Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Where to publish stuff?

Small presses are more likely to publish an author with no agent or credentials than the big ones.  It's how I moved from aspiring author to published author in the first place and why I currently have a work submitted awaiting a response.

But here's the thing: whenever I hear about a smaller publishing company putting out an open call it always seems to be one that specializes in romance.  There's certainly a lot to do in that arena:
-High School Robotics Team student repairs her relationship with engineering.
-Best friends reunited after ten years fall in love while fighting off creatures from mirrors.
-Intended human sacrifice seduces the high priestess intended to prepare her for sacrifice.
-Language pedants fall in love.
-Traumatized super hero (brutally conditioned as an assassin, super healing, the like) and disowned mundane fall in love over games of chess and an unfortunate incident with a shotgun.
-The Band Story
-so forth
BUT that's hardly a genre I want to be stuck in.

So I wonder if there are other small time publishers who would fit my kind of writing that don't fall into the, "We must have romance," category.

Anyone know of any?

4 comments:

  1. I've heard good things about Hadley Rille Books. But as long as you're not paying them, it's a good publisher. (If they pay you before you have to set lawyers on them, it's a great publisher.)

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  2. The Greek Myth-Based Story involves romance, too. But like many of those, it involves a lot of stuff that isn't focused on the romance.

    I don't necessarily know all your stuff. But A World Without God and other apocalypse thingies are good, and I would think genre enough to have calls...

    I can't think of many interesting stories that aren't at least partly about love, broadly defined... But that's not the same as the romance genre...

    Also you seem to have a lot of first-time/meet-cute/falling-in-love stories, but I would think that at least some romance could involve established relationships... especially in ways that refute the tiresome "Dude gets with his ex-wife because that's the only conflict we understand" action/scifi movie thing.

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  3. @Lonespark: Romance (in the publishing world) is a genre, and like any genre has a specific structure and rules. Established relationships aren't permitted - the structure is "meet, fall in love, overcome obstacle, get intimate, overcome second obstacle, live happily ever after." If it doesn't meet the structure, it won't be accepted by a romance publisher. (It might of course be accepted by a *different* publisher, if it meets the rules of some other genre - but it won't be published as a romance.)

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  4. Hmmm. But I was thinking of things with a bit more wiggle room. Shifting Hearts was, among other things, a romance anthology, but Chris's story was about people getting back together. In established relationships you can have flashbacks to the meeting and falling in love...

    But yeah, I get what you're saying.

    Probably I was thinking more of stories in multiple genres, like "high fantasy romance" or "steampunk romance" or "romance involving alien species and colonialism" or whatever...

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