Montana Book Publishing Services for Books Built on Real Ground

Montana's writing community is spread thin across a big map, but it is active, and much of it meets in libraries.

• Montana Center for the Book. A program of Humanities Montana in Missoula and the state's Library of Congress affiliate. It runs Montana Reads/Montana Writes, Big Sky Reads and the Montana Poets Laureate program, and works with the Montana Conversations speakers bureau to reach rural libraries.
• The Writers' Room, Missoula Writing Collaborative. Short workshops and classes for adult writers of every level, taught by professional writers and covering memoir, fiction, nature writing and poetry. The Collaborative grew out of a 1994 poetry reading and also places writers in rural and tribal schools.
• Missoula Public Library Family History Writing Contest. The annual contest opens each October and runs into March, with cash prizes of $100, $50 and $25 for family history stories.
• High Plains Book Awards, Billings. Founded in 2007 through the Billings Public Library board, the awards honor books about life on the High Plains. The yearly celebration brings author panels and a book sale to Billings Public Library. Authors or publishers can nominate a book for a $75 fee plus four reader copies, and nominations close each March.
• Montana Arts Council Strategic Investment Grants. Artists can apply for up to $1,000 toward professional development, events or marketing for a publication, with a deadline on the 15th of every month.

Where we fit in: a workshop sharpens the draft and a book award or library event puts it in front of readers. Between those two moments we do the unglamorous part: the edit, the cover, the interior and the store listings.

Three models exist. Traditional publishers buy rights and cover costs but accept few books. Hybrid publishers charge authors and share royalties. Self-publishing services charge for the work while you keep the rights, the ISBN and the income.

Montana has two well-known traditional nonfiction houses in Helena. The Montana Historical Society Press takes book proposals on Montana, northern Plains and Rocky Mountain history through an online portal. Farcountry Press, a family-owned publisher for more than 45 years, considers proposals for Western photography, popular history, guidebooks and children's educational titles, but not fiction, poetry or memoir.

For anything else, compare services on three points: whose name is on the ISBN and store accounts, who receives the royalties, and whether the price is quoted in writing. Kinetic Digital Publishers works on the self-publishing side.

Montana names a state poet laureate. On September 25, 2025, the governor appointed Allen Morris Jones of Bozeman for 2025–2027; he runs Bangtail Press and follows laureates such as Mark Gibbons and Chris La Tray. In his words, the state's writers, going back at least to Richard Hugo, "have taught us how to see the landscape and our history."