The Rootstock Publishing Poetry Series

Books in our Poetry Series:

Grow Your Poetry with Rootstock

Rootstock Publishing’s Poetry Series offers a publishing partnership to grow your book from poems on a page to a beautifully designed, edited, and printed book and ebook that are available for purchase where all books and ebooks are sold. 

What do we look for in a book of poetry? Language that sings, poems that engage, and words that grow in the reader’s imagination. We are looking for highly polished poems that create a collection. How to know if your collection is ready for publication: Do your poems stand alone and also tell a story together? Does your collection follow an arc, allowing the reader to see a story in the book, as a whole? Once you have reached this stage, we look forward to helping you through the rest of the process.

Submission Guidelines

Now Accepting Chapbooks! Also Accepting Full-Length Manuscripts.

• Full-length manuscript should have between 50 and 100 pages of poetry.

• Chapbook manuscripts should have between 25 and 50 pages of poetry.

• Poetry can be defined as broadly as the author decides. Prose poems, hybrid form, songs, spoken word, and performance poetry pieces are all accepted, as well as traditional and abstract forms of poetry.

• Individual poems in the manuscript may have been previously published.

• Except for when needed to express creative elements within a poem, we expect the manuscript to be in a common font (Times, Times New Roman, Georgia, etc.), in 12-point font size, with one poem on each page.

• Title page included.

• Page numbers included.

• Table of Contents included.

• Acknowledgments page included, if applicable.

• Submit through Submittable or postal mail to address below. 

A $15 reading fee must be included with each submission. If sending through postal mail, please make checks out to Rootstock Publishing and send to 32 St. Paul Street, Montpelier, VT 05602. Your $15 reading fee will help pay for our professional staff of readers, as well as cover costs of Submittable.

Poetry Series Fee Structure: $2,000 for Chapbooks or $4,000 for Full-Length Standard, with the author retaining a 70 to 80% royalty rate, depending on retail price of book. Your contract includes Full-Service Publishing & Marketing. Please see the Partnership Publishing Agreement on this page to understand what services are covered.