2025 Poetry Book Publishing: Trends, Deadlines, and a Tool for Your Submissions

173 reading periods in 2025. 44% of them make submission fees accessible in some way. Who are you sharing your poetry with this year?

Hey poets—it’s now been eight years (!!) of this project. If you’re new here, the Poetry Bulletin is: a free spreadsheet of submission periods for poetry books / a collective resource made better by sharing info with each other, through monthly updates / a project of building access and transparency.

This has always been about making it easier for you, on a personal level, to get your writing out there. I don't blame anyone for taking the spreadsheet and working with it that way, with the singular goal of taking care of your own poetry. It takes a lot to get just one book drafted, finished, and published.

(and)

After seven years and who-knows-how-many hours of research, I sense we’ve got more clarity than ever to move with care—to act collectively—when deciding where to submit in 2025.

We know where the gaps are in poetry book publishing.

We know there are poets getting left out.

And we know where the possibilities are.

We know which publishers are part of creating them.

In the gaps, you have power.

In the possibilities, you have a say—

Every submission is an action.

You get to choose if solidarity with low-income poets means refusing to submit to the publishers who exclude them.

Every submission is a chance to refuse business as usual.

You get to choose if solidarity with Palestine means sharing your work with publishers committed to PACBI, and encouraging more publishers to sign on.

You’ll find the 2025 spreadsheet below, with details on 173 reading periods. I've also got updates on submission fee trends (with a handful of significant fee increases) and fee fairness in this post.

The Poetry Bulletin is a free resource that began as I tracked submissions for my first book, Divination with a Human Heart Attached. In 2018, I started sharing the spreadsheet with fellow poets, and the project took off from there. It now reaches over 4,700 writers. I’m just one person taking care of a project that’s grown a ton, so thanks for your understanding if you spot any errors or additions—and please leave a comment here if you do.

Your support of this work means a lot. If you have the means and want to help this project keep going, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Half of paid subscription support goes to a fund to help poets cover book submission fees. Half goes to researching, updating, and creating new resources.

And as always, don’t hoard the goods. Share this with a poet whose book you want to read someday.

Here for the possibilities,

Emily

2025 Poetry Book Publishing Spreadsheet

NEW THIS YEAR: Column H notes whether the publisher has committed to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). I’d appreciate your help in updating this and encouraging presses to sign on.

PACBI isn’t the last word on or only form of solidarity, but it’s a place to begin. If you’re submitting in solidarity with writers facing genocide now, in Palestine and elsewhere, it’s a way to find presses that are more likely to share your values in spirit and in practice. Publishers for Palestine and Writers Against the War on Gaza both have lists of presses committed to PACBI.

About the spreadsheet in general: I track contests and reading periods for full-length poetry books. Every January, I go line by line, one reading period at a time, to update the list of 170+ opportunities. It’s a spreadsheet on Google that you can copy and customize to track your own submissions:

This is up-to-date as of January 7, 2025 and will be updated throughout the year. The spreadsheet is sorted by date. Ongoing (i.e., no deadline) reading periods appear at the end of the spreadsheet. Some reading periods have deadlines yet to be announced. Those appear with “TBA” at the very end of the spreadsheet.

TRENDS: Submission Fees in 2025

About 79% (137) of the 173 reading periods in 2025 charge a fee. The average fee—$24—is higher by $1 this year.

But talking about one average fee doesn’t tell the full story. It hides how significant the gap is between presses on the question of fees:

• 95 reading periods—almost 70% of those charging a fee—charge more than the average fee of $24.

• If you look at just those 95 periods charging over $24, the average fee is actually $28.

• This means presses prioritizing lower, more accessible fees skew the total average and provide cover for the top chargers.

• In fact, among those (42 reading periods) charging less than the average fee, the average fee is actually $15.

So in reality, there are three benchmarks when it comes to fees:

• The least accessible reading periods, with an average fee of $28

• The more accessible reading periods, with an average fee of $15

• The freely/fully accessible reading periods, with no reading fees

As a poet, these ranges can help you pay attention to a fair exchange:

If a press is charging in the highest range, are they offering anything extra to warrant the higher cost? Is there a larger cash advance, higher royalties, etc.?

For publishers, this is a quick metric to evaluate your submission policies and openness to poets from a range of backgrounds:

Where do you want to fall on the range of accessibility?

Does your fee reflect your mission as a press?

If you’re in the least accessible group right now, are you offering fee support of any kind to keep the door open?

As I shared in the 2024 annual update, fee fairness comes in many forms, as a number of publishers have already shown. We’re not lacking for good ideas on how to approach fees more fairly.

Big increases, low accessibility: Six reading periods are charging over 15% more in 2025.

Only one of them offers fee support.

Compared to the numbers I had for the January 2024 update, the following reading periods have each increased their submission fee by over 15 percent:

• Switchback Books - Gatewood Prize: Increased from $20 to $25. No fee waivers or fee support mentioned in the guidelines. This reading period also offers no cash compensation—the prize is 30 author copies. Considering compensation relative to the fee, this is the least equitable reading period on the list of 170+ reading periods.

