August Books
August Books is one of the three main imprints of Canelo, a UK  based press that was established in 2015. Their books are well distributed and you can learn more about the company as a whole here. Their main landing page is here, and as you can see there isn’t much listed there yet, because they were just launched in March 2024. Martina O’Sullivan has joined to lead the new division as executive publisher, and she has a lot of industry experience. You can read more about the launch here.

They are currently open to accepting submissions of fiction that belong in the Historical Adventure genre, and nonfiction work focused on history, popular culture, popular science, health and true crime.

Flux
Flux is an imprint of North Star Editions that publishes exclusively young adult fiction. Their motto is “Where Young Adult is a Point of View, not a Reading Level”. Most of the books they publish focus on the older end of the young adult market. They publish edgier, darker stuff, than other young adult publishers. They publish all sub-genres of young adult from realistic life stories to sci fi. They are established, have good distribution, and have published many books that have sold well. They have three open reading periods a year including June to July.

Jolly Fish Press
Jolly Fish Press was started in 2012. They are based out of Provo, Utah. Their authors have won numerous awards. They initially published a wide range of genres for adults, children, and young adults. They are now part of North Star Editions and like their sister imprint Flux, are only open to submissions from June to July.

AM Ink
AM Ink is a Western Massachusetts based press that publishes quality biographies, children’s books, novels, and short story collections.  They have sold television rights, and had movies made from their books. They consider short story collections only in June and are also open to a wide range of other titles also, till August.

Zibby Books
Zibby Books was founded by Zibby Owens, an established book influencer, as part of her company Aibby Media. You can read more about her launch of Zibby Books, here, and here. They primarily publish fiction and memoir. They have a submission form and you can submit via email. It’s not clear which is preferable, but when in doubt I always go with email submissions. They only respond if interested and do not give a deadline in terms of when to assume rejection. You can learn more here.

Bullshit Lit
This is how they describe their press: “Inspired by a stack of silly poems, Bullshit Lit is the antithesis to those flowery submissions calls for, like, “the deepest echo in your heartcanyon.” We don’t take ourselves too seriously.​ We like to see your worst. Your trash. Get funky with it. We love silly poems, nonsense prose, and lazy lore.” They publish poetry, prose, fiction, art, and work that doesn’t fit nicely into any of those categories.

They do not charge for submissions but they do charge $5 for expedited response times. They respond to expedited submissions within 2 months, and usually much quicker. They don’t say how long they take to respond to submissions without paying, unfortunately. They are open to submissions in 2024 on June 8th, at 12:01 AM EDT to June 16th 11:59 PM EDT.  Work submitted can be anywhere between 15 (they publish chapbooks also) and 100 pages.

Entrepreneur Press

Prune Juice is published three times a year on the first of the month, in April, August, and December. Each downloadable online edition features writing from around seventy contributors. So far, they’ve published 42 issues.

Prune Juice is open to submissions for their August edition through June 30. After that, they’ll open again to submissions for their December edition from October 1-31.

They accept both traditional and experimental Senryu. They also accept Kyoka, Haibun, and Gembun, as well as Linked Forms written alone or in collaboration, such as Rengay, Split Sequences, and Haiga with a Senryu twist. They’re also open to submissions of experimental forms related to Senryu.

Poets may submit up to five Senryu or Kyoka, or up to three Haibun, Gembun, Linked Forms, or Haiga. Submitting authors can expect a response within four to six weeks.

Prune Juice accepts submissions via email, not online or by post. They do not accept previously published work, and they do not accept simultaneous submissions.

Prune Juice only accepts submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Prune Juice, please visit their website here. 

Bio: Ella Peary is the pen name for an author, editor, creative writing mentor, and submission consultant. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of articles for Authors Publish, and she’s also served as a copywriter and copy editor for a wide range of organizations and individuals. She is the author of The Quick Start Guide to Flash Fiction. She occasionally teaches a course on flash fiction. You can contact her at ellapeary@gmail.com.

When I was a teenager I remember being shocked by the fact that most of the adults around me didn’t read more than one book a year. But they all told me that they were busy, and when I was older I would understand, and I wouldn’t have time to read.

I now read around a hundred books a year. I did that before I had a full time job. I continued to read that much after getting a full time job and getting married. When I was pregnant I assumed having a child would change all that. And while becoming a mother has changed every aspect of my life, I still read one hundred books every year. I am not counting children’s book either. The habit of reading is such a part of me that while other things have gone by the wayside (watching anything), no matter how busy I am, I always make sure I have time to read, even if it is just ten minutes before bed.

I believe that reading is an important part of being a writer. I think of it as part of my job as a writer to continue reading. There is a lot of attention paid to the idea that writers have to read to be good writers, and that is true. But I think to be a published writer you don’t just have to read, you have to read strategically, in a way that supports your life as a published writer.

If you are not convinced that you have to read to become a writer at all, the article is for you.

If you want to learn how to read in a way that best supports your career as a published writer, this is the article for you. You might already be doing a few of these things, but you are probably not doing all of them. As a published poet with three collections under my belt, and an aspiring novelist, I feel all of these steps have helped me get where I am, and they are going to help me get further.

