The mission of Shared Roads Press is to publish worthwhile books that are often ignored by larger, more commercially oriented publishers. We affix our press imprint only to books we judge to be of the highest quality. We publish in both print-on-demand (POD) and ebook formats, with the latter usually lagging behind the former by some weeks or months to allow time for reviews of the printed version to come in.

If you are an author looking for a fairly traditional publisher, we are a collaborative publisher offering a standard publishing contract. If you are looking to publish your book yourself, under your own imprint, please visit our Productions side instead.

If you think your work is a good fit with our interests, feel free to email us with an outline, summary, length in number of words, and a representative sample of the work as it was created electronically (in .doc, .rtf, or .txt formats). If you plan to include artwork, please also send any samples at 300 dpi resolution. Please carefully review our submission guidelines first, because any submissions that do not conform will be returned without comment.

Our Interests

Our press aims to straddle the popular and the academic, to meld the best of both to spark creative new thought. Books peppered with footnotes and intended only for readers with advanced degrees will be better served by a scholarly press. If you've written an action-packed thriller or heart-wrenching survival tale, we wish you success, but we are not the right publisher for you. Ditto for books of the Romance, Horror, Vampire, or Religious genres. Mystery, fantasy, spirituality—maybe—but only if strongly resonant with our leanings. If you're not sure, send us a one-page summary of your work and tell us why you think we'd want to publish it.

Poetry and Fiction

We are interested in exploring our place in the context of larger systems—especially the complex natural world. We are eclectic, even a little eccentric, in our tastes. We favor work that modestly yet inexorably asserts its worth and beauty—much as a tomato plant does. We are not interested in the rarified or formulaic, whether academic or popular. Metaphorically speaking, we prefer books that are more like gardens than cities.

Non-Fiction

We are interested in how humankind can practically bring itself back into harmony with the rest of the world. We are interested in both sustainability and transcendence. We are interested in "crazy” things like creative, low-tech backyard food production and water conservation methods for the clueless and the poor. (Yes, we still have a bit of that "old hippie vibe” about us. We're proud of it, too.)

We would also like to help preserve the simple wisdom of "the old-timers” before this information is lost to us for good—because we're all going to need it if we plan to survive. (But no crafting or recipe books, please.)