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Read the guidelines →New York is where American publishing decides what the rest of the country reads. Four of the five largest trade houses have their editorial operations within about a mile of each other in midtown Manhattan, and the fifth is a short walk further downtown. That concentration is not an accident of real estate. It is the residue of two centuries of the industry clustering around the port, the newspapers, the agents and, eventually, each other.
What the concentration hides is how much of the state’s publishing happens elsewhere. Brooklyn has produced a generation of independent literary houses that would be the leading publisher in most states. Ithaca has the oldest university press in the country. Rochester supports both a serious poetry publisher and the press that produces more literature in translation than almost anyone. The listings below cover the state, not just the island.
Western Reflections Publishing Company has published from Colorado since 1996 and works with authors across New York 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.
Listed with the contact details each house publishes itself. A detail we could not confirm is left out rather than guessed.
The largest trade publisher in the country, assembled from Penguin and Random House and carrying roughly three hundred imprints between them. Almost nothing reaches it without an agent, but its imprint list is the map most authors use to work out where a book like theirs would sit.
One of the five largest trade houses, with a catalogue running from literary fiction to cookery to a substantial religious publishing arm. Its imprints are unusually varied in temperament, so the question with HarperCollins is always which imprint rather than whether the house is a fit.
A major trade house with particular strength in narrative non-fiction, political books and commercial fiction. Independent again since 2023 after being bought out of Paramount, which has made its acquisition behaviour noticeably more assertive.
The American arm of the French group Hachette Livre, holding Little Brown, Grand Central, Basic Books and, since 2021, Workman. A house that has grown mainly by acquisition, which shows in how distinct its imprints still feel.
Home to Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, St Martins Press, Flatiron and the science fiction house Tor. Its literary imprints carry more prize weight per book than almost anyone elses.
The largest publisher and distributor of childrens books in the world, and the operator of the school book fairs and classroom book clubs that put its books in front of children directly.
The largest employee owned publisher in the United States, independent since 1923 and best known for serious non-fiction, poetry and the Norton anthologies that have anchored college reading lists for generations.
The American branch of the largest university press in the world. Publishes scholarly monographs, reference works and the trade non-fiction that a general reader would recognise, and takes proposals directly from academics.
A publisher of calendars, cookery, childrens and reference books, acquired by Hachette in 2021 and reorganised in 2024 with several imprints folded elsewhere.
Status update: Acquired by Hachette Book Group in 2021; reorganised in July 2024, with Algonquin Books folded into Little, Brown.
The largest American independent trade publisher still owned by its founding family, with a commercial list centred on romance, mystery and womens fiction.
An independent literary house formed from the merger of Grove Press and Atlantic Monthly Press, with a long record of publishing books that larger houses considered too difficult or too legally exposed.
An independent house with three imprints, best known for Soho Crime, a list of international crime fiction where each series is rooted in a specific country or city.
Founded in 1936 to publish experimental writing, and still doing it. The house that kept Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and a great deal of world literature in print in English.
An independent Manhattan house publishing literary fiction, translated work and psychoanalytic non-fiction, with a list that leans noticeably European.
An American house founded by the Italian publisher Edizioni E/O to bring European fiction to English language readers, and the original publisher of Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan novels in English.
An independent house with an explicitly political list, publishing investigative journalism, radical politics and literary work by writers who are difficult to place elsewhere.
A non-profit publisher founded by former Pantheon staff to publish books in the public interest. Publisher of The New Jim Crow, among the most widely assigned works of American non-fiction of the past two decades.
The oldest continuously operating feminist publisher in the world, founded in 1970 and housed at the City University of New York, with a mission that has always included bringing neglected books back into print.
A small press founded at Bellevue Hospital publishing at the intersection of science, medicine and literature. Won the Pulitzer for fiction with Tinkers, its first novel.
A Brooklyn independent known for the Art of the Novella series, for publishing government reports as trade books, and for a public willingness to argue with Amazon in print.
An independent Brooklyn house with a stated commitment to urban literary fiction and political non-fiction, and the publisher of the long running Noir series of city based crime anthologies.
The American office of the largest independent radical publisher in the English speaking world, publishing political theory, history and left wing non-fiction out of Brooklyn.
A Brooklyn non-profit publishing exclusively literature in translation, in squarish paperbacks that have become recognisable in their own right. A first stop for literary translators.
A non-profit publisher of international literature founded by the writer Ilan Stavans, running the Prize for New Immigrant Writing as a route in for first time authors.
A worker run non-profit in Gowanus making poetry, translation and essay chapbooks, much of it printed and hand assembled in the collective’s own studio.
A curated marketplace connecting authors with vetted freelance editors, designers and marketers, rather than a publisher in its own right.
A scholarly press with strong lists in Asian studies, film, philosophy and the social sciences, and a trade programme that reaches beyond the academy.
A university press with recognised depth in law, criminology, American studies, race and sexuality studies, publishing from Greenwich Village.
A scholarly press with lists in philosophy, theology, media studies and the history of New York City itself, publishing from the Rose Hill campus.
The oldest university press in the United States, founded in 1869, with international standing in international relations, labour history and classics.
The scholarly press of the State University of New York, publishing philosophy, education, Asian studies and a substantial list on New York State history and politics.
