11 Indie Presses That Want to Publish Your Anthologies
Sub Club Specials (5.8.25) | No agent? No problem.
Welcome to the super special part of our Sub Club Specials, friends! Remember when we used to do Indie Press lists and y’all loved them?
Here are a couple of refreshers:
Well, we’re back, baby. Woohoo! Once a month, for the next three months, the wonderful
will be helming these lists and covering three different types of books that indie presses are looking for: Anthologies, Memoirs, and Literary Fiction.And if you like ‘em, we’ll do more. As with our other lists, we’ll have the first section free for everyone, with all the juicy inside details to help you hone your indie press submitting skills and get a pulse of the industry at large.
Then, we’ll have our list of relevant indie presses that you can submit to right now, plus a few more that are relevant, though closed for now—you can bookmark those for later. This part’s paywalled, so we can, you know, keep doing this crazy thing that is Sub Club.
Alright, now I’ll pass it on to Justine!
Anthologies, a themed collection of stories, essays, or poems by different authors, are a bit like the ugly duckling of the publishing world. No offense to anthologies or to those who edit them—I’m one of those people, under contract to publish one of those anthologies—but they are notoriously hard to pursue publication for. Why? Well, to start, anthologies don’t have one of the key selling points of other, more traditional literary forms: a consistent, singular narrative voice.
Because anthologies incorporate the voices and styles of many different authors, the end result is harder to predict—and both publishers and readers have a harder time knowing what to expect. We generally know what we like and who we like, but anthologies instead invite us to buy based on a topic we may like or may be curious about.
That being said, anthologies still do sell. And some of them go on to do really well, winning awards and even becoming bestsellers. A few that have been published in recent years to great acclaim include: The Black Girl Survives in This One, All We Can Save, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, Our Red Book, Never Whistle At Night, and A Darker Wilderness. The allure of anthologies like these lies in their intimate exploration of certain themes or topics—Black girl characters in horror stories, women activists on climate change, menstrual cycles, indigenous stories and acts of survival, etc.
They feel niche but with wide appeal, or they feel urgent and socially or politically charged (climate change, racism, womanhood, etc.). The positioning of an anthology is therefore key: As with any publishing deal, your publisher needs to be sure the collection will sell. That means ensuring there is an audience for what is being written.
These examples of successful anthologies offer a light at the end of the tunnel: a book deal for your anthology. But how do you get there? How does one even do an anthology? For as hard as they are to sell, anthologies are equally as hard to create.
They are not the easy way to publish—if you decide to edit an anthology, you may not be writing as many words as you would have to if you wrote a novel or a memoir, but you are doing a hell of a lot of work to bring the project to fruition. A good idea is just the start, as there are many steps before your anthology even enters the hands of editors for consideration.
Ahead, we’ll walk through those steps and what comes next, including a list of Indie publishers who are open to publishing anthologies. I’ll be using my own experience as co-editor of Between Our Legs—an anthology forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in fall 2026—to show the “behind the scenes” of it all.
From Idea to Proposal
We were sitting at a sushi restaurant in Wilmington, NC—all new graduate students in the UNCW MFA program, all new friends feeling out what we could say to one another. Somehow, the topic turned to our vaginas. Our first periods. Our struggles with chronic UTIs, PCOS, and precancerous cells removed by a LEEP procedure. We talked about how little we actually knew about giving birth, about menopause, about why our bodies did the things they did, and how ridiculous it was that no one ever talked about these things.
By the end of the night, we said,We should create an anthology about vaginas and the things women are too ashamed or too afraid to talk about, and the idea for our anthology was born.
At the time, we didn’t know if it was even a good idea. That is really the first step: to do your research and see if there is a market for your anthology. We were (un)lucky that this idea struck following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, an event which brought renewed attention to women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.
We found out, too, that there had been a dedicated effort over the past decade or so to invest in research on women’s health. It was a charged topic, with political, social, and cultural implications. It was something we hoped people would be interested in reading, and our research seemed to back that up.
From there, we spent months researching and writing our non-fiction book proposal, which generally includes the following elements: an overview, author/editor bios, your target audience, comparable titles, your marketing and promotion ideas, manuscript specifications and delivery, and sample chapters.
We used Jane Friedman’s free proposal template, and wrote and revised, wrote and revised, until we felt it was as good as we could get it. Choosing the title, Between Our Legs, took hours alone—an earlier idea was Between the Stirrups, but we ultimately thought it was giving horse girl vibes more than vagina vibes.
All of this was work with no guarantee. Because as with so many things in the writing world, you just never know if what you’re working on is going to go anywhere.
From Proposal to Contributors
An anthology is nothing without its contributors, especially if you aren’t already an established author or an individual with a large platform. Who you bring in to write matters almost as much as the topic they are writing about. When it came time for us to start filling out our contributor list, we started with “warm” contacts, drafting a templated letter explaining the project and asking a few well-known authors in our MFA program if they would be willing to write an essay.
We asked a few other professors for any author friends they might know who would be interested in contributing, and then we expanded outward to writers we had personally met in various literary spaces—conferences, readings, our work with literary magazines, etc.
We were amazed at the passionate and excited responses we received, and the more yeses we got, the more ambitious we became. We reached out to authors we had never met but dreamed of having as contributors, and while there were some nos along the way, the responses were overwhelmingly positive. As it turned out, a lot of people were eager to write about their vaginas.
