Submissions
We are currently accepting proposal for 2027.
What to know before submitting
We are an editorial project, we select and publish texts based on the texts themselves and how they falls into what we call the overarching editorial spiral. The seedling of Becoming was Philosophical Negativity, and this hasn’t changed, if anything, it has, to paraphrase Hegel, become the engine of our dialectical Becoming. Negativity is nothing, or everything, and either way it is foundational. Negativity, as a nothingness, is a very open theme because it lacks a formal specificity. Yet, as open as it can seem, it is also highly elusive, appearing only in the gap between things, or emerging from the background noise between blinks.
We are not likely to accept a book proposal that doesn’t have a specific, theoretical interaction point with our other books, nor are we likely to accept book proposals if we sense a large amount of expectations. The majority of the labour of the project is done by two of us, we do not have the budget to expand, so we will not accept expectations that would traditionally be placed in a 1-million euros/year revenue like Nero, Zer0 or Verso. We have 1% the budget, and 0% the “man power”. We are a force to be reckoned with, but truly outsider in mentality. We work the way we have learned to, and we do more than people can believe, but this is only possible with the freedom to set our own pathways.
We are not a publicity company, we have a basic publicity strategy that evolves over time, which is to be extremely good at what we do, and make as many secret handshakes with the literary underground as we can, but we are not a populist project; we dwell on the periphery.
We are an iconoclastic, text-centric editorial project, we are categorically not interested in art books, image-books, exhibition catalogues. We are a editorial project which is interested in Minor Theoretical Literature presented in words. It is a contractual term that Becoming Press reserves the task of design and the final word on design decisions. If you can convince us that certain imagery is absolutely essential to the theoretical aims and arguments of the book, we are open to that, we have done books which required imagery before, but only in very specific cases like Unconscious/Television and Dialogues on CoreCore.
We are also not the right project for poetry volumes, we don’t know anything about those, and prefer to stay in our niche—we have made our bed, and it’s time to sleep.
For more information, please consider reading the Mission Statement for 2026.
The process
The standard procedure for submitting a book proposal would be to send a formal email to us expressing your interest in publishing with Becoming Press, with some information on who you are, what you are interested in, and any previous or related work. Long are the days were you can strike a publishing deal via Claire’s Instagram DMs, we have an editorial cell now, and we will be deciding on which titles to pursue as a team. We would hope to receive, as a part of your proposal:
(1) a prospective title.
(2) an authorial biography and examples of previous work.
(3) an abstract/overview of the contents of the book including:
(a) a prospective contents page
(b) possible guest contributions (afterwords, introductions) that you have either prearranged or would like to pursue together.
(c) a clear idea of necessary imagery.
(4) at least one chapter, not a draft, but enough for us to get to know the voice you are using in the text.
On top of this, we expect documents to be without text-decoration, please strip your document down to Arial font, and use only the basics like italics, bold, super/subscript. The manuscript does not need to be aesthetic but it should be clean, clear, and it should take itself seriously. It should ideally be submitted to us as a collaborative/shared Google Doc.
We would really prefer that you do not use footnotes, and if you have to, we would prefer endnotes. If you want to use in-text citations, which you are welcome to, we would prefer that you submit it in Harvard referencing format as that is our preference. If you submit a book with 400 footnotes in Chicago style, your book better be the best book of the year.
It must be possible to house your text comfortably within our publication formats, including (in cm): 11x18, 10.5x14.8, 10.5x16.8, 13x19 and 14.8x21. As such, text length can vary a lot depending on the kind of book you’re interested in pursuing. We reserve A5 for the few books in which we agree of the necessity of the image