Submissions
We are currently accepting proposals for 2027.
Due to taking on more projects and receiving more and more submissions, we have, for the first time, produced a rough submissions guide, not only to help make the submissions process more organised, but to signal the kind of literature we are interesting to developing with you.
What to know before submitting:
(a) 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.
(b) 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. Compared to major publishers, we have a fraction of the resources, we do the best work we can, but with an outsider 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.
(c) 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.
(d) 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.
(e) We feel that there is a responsibility, from 2026, to take A.I. quite seriously as a challenge, and we are emphatically uninterested in A.I. generated writings, unless the use of A.I. is both meaningful, deliberate and interesting, in and of itself.
(f) By 2027, we hope to open a fiction imprint, Thalassa, as Becoming Press will continue to operate within this loose field of minor theoretical literature. We invite the submission of thematically or aesthetically relevant fiction works, but we cannot state at this time when this will open.
(g) 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.
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:
(a) a prospective title.
(b) an authorial biography and examples of previous work.
(c) an abstract/overview of the contents of the book including:
(i) a prospective contents page(d) at least one chapter, not a draft, but enough for us to get to know the voice you are using in the text.
(ii) possible guest contributions (afterwords, introductions) that you have either prearranged or would like to pursue together.
(iii) a clear idea of necessary imagery.
On top of this, we expect documents to be without unnecessary text-decoration, anything that is not functional in relation to the ideas within the book. Typography is very important, but to get your manuscript into a book, even if the intention is to recreate a specific typographic aesthetic, we have no choice but to strip it down to rich-text (italics, bold, underline) + footnotes .docx file.
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.
From 2026, we challenge you to keep it under 25,000 words. A long book is okay when necessary, but there are a lot of long books worth reading, and we strongly favour small books for the kind of literature we are interested in.
We also challenge you to reduce the number of footnotes, as we feel that they’re rarely interacted with. Footnoting citations is fine, but if something is worth saying, if something is worth saying at all, it is worth saying in the body.
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 rare occasion where we agree of the necessity of using images.