While we chose to solicit all of our contributors, other editors of anthologies take submissions. They read through the slush pile based on a call for work, and rather than accepting a contributor based on an idea, they have the full essay or story in hand when they say “yes.”
There are obviously pros and cons to each approach, and it depends in part on the topic you are writing about. For us, it was really important to have a diversity of experiences (endometriosis, abortion, PCOS, menopause, etc.), of identities, and of age demographics. Because of this, we had to at times find the writers who we thought might be able to contribute an essay on what we were looking for—and this was incredibly challenging, given that few people were already writing about vaginas in this way.
By the time we felt ready to go out with our proposal—now with three new sections added: confirmed contributors, proposed essays, and potential contributors—our proposal was 65 pages long, and it had been almost a year since we first came up with the idea.
Is Querying an Anthology Even a Thing?
It is, but it’s not easy. By the time we finished the anthology proposaI, I was in the process of querying my memoir. But my co-editor Caroline Beuley and I decided to go out with a new round of queries specifically for the anthology. Anthologies are a hard sell to an agent because they are not the author’s own writing, and so we were advised to include in our query letters our other works in progress as well.
We wanted to paint ourselves as editors of an anthology right now, but also as dedicated authors with a lot of ideas and stories to write in the long term. And while we were hoping for an offer of representation, we knew that if that didn’t happen, we could still submit the anthology to a number of independent presses that take unagented submissions.
We did have some interest from agents during this round of anthology querying, but a few weeks in, I received an offer of representation for my memoir. We made the decision at that time to submit the anthology through my new agent, as agented submissions are always going to be the easiest way into publishing a book.
Yet the requests for the full anthology proposal we received are proof that it is possible to successfully query with an anthology, although I think success there would be the exception (not the norm).
Submitting to Publishers
This was the craziest (and the most stressful) part by far. My agent submitted our anthology proposal to a number of Big Five publishers and independent presses. Within less than two weeks, we already had interest from two editors.
We were thrilled and extremely nervous during our calls with them, where we were asked a number of questions about the anthology and how we planned to fill the remaining contributor spots (and with whom). We waited for an offer…and waited…but none came.
We had to return to the drawing board. In this second round, we submitted solely to independent presses and university presses. Two more editors were interested—again within a week or two of the submission—and this time, two offers came in.
There is a lot to consider about book deals when it comes to an anthology. There is the advance, how much you are paid for the book, of course, but we also needed to pay our contributors. We also had to negotiate the deadline for when the completed anthology would be due to our editor.
Different presses offer different marketing and publicity opportunities, hardcover or paperback printing, “print on demand” or limited runs of titles, and have different publishing timelines. We spent hours researching each press, making pro/con lists, and balancing what was on offer from the press with what we thought we could do and accomplish on our own.
Ultimately, we decided to go with the University of Iowa Press: they were the best fit, and we both felt so excited about publishing with them.
What Comes After the Book Deal?
After we got our book deal for Between Our Legs, we reached out to all of our confirmed contributors, letting them know the good news and making sure one last time that they were all still happy and willing to contribute an essay. Then we filled out the few remaining contributor spots, reaching even higher now that we had a publishing contract and could offer specifics of honorariums and deadlines.
Each contributor was given a deadline for their first draft and was asked to sign a contract giving the press permission to use their work in the anthology. There were a lot of emails and a lot of follow-ups. It was a big learning curve for us—the world of book and contract negotiation is really no joke.
All of our contributors are now confirmed, and we’re waiting for the first essays to come in for editing. We’ll spend this summer working on all of the pieces, figuring out the layout, and writing our editors’ note and introduction. Fingers crossed, we’ll hand a manuscript over to our editor in the fall. It’s a whirlwind process, but at the end of it, we’ll be publishing our very first book—one that feels urgent and important in today’s current moment.
When we came up with the idea for curating an anthology, most people told us it would be a hard sell. While we had editorial experience and were published writers in literary magazines, we weren’t big names, we were unagented, and we had never done any of this before.
We were lucky to have the mentorship of people like Emily Smith, who shepherded the project from idea to a complete and polished proposal, and to have the support of many of our contributors who offered us a “yes!” before we even had a sense of if or when this project would come to fruition.
Challenging as it is, anthologies are possible. And they can be an exciting and powerful way of bringing together a diversity of voices to speak on a single topic or idea.
While some people can and will submit a completed anthology to publishers, it’s more common for editors to submit a proposal for the project. To help folks interested in writing a book proposal—whether for an anthology or another nonfiction project—I’ll be leading a workshop with Chill Subs specifically on proposal writing next month.
Join me for Get that Yes! Book Proposals to Hook Agents & Editors on June 25, where I’ll break down the key components of a standout book proposal—from the overview to the comps to those all-important sample chapters.
To that end, for all of you anthology hopefuls, here is a list of indie and university presses that publish anthologies—even if you don’t have an agent. ↓
Happy anthologizing :) And be kind—the literary world is small, and you want to be the person people are excited about saying “yes” to.
This is one of our paid subscriber lists this month. Our paid subscriptions are what give us the ability to gather all of this information and maintain our database. If you have the means, you can upgrade here.
 | A guest post by
|