• Autumn House - Rising Writer (36 and under): Increased from $25 to $30. This is the only reading period in this group that says they offer fee waivers.
  

• Barry Spacks Poetry Prize: Increased from $25 to $30. No fee waivers or fee support mentioned in the guidelines.
  

• BOA Editions - A. Poulin Jr Prize: Increased from $25 to $30. No fee waivers or fee support mentioned in the guidelines.

• Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes: Increased from $25 to $30. The cash prize increased this year along with the fee, but they offer no fee waivers or fee support.
  

• Sarabande Books - Kathryn A. Morton Prize: Increased from $29 to $34. No fee waivers or fee support mentioned. This is the second highest fee on the full list of 170+ reading periods—making the Sarabande reading period the second least accessible period on the list. The most inaccessible on the list is the National Poetry Series, which charges $1 more ($35) and also does not offer any fee support. But the National Poetry Series awards $10,000—five times the cash prize of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize.
  

How many hours should a poet have to work to make a submission?

If you live in Michigan like I do and make minimum wage ($10.56 per hour as of January 1, 2025), you’d have to work almost three hours (depending on taxes) to afford just one submission at the average fee of $24.

If you want to submit to a reading period like the National Poetry Series or Sarabande’s above and you make minimum wage, you’ll need to work about four hours to afford the fee, depending on your net after taxes.

A half-day of your labor for one submission fee.

Is this a fair exchange?

How accessible is poetry book publishing?

Based on the data I have now, 56% of poetry book reading periods are excluding poets who can’t afford fees.

Of the 173 reading periods I track, 36 do not charge any fee at all.

Of the reading periods that do charge fees, 40 of them claim to offer fee support or waivers of some kind.

And I’m being generous about what “fee support” means. For example, the Michael Waters Poetry Prize offers 50% off to graduate students only.

This means if you can’t afford to pay submission fees, you can access 76 of the 173 reading periods—assuming you can get a fee waiver or fee support from those who claim to offer it.

That’s just 44% of the opportunities to publish your book.

Meaning your voice is not included in 56% of the poetry book ecosystem, to the extent it’s tracked here. ¹

Is this list of 173 the absolute, entire ecosystem? No. I don’t include presses that only offer hybrid publishing or demand you hit a pre-sales number to even go to print. While I share region-specific and niche opportunities (e.g., contests for people of one age group) in the monthly bulletin, I haven’t yet included them on the big spreadsheet.

So a poet may find there are more doors to open beyond this list. But I do believe the list of 173 reading periods is a strong representation of what the “front door” into poetry looks like and how closed it is.

Least accessible (again): National Poetry Series

The highest fee. No fee support offered, even when asked to reconsider. Almost $55,000 in submission fees collected in one year.

The highest submission fee on the list is $35. Three reading periods charge this, including the National Poetry Series. Two of them offer fee support of some kind:

• Michael Waters Poetry Prize at the University of Southern Indiana — offers 50% discount to graduate students

• Academy of American Poets First Book Award — offers fee waivers

NB: Omnidawn, which used to be on this list for its open reading period and first + second book contest, has lowered their fee from $35 to $30. They also continue to offer fee waivers.

The National Poetry Series is the only one charging so much and not offering fee support of any kind. As I shared in my update last July, the staff made it clear:

• They view submission fees as revenue and have increased the fee before to generate more revenue.

• They get between 1,400 and 1,700 submissions per year. Without any outside pressure or a drop in submissions (i.e., a loss of revenue), they don’t intend to revisit their decision to exclude poets who can’t afford the fee.

According to its 990 filed in December 2022, the National Poetry Series has an annual revenue of about $400,000 and assets of over $700,000. Just over $328,000 was listed as expenses for publishing and promoting the five books chosen in the series.

And $54,495 in program fees were collected in just one year—as in, the submission fees, or what the National Poetry Series describes in the 990 as: “In order for a candidate to be eligible for an award they must submit a fee with the submission of their manuscript. This fee helps defray costs in the judging of the awards to candidates.”

Is this a fair exchange?

Does it reflect the mission of the National Poetry Series to exclude any poet who can’t pay to participate?

Every submission is an action, every submission can be a refusal. May our words find worthy readers this year—

More on the way… including a closer look at compensation in 2025, plus trends on fees and access to reading periods for first books. I love to know how this project is changing how you submit or think about your work. I love celebrating when you get the big “yes” to your book—drop a comment and a pre-order link if your book found its home with these tools!

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Thank you for keeping this project going!

All the tools and posts here are free—and will continue to be free. This project is made possible by your open sharing of updates and information, my husband’s health insurance and the sweet miracle of Nurtec (just keeping it real ha), and paid subscriber support. Thank you. 💚

1. This is better (by about 5%) than last year’s numbers. However, this year I removed 17 reading periods that have closed permanently or been on an extended hiatus. More than half of those were reading periods that charged fees and offered no waivers. So this improvement in access is likely a combo of data clean-up and actual, good shifts in practice at publishers.