FAQ

General inquiries and booksellers:
Contact us here

We work with Protea Distribution to sell our titles into the South African book trade. Contact them by email or call 021 0017618

Internationally many of our titles can be bought from African Books Collective and other online retailers.

Submissions:

We have decided not to call for submissions this year. The past few years have been tough for us as a small publishing company. We are recovering from the effects of the pandemic on our business. We also have a backlog of books that will keep us busy till 2025. If Modjaji Books has previously published your work – please send a query letter.

In addition, we offer a manuscript assessment service to see if your work is ready for publication. Our rates are available on request.

If you want to keep updated on when we will call for submissions, please sign up on the website for our newsletter. Or follow us on social media. We are on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

We do have another imprint, Hands-On Books where we use a model where authors contribute to the costs of publishing their book. If you would like to know more about this email us.

See below for what we accept when we call for submissions:
  • Novels
  • Collections of short stories by a single author
  • Creative Non-fiction can include memoirs, letters, biographies, and other kinds of non-fiction.
  • Poetry

Please note that as Modjaji Books we only publish southern African women writers.

These are other South African publishers who publish similar books to us that are worth considering submitting to:

Fiction: Jacana Media, Panmacmillan, Geko, Blackbird Books, NB Publishers, in particular, their Kwela imprint, Karavan Press.

For creative non-fiction: Bookstorm, Jonathan Ball, PanMacmillan, Jacana Media, NB Publishers, Geko, Blackbird Books, Karavan Press.

For poetry: imphepho press, deep south, Dryad Press, Black Media Press, Uhlanga Press, poetree publications, Karavan Press.

Please let us know if we should add other publishers here. These are the ones that we were able to list without doing extensive research. Email us with your suggestions.