Read the genre you write in

I know a lot of authors who write young adult (YA) fiction and don’t actually read it. A friend of mine who is writing a YA novel confessed that the last YA book she read was in high school. She is now in her fifties. The same goes for literary fiction, surprisingly. I think this is less likely to happen in genres like science fiction, but I might be incorrect.

I am going to use YA as the example genre in this section because most people have some familiarity with it. Even if that familiarity is dated.

Even if you don’t love the genre you’re writing in, you should be reading it. You should have read the classics. In the YA genre that includes books like The Outsiders and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. You should also have read at least three books that have been published in that genre in the last few years, if not more.

This is important for a number of reasons. If you don’t read within your genre you don’t understand what is standard and what is not, what is controversial and what is just par for the course. You can’t come in with just a one book filter, if all you read of YA was Divergent your filter would be very different than from someone who had only read The Fault in Our Stars.

The more you read in your chosen genre the more you can learn from the good choices (and the mistakes) that other authors make. One of the YA books I read and loathed, had a very well written fight scene. The book was mostly a waste of time but that one scene really helped me write one of the most important scenes in my own novel. Of course, you can learn some of those lessons outside of your genre, but not always.

You need to read books that have been recently published

First, you learn what is being published right now and who is publishing it.  But even more importantly, at least from a publication standpoint, many publishers and agents want you to compare your book to two or more recently published books in your query letter.  The more you read, the more accurate those comparisons can be.

It is important to read outside of your genre too. I think the best writers are diverse readers who read a whole range of writing.

Research for your book with books

I love researching on the internet. It is so easy to look up facts. The novel I wrote relies a lot on geography and so I found myself Googling a large number of maps and also asking the internet specific questions, like “how long does it take to get from Venice to Umag by boat?”.

But in order to get deeper into the lives my characters really lead, I had to read books. The internet is a great way to resolve specific questions, or look at maps or pictures, but much of the information lacks depth.

My book involves refugees in transit between countries. I found that while podcasts helped, nothing beats a good long book for really conveying the experience. Not all stories require research, but if yours does, including books as part of your research is always a good idea, because the information is more likely to be correct and because books tend to go far deeper into a subject.

Pay attention to the publishers

The first thing I do when I see a book is look at the publisher. Now it seems obvious to me. But for over two decades I read books without, for the most part, noticing who published them. Most readers don’t notice the publishers, and if they do it is just in passing.

If I have never heard of a publisher before and I enjoyed the book, I usually look the publisher up and do research on them. If the same publisher has published a number of books that have something in common with mine, I add their name to my “To Submit” File.

I have learned quite a lot by paying attention to who publishes the books I read. Some of it is relevant to what I write, and most of it is not. for example I know a lot about children’s book publishers because my children love books, but I don’t ever plan to write one. Still, that information helps me be more informed about how publishing works. It is part of the bigger picture. 

Even if you are not submitting directly to a publisher, it helps to know what publisher might be a good fit for your book. Author friends of mine who have mentioned the potential publisher for their novel in their agent query have had a very high success rate of landing an agent, and often a publisher that way.

Browse in bookstores, buy in bookstores

When I go into a bookstore I also pay attention to a publisher. Sometimes, if I have read an eBook that I like and the publisher claims to have good distribution, I look for the print version in the book store. If I can’t find it, I ask the booksellers about it. At a good bookstore they often know if they carry that publisher or not. The same goes for publishers I have read about online but am not otherwise familiar with.

Browsing through a bookstore educates you in many ways. You should be looking at covers. What trends are prevalent right now? What subjects seem well covered? What books seem to move? What are the booksellers recommending?

What a lot of people do now is browse in bookstores but buy elsewhere. Often just taking pictures of the covers of the books they want to buy. This is not good. Good independent bookstores help authors sell books. They support independent publishers. They help raise children into readers with story hours. It is important to support their financial health and ongoing existence.

Read the front matter and back matter

Front and back matter are a wealth of information, particularly in certain genres. Front matter is everything before the actual text of the book. Things like the table of contents and acknowledgements.  Back matter includes bibliography and authors bio.

The acknowledgments and the authors bio can often be the most helpful parts of books. Acknowledgments often reveal the author’s agent (if they have one) and editor (many who freelance, and who you could theoretically hire to polish your book).

In the case of poetry and short story collections acknowledgments are very helpful because they reveal where the author’s work has been published before, what journals and magazines have published them. The literary journals listed in there are usually a mix of the established and known (such as the New Yorker) and newer up and coming journals that are still becoming established but are most likely already respected within the publishing community.

Focus on submitting to those literary journals and magazines and your odds of having a full collection published usually increases dramatically.

Bio: Caitlin Jans has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-founder of Authors Publish and The Poetry Marathon. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Literary Review of Canada, The Fiddlehead, Eleven, Eleven, The Adroit Journal, and Killer Verse. Her prose and poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, BILiNE, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and The Best of the Net. You can learn more at www.caitlinthomson.com.