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?
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.)
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
@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.)
ReplyDeleteHmmm. 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...
ReplyDeleteBut 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...