Send your manuscripts to contactus@enroutebooksandmedia.com

ENROUTE Books and Media, LLC, is a small Catholic publishing house owned by Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, and operated out of its offices in St. Louis, MO.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic spiritual journey, so we publish books that speak the truth of the Catholic faith tradition. For examples of the kinds of books we publish, please browse our catalog.

En Route Books and Media, LLC, is a traditional Catholic publishing house that prints books to order. This enables us to keep costs down with no warehousing expenses or up-front capital investment in product. It also enables us to remain nimble in our distribution method – we use Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers as our fulfillment centers for both retail purchases (retail customers ordering through Amazon can usually get their books in 2 days with free shipping, and wholesale customers ordering through the website can usually get their bulk orders in 8-10 days with a modest shipping price). We can get books to addresses in Canada, Australia, anywhere in Europe and anywhere in East Asia at domestic shipping prices and local shipping speeds by relying on printing and distribution services within those countries.

Submission Guidelines

Because En Route is a traditional publishing house, we bear the costs of preparing the book for print, charging authors only for copies they purchase at a 40% discount of the retail list price of the book, the same discount that bookstores receive. Authors receive a royalty of 10% of the retail list price and the first ten copies of their initial order at no cost.

We accept new, unsolicited book queries or submissions that concern Catholic themes in the areas of theology, philosophy, spirituality, poetry, and literature, including fiction and children’s books. Books must be submitted in MS Word format and have been professionally edited. Include the title of the book and the full contact information (mailing address, phone number, and email address) of the author on the cover page. If illustrations are desired, the author is expected to provide them. If copyright permissions for materials included within the work are required, the author is expected to secure them.

While most first-time Catholic authors start with no platforms through which to sell their work, we expect authors to seek to become the face of their message in the public sphere and grow a platform that can generate sales. While sales are only one measure of a book’s impact, it’s an important measure in a commercial enterprise. Whatever an author can share as part of the submission process in terms of how he or she can assist En Route in selling his or her book will be helpful in En Route’s decision of whether to invest its resources in publishing the work.

En Route Books & Media partners with WCAT Radio in the promotion of its books, and all authors are required to participate in at least one radio interview as part of En Route’s promotional work. Other venues for promotions include book reviews in popular magazines, book signings at Catholic bookstores, news stories in local papers, and the like.

For authors using Church materials, please note:

• USCCB’s guidelines at http://usccb.org/bible/permissions/index.cfm.

For Scripture (NABRE), these rights are owned by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. You can use up to 5000 words before you need to request a license.

 

For the Catechism, owned by the USCCB: Similarly, you can use up to 5000 words without requesting permissions.

 

For the Lectionary, again: 5000 words. But you must use their official texts, including the sense line breaks in Old Testament and psalm verses.

• Intl. Comm. on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) guidelines at http://icelweb.org/copyright.htm.

For the Rites (Missal, sacraments, blessings and dedications, Liturgy of the Hours): You must notify them of your usage.

Contact us at contactus@enroutebooksandmedia.com or write to 5705 Rhodes Avenue, St. Louis, MO, 63109 or call (314) 706-1009.

About the Publishing House:

En Route uses a print-on-demand publishing model, which means books are printed only when an order is placed rather than produced in large advance print runs and stored in warehouses. This approach allows us to operate efficiently, sustainably, and responsibly while keeping titles continuously available to readers.

Traditional publishing models require publishers to print thousands of copies upfront, tie up significant capital in unsold inventory, and manage extensive warehousing and manual fulfillment. For a press like En Route—serving a global readership and managing a large and diverse catalog—this model would limit our ability to focus on editorial quality, author support, and outreach. Print-on-demand eliminates these constraints and makes international distribution practical by printing books closer to where readers live, reducing shipping costs and delays.

This model also reflects broader shifts in the publishing industry, as many traditional houses have struggled under the financial burden of warehouses filled with unsold books. By contrast, print-on-demand allows publishing decisions to be guided by mission, quality, and contribution, rather than by speculative sales forecasts.

