Beginning

Where storiesfind their voice.

A publishing house and a workshop: read the list, meet the people who wrote it, and bring us the manuscript you have been circling for years.

Explore storiesPublish your work

The house

Words canbecome worlds.

ScriptLyra is a publishing house with a workshop attached: one place to read what has been made, and to make the thing you have been carrying.

  • Discover

    Reading here is not a feed. It is a list, kept deliberately short, with a person behind every entry and a reason for each one being on it.

    Explore the list

  • Create

    Draft in a room built for prose. No dashboards, no streaks, no notification pretending to be encouragement — only the page and how far you have got.

    Inside the workshop

  • Publish

    Editing, design, print and distribution: the unglamorous half of a book, done properly, by people who have done it before.

    Publish with us

The list

Four books,chosen slowly.

We publish a handful of titles a year and stand behind every one. Here are the four we cannot stop talking about.

The whole list

Voices

Behind every storyis a voice.

Twenty-one writers work with the house. These four are the ones people write to us about.

All authors

Making a book

Your story deservesa place in the world.

What happens between the manuscript you send and the book on a shelf. Five stages, roughly nine months, no mystery about any of it.

  1. 01

    Write

    Bring us a finished draft, or the part of one you trust. Every submission is read by an editor, and every submission gets an answer.

  2. 02

    Edit

    Two passes with an editor who has read your influences. Structure first, then sentences — and never the other way round.

  3. 03

    Design

    Type, cover, paper stock, binding. A book is an object before it is ever a purchase, and the object is half the argument.

  4. 04

    Publish

    Print and digital together, with an ISBN registered to you and a contract you can read without a lawyer beside you.

  5. 05

    Reach readers

    The list goes to booksellers, festival programmers, reviewers, and forty thousand readers who have come to take our word for it.

Send us your manuscript

The Journal

From theScriptLyra Journal.

Essays on craft, interviews with the people on our list, and the occasional argument about publishing itself.

Read the Journal

We believe stories shape culture.

A book changes what a person is able to think. That is a slow, unfashionable kind of power, and it has outlasted every invention built to replace it.

So we publish for the reader who will still be reading in thirty years, and we make books that will still be worth opening then.

Nothing here is written for the scroll.

Colophon

Have a story to tell?Let’s give it a voice.

Submissions are open all year. Send the first fifty pages and a page about what the book is for; an editor will write back within six weeks.

Start writingHow publishing works