Thanks so much for your interest in partnering with Dexterity to publish your book. You can see elsewhere on our site that we offer a full menu of editorial, production, and distribution services for authors and publishers, but the submissions info on this page is for authors, content owners, and brand owners who would like to know if we’re a good fit to be the publisher of your book. We accept submissions from both agents and directly from authors.
Our team here at Dexterity believes in the power of books to inspire, empower, educate, and entertain readers, and our mission is to make use of our love for and expertise in all things books to leave the world a little bit better than how we found it. The books we publish, then, reflect the mindset of our company—positive, collaborative, hopeful, or entertaining through a family values lens. Our general rule of thumb is, we wouldn’t want to publish anything we’d be embarrassed for our kids to see out on the kitchen table.
That gives us a lot of room to publish in a broad range of adult trade nonfiction categories, from biography and memoir, to business, leadership, self-help, inspiration, relationships, family and parenting, and how-to.
We publish full-color lifestyle, gift, and coffee table books in these same categories, and we have an additional interest in arts and entertainment related books, as well as regional titles connected to our beloved hometown of Nashville and the broader South.
Finally, we publish titles for the faith-based market, primarily in the Christian heritage and tradition, from light inspiration to devotionals and gift books, with the specific focus on books for a broad audience, not a narrow one, and books that unite, instead of divide.
If you are an author in another category, whether fiction or children’s books or academic titles, we very well may have other publishing services to offer you on your publishing journey, but those categories won’t be a fit for our current publishing program.
If this does sound like you, though, we’d like to hear from you. Here are our submissions guidelines.
- Mail your inquiry or proposal to [email protected]. We do not accept hard copy submissions.
- Include an introduction in your email, and tell us about who you are and why you want to publish.
- Tell us if you are at the concept stage of publishing or if you have a completed manuscript, or something in between.
- We consider a range of publishing relationships from traditional to partner and custom publishing, so if you have a set budget for the development of your project, that would be great to know.
- On the book itself, give us a 1-2 paragraph summary of your book idea.
- Give a Chapter level outline with a few lines of description on what’s contained in each chapter.
- Send 1-2 sample chapters, if available.
- Provide some author bio info which might inform us about your marketing reach, potential customers or target audiences for your work, or events and communities you belong to and engage.
- If you have a vision for size, format, word count, design, or other elements of the book’s package and style, please share those.
- Let us know what other books you see as similar to yours, as well as how your book might be distinct from others like it on the shelf.
- Finally, if there’s a specific time or date when the book needs to be published, or if an event is essential to tie into for the pub date, let us know that, too.
Thanks for following these guidelines, which will help us to more effectively assess if we’re the right fit for your project. We’ll make every effort to respond as quickly as possible to each submission, but please allow for three to four weeks for us to evaluate proposals. If that doesn’t work for your timetable, definitely let us know in your submission. Thanks again for considering us as the publishing home for your book.