Seedlings Pamphlets

Seedlings is proud to launch a series of Pamphlets for 2026. We are looking for exciting writing from emerging writers that explores our relation to the natural world.

This could be

  • a novella of around 20,000 words,

  • a few short stories,

  • an extended essay or collection of essays,

  • a poetry collection.

We encourage you to create something with a sense of wholeness, rather than simply a collection of recent poems. For inspiration, take a look at:

  • Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood

  • Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

  • Cairn by Kathleen Jamie

  • The Penguin ‘Little Black Classics’ series

The pamphlets will be a maximum of 50 or so pages (including frontmatter) at our usual Seedlings square format of 15cm. This means a maximum prose word-count of around 20,000 (though this could be raised, it would mean printing with a very small font). For example, at A4 with double spaced text, this is about 60-70 pages.

To start, we will select a couple of manuscripts to print from this open call and from commissions. The pamphlets will be bound by hand with a handprinted letterpress cover, and sold online and at bookshops via our distributor. There is not an advance for authors as we are self-funding this project, but we will offer a royalties fee from all sales. The full terms of payment will be negotiated after selection, as the costs will vary depending on the length of the manuscript.

Please ensure that you have all necessary rights for the project and permission if writing about living persons. We are not accepting works created with use of generative AI. By submitting you accept these terms.

We are charging a £2 reading fee for the works, which goes to our literary editors: Will J. Wood and Alessia Fenwick. If you cannot afford it at this time, we understand, please skip that stage. Finally, we expect to respond within 8-12 weeks and will respond sooner with queries if need be.

Submission

Please email us at: seedlingspamphlets@gmail.com.

Please include in your email:

  • Your name

  • The title of your work

  • About your work

  • About the author

  • Any extra notes or queries about printing, presentation, illustration (please tell us here if you have an illustrator in mind or perhaps an illustration style. Also use this space for any other details on the rights of the work, or other things we should know).

  • Please email your manuscript as a .docx file or a link to a .docx file which we have permission to open and download

We will of course not use, print, or publish anything you send us without your permission.

Reading fee

We are charging a £2 reading fee to cover the time it takes to read the submissions. For our magazine submissions we only requested a donation, but whereas we only read five poems per magazine submission, a pamphlet could be fifty poems. This money will go directly to the literary editor who reads and responds to your submission. The link to pay it is here, and we really appreciate the support.

Financial arrangements

Looking into the expected costs and revenue from our Seedlings Pamphlets series, an indicative financial arrangement could be as follows. We have two ways of selling Seedlings, via our website here and via our distributor Public Knowledge Books. From distribution our income is less than direct sales. Therefore, we could pay the author of a 36pp poetry pamphlet RRP £7: £50 per 100 sold via our distributor and £100 per 100 sold via our website. As we say, these are simply estimates, but hopefully give a fair idea of the expected arrangement. Since we have no start-up funding there is no advance, but we will be fully transparent throughout the process. We are doing this project to uplift emerging writers, while making beautiful handbound pamphlets with handprinted covers, and so we want to support our writers as much as possible!

Thank you for your time. 

The pamphlet format of Seedlings V: Queer as Nature