Publishing Policy

DawnSignPress is a specialty publisher of instructional materials for the educational market.

We receive dozens of manuscripts and query letters from aspiring writers hoping to get their work published. Because of our small staff and the limited number of new titles we publish each year, we are unable to review or respond to the large number of unsolicited materials mailed to our office.

Often we are asked to explain our criteria for publishing a manuscript. The standards we use are unique to DawnSignPress. Beyond our role as a publisher of other people's work, we also develop some of our own products, reducing available resources for developing and publishing outside projects.

To assist you in determining whether you meet our guidelines, here is an outline of DawnSignPress's publishing criteria:

1. Focus must be on educational and instructional materials related to American Sign Language (ASL) and American Deaf culture.
2. Authors must be established educators or researchers.
3. Authors must be widely recognized in their field and offer a unique teaching concept or teaching materials.
4. Authors may have been published by other presses and are seeking a new publisher for new, completed works or new editions of previously published works related to American Sign Language or American Deaf culture

We do not currently accept:

• Unsolicited manuscripts
• Abstracts or unfinished/partially finished work
• Works of fiction, poetry, memoirs, novels, autobiographies, biographies, plays, or dissertations
• Novelty items (games, dolls, I-L-Y merchandise, clothing, toys)
• Children's products (DawnSignPress is developing an extensive line of children's products in-house)
• Products focusing on signed languages other than ASL

Other publishers may specialize in certain areas such as children's books, poetry, non-fiction, fiction, memoirs, and drama. The following links to sites about writing and how to get into print may help you learn more about the business side of publishing:

www.writersdigest.com
www.writersmarket.com
www.writersonlineworkshops.com

We admire writers and wish we could publish more than the five to six new titles we release each year.