General Submissions

*Chômu Press are currently closed for submissions.*

Due to the large backlog of submissions received, we are currently closed for submissions. Please check back for further news. To all those who have submitted, thank you for your patience in waiting to hear back from us.

If you would like to submit your work, please contact us by clicking here or email to submissions at chomupress dot com. In the case of a novel, please be prepared to send us the first chapter and a synopsis. In the case of a short story collection, please be prepared to send us one or two finished stories – one if it is longer than 10,000 words, two if they are both shorter than 10,000 words. Also be prepared to send your samples as a Word Document or in Rich Text Format (these formats being preferable for us to PDF). For anything else, please make specific enquiries.

Chômu Press are not looking for work in a specific genre. We are actually most likely to be interested in work that is hard to categorise. An imaginative element is a plus; the realist assumption that there is only one reality is a minus. If you would like to know more about our interests in order to have some guidance, please read the essays linked to here and here.

Some reference points – in random order – for what excites us: J-K Huysmans, Mishima Yukio, the Italian Futurists, Daoism, Yasutaka Nakata, Arthur Machen, Dare Wright, the aesthetic of Chôgen, Thomas Ligotti, Mary Shelley, Luke Geddes, Cordwainer Smith, Lisa Tuttle, Robert Aickman, Carson McCullers, yuugen, Mumonkan, Lawrence Miles, Yang Lian, Gene Wolfe, Kanehara Hitomi, demented fiction, Bishop Berkely and immaterialism, Aldous Huxley, Michel Houellebecq, Annette Funicello, Higuchi Ichiyo and Ikkyu.

This may give some indication of what we’re looking for. However, why not try and surprise us?

Addendum: Although we have published work of a ghost story/antiquarian bent, we have decided that we want to emphasise the future rather than the past in our aesthetic. There are already a number of excellent publishers who are catering to the ghost/antiquarian niche, and we are extremely unlikely to take on more fiction of that type.

Some general notes and caveats:

We are currently receiving a high volume of submissions, therefore it may take some time to get back to you. We apologise for any long delays, but would like also to point out that we accept simultaneous submissions. We ask, however, that if you do send a simultaneous submission, you keep us informed of its status with any other publishers you have sent it to.

Chômu Press are currently publishing one or two titles a month, or, sometimes, no titles at all in a given month. Even if all the submissions we received were wonderful and entirely suitable, we would have to make numerous rejections for purely practical reasons. Added to this is that fact that we do have our own personality and aesthetic agenda as a publisher, so that, again, even if we only received a handful of submissions in a year, and they were all excellently written, we would not publish any of them if we did not deem them Chômu Press material. Therefore, please do not feel discouraged by a rejection. If you would like to know what is Chômu Press material, you can always check out our books. This won’t, of course, guarantee that your submission will be successful, but knowing what we like and what we publish will probably give you an advantage, and may save you some time.

Rejection is many times more frequent than acceptance. If you don’t think you can handle it, please don’t submit to us, as we have to deal with a great many rejections. In the case that you are finding rejection difficult, we recommend you read Resilience by Mark McGuinness and persevere.

Additionally, since it should go without saying that we take seriously our mission to publish high quality work that fits the Chômu Press aesthetic criteria, it should also go without saying that we will consider all submissions on an equal basis no matter who makes them: Please do not expect preferential treatment because your nephew is very ill and needs a costly medical procedure or because you once bought someone from Chômu Press a drink at a book convention.

Thank you. We look forward to hearing from you.