Information about our editorial features

The Bookseller currently runs a number of Category Spotlights, including:

• Food & Drink
• Audiobooks
• Non-Book Products
• Art, Architecture & Photography
• Humour

In addition, the Country/Regional Focus and Market Focus areas include:

• Ireland
• Wales
• Scotland
• Northern Powerhouse
• Travel
• University Presses

Submissions of AIs should be sent via email to the adminstrative assistant India Hammal. Please ensure file sizes are kept to a minimum.

Submissions of proofs, sample chapters and large files: please email the above address in advance to make arrangements.

To be notified when it’s time to submit titles for our Country Focuses, Market Focuses, and Category Spotlights, you can sign up here.

The Bookseller Buyer's Guides (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Children's) list thousands of titles coming out in the UK in the next six months. Two editions of the Buyer’s Guides are published per year.

You can find out more about title submissions, advertising opportunities and publication dates for The Bookseller Buyer's Guides here.

The Bookseller publishes daily editions during the London Book Fair, Bologna Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair.

For editorial queries or pitches for The Bookseller Daily, contact Tom Tivnan by email or send information to The Bookseller, Stage House, 47 Bermondsey St, Bermondsey, London, SE1 3XT.

For advertising queries for The Bookseller Daily, contact Paul Clifton at paul.clifton@thebookseller.com or call +44(0)20 3358 0387.

Every day The Bookseller news team receives a huge number of emails from publishers and PRs with news releases and rights acquisitions.The Bookseller news team is a small team of journalists, and as much as we’d like to cover every single rights release and news story, it is simply not possible. Every day we, as a news team, have to make a decision of what to cover and what to leave. To make this process easier for everyone, the team has put together a guide on what we’re looking for in a story, what we will prioritise, and the essentials.

News:

• We will always prioritise exclusive stories, both over other stories to cover on the website, and their position in the morning bulletin. Exclusive means The Bookseller gets to ‘break’ the story i.e. we get to publish it on the website before general release, and before anyone else gets it. Our morning bulletin goes out at approx. 9am, so any exclusives should be timed for either the day before, or as early as possible in the AM.

• The morning bulletin is finalised around 4.30pm every day, with tweaks made for urgent stories only the following morning by 8.45am. Where possible, please get those stories to us by these times.

• The earlier in the week stories can be sent the better with clear embargos (sometimes we receive multiple and confusing dates), it allows the news team to plan the week better. 

• Areas of news we’re interested in covering more of include restructurings, high-level job changes at publishing houses and agencies, agencies or publishers being founded or folding, book sales trends, credible industry research and insights, tip-offs about employment and diversity issues facing the industry, the impact of AI, picture stories of quirky things.

• Is it new? Do people know about it? If the answer to the former is yes, and the answer to the second is no, then get in touch. 

We simply do not have the capacity to cover every single story, and rights is by far the topic we get the most releases on. We also do not have time to let you know whether we are or are not going to cover a story.

Rights:

• Every story must include all the rights information, including the publisher, the acquiring editor, the agent, and the agency. Without this information, we cannot cover the release.

• Rights stories must include an image of the author (see image requirements below). We cannot use book covers as main images.

• We will prioritise auctions, pre-empts, deals with values attached (£), well-known authors, debuts and authors from underrepresented backgrounds but make every effort to cover as many as possible from the big four to independent publishers.

• Keep synopses short and simple, the less editing needed on the release, the more likely we are to cover the story.

• We do not cover book release dates, only rights acquisitions. If you send us book releases you may get ignored.

An example of an ideal rights deal release: 

Tor UK acquires Talia Hibbert's romantasy in 'spirited' 15-way auction

Alternatively, if we are unable to cover your rights release, please get in touch with The Bookseller’s advertising department here. If you are interested in being covered in print, please find our publishing calendar here.

Other essentials:

• Every story must include a colour, high-quality picture, ideally landscape but needs to be able to be cropped to 1920x1080px for the website.

• The only exception where black and white images can be used is for obituaries, or where the person mentioned has died.

• Values need to ideally be in pound sterling (£), not dollars ($), or euros (€).

• Maia Snow: All stories
• Heloise Wood (Mon-Weds): Big four publishers, AI
• Melina Spanoudi: Independent publishers, distribution, bookshops, audio
• Matilda Battersby (Thurs-Fri): Big four publishers, AI
• Katie Fraser: BookTok, SFF/romance pitches

If you do not get a response from us, we are not ignoring you, we are incredibly busy and have a lot of news to cover. If we have further questions, or have time to reply - we will!