Most importantly, this approach enables En Route to publish a wider and more diverse range of Catholic authors—including scholars, clergy, poets, translators, and emerging voices—many of whom may not be able to demonstrate the immediate sales volume required by large commercial publishers. Our model ensures that valuable theological, spiritual, and cultural contributions can be brought to print and remain accessible without requiring authors to carry the financial risk of large print runs.

In short, print-on-demand allows En Route to remain faithful to its mission: serving the Church, supporting authors, and making meaningful Catholic thought available to readers around the world.

A special welcome to all site visitors on this occasion of our 11th anniversary as a publishing house and 9th anniversary as a radio station!

In October of 2014, Ronda Chervin (philosophy professor emerita at Holy Apostles College & Seminary) and Sebastian Mahfood planned out, with the marketing assistance of Shaun McAfee, founder of EpicPew, and editorial assistance of Jeremie Solak, then a graduate student at Holy Apostles, a new Catholic publishing house that would focus on Catholic spirituality and wisdom. In the past eleven years, ENROUTE has published and made known to the Catholic world almost 700 titles.

In October of 2016, under the leadership of Bob Olson, Catholic lay evangelist, and Ronda Chervin, ENROUTE launched WCAT Radio for the purpose of advancing the themes of its books. WCAT Radio now shares over 80 programs with about 7,000 podcasts on its website. In January of 2025, WCAT Radio broke a new record by reaching 200,000 downloads a year.

Thanks so very much to our wonderful authors, readers, show hosts and listeners for keeping us growing in our mission to share the sweetness and light of our Catholic faith with the world!

Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP
Publisher, En Route Books and Media, LLC

Frequently Asked Questions:

What’s the editing process look like?

Authors are expected to submit works that have already been professionally edited. Many emerging authors need both developmental editing and text editing to resolve both the tendency to drift tangentially and to remove the myriad of typos that can occur even with proper grammar school training. En Route provides proofreading, which generally catches the errors that the professional editor has missed. First time authors tend to have 5 to 20 errors per page, so whatever an author can do to clean all that up to get the work ready for submission to a publishing house is important. To receive the Seal of Approval from the Catholic Writers Guild, you can only have one typo every 20,000 words. So, even authors who carelessly write their books, throwing unsupported gerunds and participials around willy-nilly, will wail the full litany of Old Testament laments when encountering a single typo in their published paperback. Don’t be that guy!!!

Who designs the cover?

About 70% of the book covers available for review in En Route’s catalog (feel free to scan the covers within this website) are generated by En Route with feedback and approval from the author. The remainder were sent by the author or the author’s illustrator, and En Route is open to working with the author on those cover options.

What’s the timeline to publication?

Most authors don’t realize when they sign their contract that they’ve entered a queue with other book projects ahead of their own. That’s why the contract reads “six months.” Compare with other publishing houses where the timeline is as many as two years. Authors who commit to large purchases can move forward in the line. This is where money beats poverty. Works submitted by octogenarians may take priority.

What’s the standard release format?

Paperback and Kindle. Authors may request hardback and submit audio files for Audible.

What’s distribution look like?

Distribution occurs when orders are placed. En Route works with about 70 bookstores, but bookstore managers tend to buy books only after a demonstration has been made that the book will yield a return on the investment (that’s because bookstores are businesses as much as they are ministries). See the Wholesale Ordering tab for more.

• We require authors do at least one interview on WCAT Radio. En Route also helps them find spots on other networks – like EWTN where over a dozen of our authors have appeared over the years to talk about books coming out of us.
• We promote author accomplishments in our newsletters and in our catalog and share them through our social media
• We assist authors in preparing for book signings and conference presentations by preparing flyers and graphics.
• We help authors get reviews in the relevant journals and magazines and will send review copies to confirmed reviewers.
• With some authors, we assist in merch design.

About the logos:

Special thanks to Michael Stevens for designing the nautical logo for us that we use on all the books.

Special thanks to Michael Stevens for designing the aeronautical logo for us that we use on our radio station, WCAT Radio, which went live October 1, 2016.