L,B's Blackfriars holds open submissions

Little, Brown Book Group’s digital first imprint Blackfriars is to hold a week of open submissions for literary novels.

Authors will be able to submit unagented works to Blackfriars from 1st December to 7th December.

Blackfriars was launched in June 2013 and has published fiction and non-fiction titles including comedian Rob Delaney’s memoir, The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne, and Murder in Mississippi by John Safran.

Ursula Doyle and Clare Smith, publishers of Blackfriars, said: “Blackfriars has had a great first year, and has just published its first hardback with Nicola Griffith’s brilliant Hild. The open submissions week is aimed at opening a door for people from anywhere in the world who want their work read by editors with a view to publication.”

Authors will need to be previously unpublished, and will have to submit the first chapter, a one page synopsis of their novel and an author biography to Blackfriars@littlebrown.co.uk.

Smith and Doyle will read all submissions and request completed novels from the best novels to review further.

All entered novels must be complete at the time of submission, written in English and at least 70,000 words long. The author of the best submission will have the opportunity to further discuss their work with an editor at Blackfriars. More information and the submission criteria are available on the Blackfriars' website.

Other publishers to hold an open submissions period include Penguin Random House’s Jonathan Cape (), HarperCollins’ crime imprint Killer Reads, and HarperCollins HarperVoyager imprint, which signed 15 writers through its open submissions process.