A scholarly press with distinctive lists in Middle East studies, Irish studies, disability studies and the history of central New York.
A non-profit poetry publisher in Rochester, running since 1976, with a translation series and prizes that have introduced a long list of American poets.
The literary translation press of the University of Rochester, publishing ten or so books a year and running the Three Percent project that tracks translation in American publishing.
The industry has been here since Harper & Brothers opened in 1817, and for most of the twentieth century its physical centre was Book Row, the stretch of Fourth Avenue below Union Square where dozens of second hand bookshops operated within a few blocks. The trade houses clustered nearby, agents opened offices between them, and the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street supplied the lunch table where a group of critics and playwrights spent most of the 1920s deciding what was worth taking seriously. The New Yorker was founded a few doors from that table in 1925 and has been a route into book publishing for writers ever since.
Uptown, the Harlem Renaissance produced the most consequential body of American writing of the interwar years, and it did so partly in argument with the publishing establishment downtown. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer were published by white owned houses on terms they had little power to set, and the long project of building Black owned publishing in the city runs directly from that experience. Brooklyn’s current density of independent presses is a later chapter in the same argument about who gets to decide what is published.
Upstate has its own literature and it is not a footnote. William Kennedy built an entire Pulitzer winning cycle of novels out of Albany. Vladimir Nabokov taught at Cornell for eleven years and wrote much of Lolita there and on summer road trips west. Washington Irving invented an American folklore out of the Hudson Valley at Tarrytown. Yaddo, the artists’ residency at Saratoga Springs, has hosted an implausible share of American letters since 1926. If you are writing about New York State rather than New York City, the university presses at Syracuse, Albany and Ithaca are frequently a better first call than anyone in Manhattan.
The realistic route into a New York trade house runs through a literary agent, and the majority of American literary agencies are in Manhattan. Agents are found through Publishers Marketplace, QueryTracker and the acknowledgements pages of books like yours, they are approached with a query letter and sample pages, and a reputable one charges nothing up front and takes fifteen percent of what they sell. Expect the search to take months. The direct routes are the independents and the university presses: Akashic, Seven Stories and Bellevue read queries; Archipelago and Open Letter read translators; Restless Books runs a prize for first books by immigrant writers; Ugly Duckling and the Feminist Press open reading periods; and Columbia, NYU, Fordham, Cornell, SUNY and Syracuse all take scholarly proposals.
No state has more prizes, fellowships and residencies. The National Book Foundation, PEN America and the Whiting Foundation are all based in the city and their awards are the ones that change a career. The New York Foundation for the Arts gives fellowships to individual writers resident in the state. The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn runs a first novel prize and an emerging writers fellowship. Cave Canem, for Black poets, and Kundiman, for Asian American writers, both run from the city. Upstate, Yaddo at Saratoga Springs has hosted residencies since 1926 and Millay Arts at Austerlitz continues the tradition on the poet’s former farm. The 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center has run readings since 1939 and the Brooklyn Book Festival, every September since 2006, is the largest free literary event in the city.
The bookshops are where a New York book is made real, and the city’s independents have had a strong decade. The Strand is the last survivor of Book Row. McNally Jackson, Three Lives, Rizzoli and Argosy hold Manhattan; Books Are Magic, Greenlight, Community Bookstore and Word hold Brooklyn. Upstate, the Bookery in Ithaca, Northshire in Saratoga and the shops around Rochester and Buffalo serve the university and press communities there. A New York launch is a reading at one of those shops, and an author who has built a relationship with a bookseller before the book exists has done the single most useful piece of marketing available in the city.
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.
Developmental, line and copy editing, plus proofreading, quoted by manuscript length and condition.
Learn more →Original cover artwork and typography, supplied as layered source files you keep.
Learn more →Print ready interiors and reflowable ebook files built from one typeset source.
Learn more →Short runs, offset runs and print on demand, with paper and binding specified to the book.
Learn more →Launch planning, retailer metadata, review outreach and regional bookshop campaigns.
Learn more →Full manuscript writing from interviews, notes or a partial draft, published under your name.
Learn more →Almost every Manhattan trade house requires an agent before an editor sees a word. We read submissions directly, and we tell you honestly whether the manuscript is ready and whether we are the right home for it.
Our services are quoted as fixed fees. We do not take a percentage of your royalties in perpetuity, and we do not ask for subsidiary rights as the price of doing the production work.
Structural editing, copyediting, cover design and typesetting to trade standard, with distribution through the same wholesalers that supply New York bookshops and libraries.
Small houses can keep a book available for years because the economics do not depend on a first six weeks. Backlist is where most of our authors have earned most of their money.
Send the manuscript or a proposal. You get a written assessment rather than a form rejection, including whether a New York house is realistically the better target for the book.
We identify what the book needs, in what order, and quote each element separately so you can take all of it or part of it.
Developmental work first, then line and copy editing, then cover and interior. Nothing goes to layout while the structure is still moving.
Print on demand or a print run, listings set up so bookshops and libraries can actually order the book, and a launch plan built around your own readership rather than a generic campaign.
City directories go deeper on the local scene; the state page carries every publisher in New York.
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