Submission Guidelines

Bottlecap Press is a publishing company founded in 2014, best known for its poetry chapbooks and full lengths. Their books have been showcased in Dazed, Forbes, New York Magazine, The New York Times, NME, Nylon, Poets & Writers, Vogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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.

Before you submit, it’s important that you understand that Bottlecap is a zine press based in a studio apartment. It’s an arts and crafts project, not a corporation. While we do publish (and have published) a large variety of chapbooks ranging from very silly to very serious, and while we love them all the same (there is room for all styles of writing here), Bottlecap is, deep in its core, just for fun. This is a labor of love and it’s nobody’s full time job. We’re not on a hunt for prestige and we don’t expect any chapbook to make any money. Please send us your weekend project (or your summer project), NOT your magnum opus. Bottlecap is a contemporary micropress. It is not a literary press or a print on demand service.

DO NOT expect us to be able to offer the editorial services, the precision, or the speed that you might expect from a mainstream publisher. We are two people doing what we can in our spare time. All our chapbooks are made by hand. Printing is slow. That’s the nature of this kind of thing. If you want a book made by a machine, PLEASE don’t submit to us.

Manuscript submission guidelines:

Bottlecap Press is currently accepting chapbook submissions for our ongoing multi-genre chapbook series, Bottlecap Features. All genres are welcome, and we're looking for submissions between 12 and 28 pages. Please try not to go over 28 pages: Bottlecap is a place for your smallest projects. By our standards, smaller is better. 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.

We're looking for poetry, prose, and more. Manuscripts may include individual pieces that have been previously published elsewhere, but we generally can't accept projects that have already been published in their entirety, including self-publishing. 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.

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, excessive swearing.

Some things we do like: nature, animals, relationships, culture (including pop culture), feelings, identity, experimental lit.

We will not consider any AI-generated writing or art.

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 original publisher of the quote. Similarly, do not include photographs or illustrations that don't belong to you, outright — this includes collage.

We also would typically discourage most submissions written under a pen name. Pen names can make it difficult to promote to friends and family, who are often some of the most supportive readers for a chapbook. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule: for instance, if you have a job that absolutely requires online privacy, like a primary school teacher, or if more people already know you by your pen name than by your name. It is, however, absolutely okay if you go by a name other than your legal name in real life — we can use that.

Please include a bio with your submission.

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