Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: Work that Shapes the Dark
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: In the science fiction/fantasy domain, in no particular order: Crossed Genres, Angry Robot Books, Melville House, Small Beer Press, and Evil Hat Productions, among others.
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: I’m a book devourer in four languages across genres...almost impossible to come up with a manageable name list. What follows is more like a sprinkling. Poetry: VictoríaTheodhórou, Elytis, Seferis, Rilke, Yeats, mid-Piercy, Celan; SF/F: Melissa Scott, Tanith Lee, Alex Jablokov, Vandana Singh, Dunsany, non-Amber Zelazny, Emma Bull, pre-Thrones George Martin, parts of Le Guin; Mystery: Tana French, Martin Cruz Smith, Elsa Hart, John le Carré; non-genre: Isak DInesen, Tracy Chevalier, Jim Harrison, Nadine Gordimer, Savyon Liebrecht, Bharati Mukherjee, Andre Dubus, early-to-mid Atwood.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: We publish works that cross boundaries. We firmly believe that speculative fiction is (must be) literature, and can become myth, legend, song, a river on which dreams can sail. We want to bring forth fiction that’s nuanced, layered, that brims with non-triumphalist sense of wonder, three-dimensional characters, fully realized universes, stories that lodge in cortex and breastbone. We want to help create books whose universes, societies and characters are diverse in any or all respects, but originality of imagination and quality of craft are our paramount criteria. We mean it when we say we want to elicit and nurture fiction that shapes the dark.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Edit, edit, edit, and then go back and edit some more. Yes, you will be professionally edited if you’re accepted for publication with us – but that doesn’t mean your book shouldn’t already be in the best possible shape you can make it. Be ready and willing to make changes and to dig into your work layer by layer, no matter how many times you’ve already done it; there’s always something more to discover and refine.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: The ideal submission is snappy, with a great opening that makes us demand to read more. It’s got a distinctive voice, fully realized worlds, vivid characters that feel like actual people. Technically speaking, it’s well-formatted, uses full sentences and proper punctuation, doesn’t use tab indents (the bane of a typesetter’s existence), and has obviously been proofread. Also, it adheres to our submission requirements – in other words, you actually read the guidelines and sent in the format and materials we request.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: We really do mean it when we say we’re a speculative fiction publisher. Arguing with us about how your literary memoir does have an element of the fantastic or unusual in it, really it does, will not make us more likely to reconsider.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: Cover letters, queries, etc. are really of secondary or even tertiary importance. As long as you’ve written a wonderful, captivating story, we really don't care who you are or what you’ve published before.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: I can often tell whether a piece is wrong for us within few paragraphs – but to determine whether a piece is right takes longer. I read nearly every submission through to the end of the sample ~10 pages, and anything that seems promising enough to request a full manuscript gets read in its entirety before an offer or rejection is made.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: Sometimes a rewrite request or a discussion with the author regarding certain elements of the piece will happen; but mostly, if we're going to accept a work, we do so on its initial merits, purely based on originality and quality, rather than subjecting it to marketing or other benchmarks.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: It's immensely important. Electronic submissions speed and streamline the submissions process, while social networking and use of social media make it easier to connect with both authors and readers – critical for building an audience and finding out what readers actually want to read right now. It’s all about making sure good stories get told, and that people hear those good stories; new technologies can help with that. They also make it possible to produce high-quality work more efficiently, which means we can make it easier and more affordable for readers to actually read said stories.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: Our focus is on the work; the author's name recognition is irrelevant except insofar as ego or past habituation to auto-piloting may hinder the editing process. That said, we want to sculpt and burnish each story to its maximum potential, not change it to fit preconceived Procrustean beds. We also do acknowledge the engineer's motto, "The perfect is the enemy of the (very, very) good." For the rest: yes to all of the above.