SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Marginal is a small publishing house devoted to spotlighting unheard and marginalised voices aged 8-25, with a focus on nurturing, developing, and encouraging upcoming zine, comics, and graphic novel talent. We actively seek aspiring writers and artists alike to join our radical collective of changemakers. As such, we welcome your submissions with a view to be published in print or digital form.

When you pitch your ideas to us, keep the following guidelines in mind:

  • Marginal only publishes content developed by children and young people aged 8-25. This could include comics, graphic novels, webcomics, zines or poetry anthologies. If you are not sure your idea fits, please reach out! We get how scary it can be to ask that initial question and we want you to know that all your questions are valid.

  • Marginal only publishes creator-owned material. We do not contract our young creators; we are only interested in publishing original content for which you would retain all the rights.

  • Marginal publishes creator-owned/creator generated properties and WE DON’T PAY PAGE Rates. We will take a flat fee off the books published and remaining profits will be put into a bursary for our young creatives.

  • All the material we publish focuses on making unseen youth issues and lived experiences visible within mainstream media. Our work will have strong content relating to the lived experiences of LGBTQIA and BAME youth in addition to young carers, looked after children, care leavers, SEND young people and young people who experience mental ill-health.  This can either be explicit (stories about situations and struggles tied to marginalised experiences) or implicit (looking at more general situations through the lens of marginalised youth). For example, stories with only LGBTQIA side characters and sub-plots, or ‘gay best friends’ are generally not going to be a good fit for us.

  • We seek to publish 8-12 print projects a year within a 24-page 17 x 23 format.

  • We can and will publish shorter pieces as digital comics and are actively seeking new ideas to publish digitally.

  • We’re a bit different to other publishers as we exist to support you to assemble a creative team in order to create new works. Feel free to ask us if your potential project is the kind of publication we might publish!

If you already have a completed piece of work!

  • We will accept submissions for picture books that are 24 pages or 32 pages long (story) with a word count of 500 words (1000 max) for picture books.

  • We will require a brief synopsis of the story and the complete first draft of the text, this must be sent in an attachment (we accept we transfer files).

  • If you are an illustrator/author or an illustrator author duo, you should supply a minimum of two finished double page spreads. In case of a picture book submission, the remainder of the pages should ideally be visually roughed out as a first draft.

Thank you so much for your hard work and we look forward to seeing your submissions!

Please send a cover letter and PDF of your idea to hi@marginalpublishing.co.uk

Submissions may also be sent by mail to:

Marginal Publishing House, Suite 3, Tempest Building, L2 2DT