Submit to Explorations

We encourage submissions to our short-form monograph series, Explorations in Local and Regional History. In Explorations we aim to publish texts of between 40,000 and 60,000 words in length.

This length of text is fresh and offers advantages over the conventional choice between a journal article or a full-length book:

  • There is space to say more than in a journal article.
  • But it's not as onerous as tackling 90-100K words in a full-length monograph.
  • Your work will attract more attention through reviews than an article would.

In an Explorations volume, we encourage authors to say something new, provocative even; to focus closely on a single region or place or to collaborate on a cross-disciplinary project.

The remit for the list is deliberately wide and inclusive. Although the series' strengths to date have been in medieval/early modern and landscape history, we welcome research in all periods and seek to reinvigorate and even redefine the methods and scope of local and regional history.

Why submit your work to Explorations?

A number of other publishers have recently launched mid-length series. Explorations stands out from these in several respects

  • Your book will benefit from being published as part of a focused and coherent History list.
  • These are much more affordable than books on other short-form monograph lists
  • Explorations titles are published first and foremost as real books with individual cover designs (as opposed to units of text in digital 'collections').
  • We also publish them as e-books on all the major e-book platforms (including Kindle, iBooks, Sony eReader).

More advantages

  • We publish all our books in a timely manner, usually around six months after delivery of manuscript and illustrations.
  • Your experience of being published by us will be characterised by real relationships with a very small, specialist staff.
  • Shorter monographs can be submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the same way as journal articles and longer monographs.

Explorations has two series editors: Prof Katrina Navickas, director of the Heritage Hub (k.navickas@herts.ac.uk), and Dr Angela Muir of the University of Leicester, am1074@leicester.ac.uk.

Please contact either of them to discuss an idea for Explorations or, alternatively, fill in our proposal form and email it to the Press publisher, Jane Housham (j.j.housham@herts.ac.uk).