Privacy
We keep your email address if you ask for the Journal, and your manuscript if you send one. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared, and there are no third-party trackers on this site. Ask us to delete your details and we will, that week.
The houseSince 2019
A small housewith a long memory.
Nine people, one bookshop staircase, and a list we can defend book by book.
ScriptLyra started in 2019 in the back room of a bookshop, with one manuscript nobody else would take and an argument about how it should be set. The manuscript became our first book. The argument became the house style.
We publish four to six titles a year. That number is not modesty — it is the most any of us can edit properly while also answering letters, reading submissions and getting the paper stock right.
Everything we publish stays in print. If a book sells eleven copies in a year we reprint eleven copies, because the alternative is telling a writer their book is over.
- Founded
- 2019, Edinburgh
- Titles in print
- 6
- Writers on the list
- 21
- People in the office
- Nine, two of them part-time
- Reading period
- Open, all year
- Books a year
- Four to six
Three things wewill not trade away.
- We edit slowly
- Two full passes with the same editor, structure before sentences. Nothing goes to press because a catalogue deadline says it must.
- We keep books in print
- Short runs, reprinted as needed, for as long as anyone is still reading. No remainder bins, no quiet deletions.
- We pay on time
- Royalties twice a year to the day, with a statement in plain language. Writers should not have to chase a small press for money.
Colophon
Our books are set in Instrument Serif and printed on 80gsm Munken Print Cream, sewn in sixteen-page sections by a bindery in Fife that has been doing it since 1904. Two titles a year are set in metal, which is slower and more expensive and produces a page you can feel with your thumb.
This website is set in the same two faces as the books, on paper the same colour as the endpapers. There are no photographs of authors on it, because a monogram struck into a flyleaf tells you more about a house than a headshot does.
The small print, in plain words
Terms
Reading this site costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Sending us a manuscript does not create a contract; a contract is a document we both sign, written in language you can read without help.
Copyright
Our authors own their work. Extracts on this site appear with their permission. Quote up to four hundred words in a review without asking; for anything longer, write to the rights desk.
The door is onCathedral Row.
Second floor, above a bookshop, no reception. Write first and there will be coffee and probably an argument about commas.