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Read the guidelines →New York City is the capital of American publishing, and the density is still startling. Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan all have their principal editorial operations in Manhattan. Scholastic is on Broadway in SoHo. Norton is on Fifth Avenue. Within a subway ride of any of them are dozens of independent houses, three university presses and the offices of most of the literary agents in the country, which is the part that actually governs who gets published.
The city’s publishing is also more geographically varied than the midtown addresses suggest. Brooklyn now holds a cluster of independent literary publishers that would be the leading houses in most states, several of them in the same converted factory buildings in Gowanus and DUMBO. Verso’s American office, Melville House, Archipelago, Akashic and Ugly Duckling Presse are all across the East River. The listings below cover all five boroughs.
For authors in New York City and the surrounding area, Western Reflections offers something most of the houses on this page cannot: a direct read, a written response and a publisher who will say plainly when another New York press is the better home for your book. We have published regional history, biography and memoir from Colorado since 1996 and work with authors nationally by email and phone.
Services are quoted individually and never as a package, you retain copyright and all files, and books stay in print. A quote costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Contact details are the ones each publisher lists itself. Anything 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 most consequential self published book in American history came out of Brooklyn. Walt Whitman had edited the Brooklyn Eagle in the 1840s, and in 1855 he set some of the type himself for the first edition of Leaves of Grass at a print shop on Cranberry Street, paid for it, and sold it out of a shop on Fulton Street. No publisher would have taken it. That is worth remembering when the city’s publishing establishment is being described as the only route to a serious readership, because the establishment has been wrong before, in Brooklyn, in print.
Manhattan built the establishment anyway. Harper opened in 1817 and Random House in 1927, when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer bought the Modern Library and decided to publish a few books on the side, at random. Book Row on Fourth Avenue held dozens of second hand dealers through the middle of the century; the Strand, opened in 1927, is its only survivor. The Algonquin Round Table met a few blocks from where The New Yorker was founded in 1925. Uptown, the Harlem Renaissance produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen and, later, the environment in which Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man and James Baldwin began.
The living city is still doing it. The Brooklyn Book Festival has run every September since 2006 and is now the largest free literary event in the city. PEN America, the National Book Foundation and the Center for Fiction are all here. The 92nd Street Y has been hosting readings since 1939. The New York Public Library’s research collections hold the manuscripts of a good share of the authors mentioned on this page. For a writer, the city offers the densest literary infrastructure on earth and the most competitive publishing market on earth, and those are the same fact.
The path into a Manhattan trade house is an agent, and the city holds most of them. Query through Publishers Marketplace and QueryTracker, target agents named in the acknowledgements of books like yours, and expect months. The direct doors are the independents and the university presses listed above. The Brooklyn Book Festival each September is the largest free literary event in the city and the one place a new author can meet most of the Brooklyn presses in an afternoon. The Center for Fiction in Fort Greene runs a first novel prize, emerging writer fellowships and a full events programme. Poets House, Cave Canem, Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses are all in the city and all serve writers before they have a book.
Launches happen at the independents, and the relationship with a bookseller is worth more than any press release. The Strand on Broadway, McNally Jackson, Three Lives in the Village, Rizzoli on Broadway and Argosy on 59th Street hold Manhattan. Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill, Greenlight in Fort Greene, Community Bookstore in Park Slope and Word in Greenpoint hold Brooklyn. Word Up in Washington Heights and the Lit. Bar in the Bronx serve their boroughs. The 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center has hosted readings since 1939 and the New York Public Library’s programmes bring authors to branches across the city. An author who has read at three of those venues has done the city’s most effective marketing.
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 →The large houses require an agent before an editor sees a word. We read submissions ourselves, respond in writing, and tell you honestly whether a New York house is realistically the right target.
Services are priced individually and you keep copyright, the production files and every subsidiary right. We do not take a perpetual share of royalties for doing production work.
Trade standard editing, cover design and typesetting, with distribution through the wholesalers that supply the city’s bookshops and library system.
A small house does not need a book to perform in its first six weeks. Books stay in print and keep selling, which is how most of our authors have earned most of their money.
Send a manuscript or a proposal. You get a written assessment, including whether an agent and a New York house would serve the book better than we would.
A plan covering what the book needs, in what order, each stage priced separately.
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 run, wholesale and library listings, and a launch plan built around the city’s bookshops and reading series.
City directories go deeper on the local scene; the state page carries every publisher in New York.
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