If you are, you’ll want to know what it is that we look for, first of all, whenever we receive a book proposal or a manuscript.

It’s respect for readers.

As far as we’re concerned, you don’t understand a topic well unless you can explain it.

Specifically, you must be able to explain it to somebody who’s striving to understand it better, and who currently grasps important aspects of it less well than you do.

Not only that, but you should enjoy explaining it.

You yourself should be striving to make progress. It follows that you’ll love answering good questions. You won’t show off. You won’t be competitive. You won’t wear the uniform of a professional.

Our books are written for readers who appreciate this and who don’t want to be spoonfed. They are books for active readers who find them practically useful.

We like rigour, analysis, and clarity. We also like self‑consciousness, direct address, and digression. Twine these two triple braids together and you’ll hook our attention.

Authors of novels and poems, of course, don’t need to explain. But you too should have something to say – something with practical ramifications.

If you’ve got a project to pitch, we certainly do want to hear your ideas about the marketing programme.

What we don’t want to hear is how similar your book is to somebody else’s book that came out in the last few years. Nor what genre or subgenre it’s in. If that’s how you think about your work, we wish you success but we aren’t the right publisher for it. We’re not genre. We’re disruptive.

If you have some thoughts about the physical design of your book, you should tell us those too. We have a house cover style, and we have high production standards – for example, we use 350gsm gloss – but that doesn’t mean everything’s fixed.

One way we’re similar to other publishers is that we don’t relish receiving unsolicited manuscripts. Please only send us a manuscript if we ask for it. But if we do ask for it, we won’t care in the slightest whether it’s in double‑spaced 12 point Times or 1.7‑spaced 11 point Arial, just so long as we can read it.

Last, please don’t forget that all our books accord with our 16‑word statement of principle. You can find this on our front page, but we’ll repeat it here because it’s not negotiable: