Mission

Open Books Press is dedicated to publishing quality nonfiction for adults and fiction for all ages. While we accept queries from all genres, we publish only work we truly believe in.


We welcome hearing from you at any point in your writing and publishing process. When you are ready to have your work considered, we need your finished [final-edit] manuscript and your marketing/promotion plan or proposal, including details on your current platform. This should lay out what you specifically will do to promote the book, ideally organized in chronological pre- and post-publication order, and what base/platform you have established to do so. Please include your past publishing history, if any, with sales numbers when available.

We want to give authors every chance to prove their ability to reach their audience. We are open to incorporating advance orders and non-traditional marketing into our process to help un- or little-known authors with advance promotion. This provides flexibility to publish more authors with quality work we want to invest in.

See Query/Submit for more information.

Overview

Open Books Press, established in 2010, is an imprint of Pen & Publish, a small press founded in 2005 to serve schools and nonprofits.

Pen & Publish serves a variety of markets through its three imprints. Transformation Media Book is our body/mind/spirit imprint. Brick Mantel Books was added in 2015 to foster literacy by publishing literary fiction and poetry.

Staff

Jennifer Geist

Jennifer Geist, Owner & Publisher

With a decade of experience in editing, book compositing, photography, graphic and web design, marketing, writing, and more, Jennifer Geist is able to see any book from acquisitions to publication and beyond. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing with a focus in small press publishing through Southeast Missouri State University. She has worked with numerous small presses and her stories and photos are published in a variety of literary magazines. In addition to heading Pen & Publish, Open Books Press, and Transformation Media Books, she added a literary fiction and poetry imprint in 2015: Brick Mantel Books. She can be reached via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or email.