Open Reading Guidelines (September 2020)

The 2020 open reading period starts at midnight September 1 and runs through 11:59 PM September 14.  This is a couple months earlier than previous years.  I thought we’d get a head start on setting up the schedule for 2021.  Here are the guidelines:

      • One entry per person.  No reading fee.
      • Manuscripts will be read as “blindly” as possible, so please take your name off the title page.
      • Manuscripts should have between 16 and 24 pages of poems.
      • Email submissions to greybookpress (at) gmail (dot) com.  Subject line: “SUBMISSIONS – [LAST NAME] – [TITLE]”
      • If you’ve had a chapbook published by GBP, you’re not excluded.  But if there are multiple GBP veterans among the “finalists,” only one will be considered for publication.
      • The goal is to choose at least two manuscripts for publication with a maximum of five.  Runs will either be open-ended with 25 author copies or limited limited editions of 50 (in which case, 15 author copies). 
      • The goal is to notify all finalists by Halloween.  We likely will not notify you if you are not a finalist, but feel free to check with us after Halloween if you haven’t heard anything.  Updates will be posted here.

In selecting chapbooks for publication, we usually aim for “range” in across accepted manuscripts.  For instance, we may choose a favorite, or “winner,” that would be the best/most resonant manuscript, and other selected manuscript(s) would be “different” from that one in some way.  If several are chosen, ideally, they’d be different from one another.

If you have any questions not answered/addressed here, let us know at the email listed above.

Good luck!