Submission Guidelines

Bottlecap Press is a publishing company founded in 2014, best known for its poetry and prose chapbooks. Their books have been showcased by Dazed, Forbes, New York Magazine, The New York Times, NME, Nylon, Poets & Writers, Vogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, MoMA PS1, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Bottlecap authors have performed at Art Basel, SXSW, TED, and more, and have received awards, grants, and critical acclaim.

Manuscript submission guidelines:

Bottlecap Press is currently accepting submissions for our ongoing chapbook series, Bottlecap Features. All genres are welcome, and we're looking for submissions between 12 and 28 pages. If your submission is too long, it will be rejected. Bottlecap is a place for your smallest projects. By its nature, a chapbook is meant to be fun, ephemeral, and low-stakes — put simply, from Bottlecap's perspective, a chapbook is more like a zine than like a book. It's important to understand before submitting: Bottlecap is not built for speed — we are a traditional publishing house, NOT a print on demand service. The editorial process is often quick; the printing process is often slow.

We're looking for poetry, prose, plays, and more. Manuscripts may include individual pieces that have been previously published elsewhere, but we can't accept projects that have already been published in their entirety, except in special circumstances, like very-small-run handmade editions. If any portion of the manuscript has been previously published, please include an acknowledgements page at the end of the manuscript. Please send submissions in a single file in .doc or .docx format to bottlecappress@gmail.com. Only one submission at a time, please. Please include the word "Submission" in the subject line of your email. Please also include one line about where you heard about Bottlecap Press in the body of your email.

You must be 18 years or older to submit. We will not consider submissions from minors, even with parents' permission.

Some things we don't like: violence, hatred, morbidity, excessive swearing.

Some things we do like: fun, lighthearted, imagination, nature, culture, music, surrealism, fashion, dreams, plants and animals.

We will not consider a submission of writing or art that was generated by AI in its entirety. Using AI as a tool along the way is fine, for things like brainstorming, research, mood boards or grammar checks. We believe the finished work should be made by people, and that matters to us.

Try your best to avoid using the "Section Break" button -- that button is for editors, not for authors. Formatting to Garamond 16-20pt (the bigger, the better) before submission makes our lives easier, but isn't required. Tiny font is a bad idea -- it won't lower your odds of acceptance, but it will make the project harder for us and for you, because we will be reformatting to Garamond 16-20pt.

Although you don't have to agree with us on everything, and you don't have to be a perfect fit philosophically to get an acceptance, it's important to us that you understand who we are before you consider collaborating with us, and so we're providing this word cloud of concepts that Bottlecap stands for: anti-authority, anti-establishment, anti-corporate, DIY, punk, arts & crafts, equitable, diverse, underrepresented, feminist, queer, micro-scale, boutique, nontraditional, outsider art. Bottlecap is interested in art for the people, not prestige, and is institution-skeptical.

Please do not include an epigraph in your submission unless you have already obtained written permission from the originator of the quote or their next of kin, as well as the publisher of the quote (unless the epigraph is in the public domain.) Similarly, do not include photographs or illustrations that don't belong to you, outright — this includes elements incorporated into a collage.

Please include an author biography with your submission.

We are not currently accepting new submissions from authors outside the United States.