Submission Guidelines

We’re a genre fiction publisher. We don’t publish literary fiction. We focus on science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime and mystery, action and suspense, historical, romance, and Westerns. Both adult and young adult. We don’t publish comics or graphic novels. We don’t publish porn or hate or any of the usual stuff that nice publishers don’t publish.

We do sometimes release anthologies, though not often. If you’ve written genre short fiction, it’s best to ask first whether we have need for it.

We’re interested in most non-fiction but especially non-fiction that is related to pop culture. We welcome both scholarly and not-so-scholarly works. We’ll take biographies, histories, and critical analyses. If you’ve got a good spin about a comic book topic, a film topic, a musical topic, an entertainment or theme park topic, a literary or historical topic, or any other topic of general appeal, we’d like to hear about it.

To borrow from a more famous phrase, pitchin’ ain’t easy. Most pitches we receive are too long. A long pitch is written by an author who can’t decide what he wants to say, who is uncertain how to encapsulate the wonder and appeal of his book in just a few lines. A crisp pitch, on the other hand, gets right to it and in active voice establishes why the book is unique, why it has a market (even a niche market is okay), and why it will sell copies. That’s all a pitch should do.

A clear pitch ought to emerge naturally from a crisp pitch. For example, you could pitch a murder mystery set in Tudor England. That’s a crisp pitch, but it lacks clarity. It needs more. What if the victim was Henry VIII’s favorite falconer who had been sleeping with the king’s wife and who had been using his birds to carry messages to Henry’s enemies in France on behalf of … the murderer? Now I know exactly what you’re up to and we can have a conversation about it.

A pitch is the last place you want to make a typo. It shows either that you don’t care about the pitch or that you’re a sloppy writer. Especially today, when AI can proofread your pitch, there’s no excuse for errors. If I love your idea and decide to publish your book, I’ll expect to find a few typos and other gremlins in the manuscript, but that’s not a problem because you already sold me on your idea. However, if you can’t write a clean paragraph free from grammatical goofery, we probably won’t get that far.

The best way to make a pitch compelling is not to try so hard to make it compelling. I know you’ve got this great idea and you’re excited to turn it into a book. But the harder you try to convince me, a stranger, to share your excitement, the more you’re going to tell me what you think I want to hear instead of what you feel. So imagine we’re friends. We’re hanging out somewhere. You’re dying to tell me about your idea and since we’re friends you can speak in your authentic voice, you can get carried away with excitement and not worry about being judged or rejected. That’s what to do.

Yes. You hold the copyright to your book and that won’t change. If we sign a contract, you are giving me the exclusive right to publish your book in various formats, not ownership of your book.

We typically pay higher royalties than is standard in the world of small press publishers. Unlike the big publishers, such as Penguin, Harper Collins, Tor, and the lot, we rarely pay advances; if you think a big publisher will be interested in your book, you shouldn’t be messing around with us. We pay royalties bi-annually.

No. If a ‘publisher’ asks you to pay them to edit, assemble, publish, and/or distribute your book, please run. Those folks will take anything you gave them. They don’t care about making it the best book it can be; they care about taking your cash and moving onto the next victim. We pay our money into your book.

You’ll hear from us within 24 hours to acknowledge receipt of your pitch. If you haven’t, use our contact form at the top of every page on the site to rattle our cage. After we acknowledge receipt of your pitch, we’ll need another few days to respond in full.

In the contract we’ll have set a deliverables date by when you agree to send us the final manuscript and any ancillary material like photos. Once all that is in hand, we typically take 4-8 weeks to return a galley proof. You can make edits on the galley proof and we’ll incorporate them into another galley proof for you to review. This cycle typically repeats a few times until we’re both satisfied with the result. During this period we’ll be sending you cover art to review as well.

After the galley is locked down we’ll prepare it—and the cover art— for print and electronic production. That’ll take another couple of weeks.

Trade paper and EPUB (for Kindle and other e-readers) and sometimes hardcover.

We like to include an index with our nonfiction books. We have a simple, semi-automated process for creating an index that we’ll share with you when the time comes. A foreword is welcome for both fiction and nonfiction books; however, for the foreword to have any effect, it should be written by someone relatively well-known in the field. For example, if you’re writing a horror novel, then getting Stephen King to write the foreword would be wonderful—but not so much the guy down the road who reads a lot of Stephen King.

In a stripped-down-to-the-bone Word document. We do our work in Adobe InDesign. As soon as we get your manuscript, we import it into InDesign and toss the Word document into a folder somewhere. In Indesign we handle all the layout, styling, and typography. Any of that stuff you put in a Word document gets discarded, so it’s best not to put it in there in the first place. No fancy font, no page numbers, no images (see below for more on images), no sections, no formatting other than bold, italic, bulleted or numbered lists, and tables.

You should not put them in your Word document. It’s a hassle for us to strip them out prior to importing the text into InDesign. Instead, you should indicate in your document where you want images to appear. For instance, if you have an image named ‘Excelsior’ that you want to appear in the middle of a specific page, then in that spot put , followed by its caption, if any. Then send us all your images along with your Word document. We’ll take care of the rest.

No. You have a great deal of say in how you want your book to appear and in the art you want to put on the cover, but in the end that’s a decision for us to make based upon what will do best in the market. We will almost always defer to your judgment, but there are edge cases when we won’t. In those cases, we’ll explain our reasoning and either reach common ground or make a compromise suitable to all.

An opinionated book is fine; in fact, it’s great! But if you’re consumed by fringe politics or religion, if you’re misogynistic, if you have conspiracy theories that the world just must believe in, then we’re not for you and you’re not for us. There’s sometimes a fine line between being critical and being crazy. Please don’t cross over into crazy.

That’s a problem. If there’s grungy stuff on every page, we most likely won’t publish your book. As a writer, professional or otherwise, you should deliver a clean manuscript—maybe not perfect, but reasonably so. Typos and other minor grammar issues are inevitable; we’ll fix those, and we’ll also check your facts (make sure you do first!), ensure consistency (once an Oxford commas, always an Oxford comma), and other editorial touch-ups. As long as you don’t send us the equivalent of a rough draft, we’ll be fine.

No.

We promote each of our books, but the more successful authors pitch in as well. If you have a social media following, great! There’s no better way to drum up sales for a book than from your own followers. We’ll likely also schedule you for interviews, podcast appearances, and other promotionals. You don’t have to do them, but it does help.

Sure, if you’re good at it. And even if you’re not good at it, we welcome your ideas and sketches. We want you to be happy with everything we create together, including the cover.

Know your story well, whatever it is, and make it exciting or informative (both if you can) to read.

No. We can’t wait to read your book!

Please get in touch via our contact form at the top of every page on the site.