume. The state has an unusually strong library market, so library binding and hardcover editions are worth costing for childrens and educational books in a way they would not be elsewhere. Audio suits memoir and narrative non-fiction. Ebooks matter for the library market through OverDrive, which Minnesota libraries use heavily.
What genres do Minnesota publishers cover?
Literary fiction, poetry and the essay through the Minneapolis non-profits. Childrens and educational publishing at real scale through Lerner in Minneapolis and Capstone in North Mankato, which together make the state a national centre for childrens books. Regional and Native history through the Minnesota Historical Society Press and the University of Minnesota Press. Body, mind and spirit through Llewellyn in Woodbury, the largest publisher in that category in the English language. Commercial genre fiction is the notable gap.
Find Publishers All Across Minnesota
City directories go deeper on the local scene; the state page carries every publisher in Minnesota.