Editor Interview: BrickHouse Books

Clever-ecletic, with grit

Akashic Books, Mason Jar Press, Two Dollar Radio, Haymarket Books, Fitzcarraldo Editions, City Lights, Dzanc Books, Little Patuxent Review

Martin Amis, Nathan Hill, Alan Watts, Margaret Atwood, Matt Haig, Tom Robbins, Max Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace

We provide all submitters with sincere and detailed critiques of their work. We PROMOTE our authors.
As a non-profit, we need only make enough money to keep our lights on and pens well-inked.

We look for clear voices and demonstrated skill. Fiction that can get the reader from point A to B without a map app. Poems that can get around the barrels and make the tight turns. Know what your work is trying to do and help it without getting in its way. The reader wants to walk with you, but don't yank her sleeve like a kid.
And if you send anything about stones, bones, scars, or your grandmother, make it something that sounds like nothing that's come before. Be enchanted, in awe. Let your words make us hear the music you were listening to when you wrote them.

Poetry that appeals to people who don't really love poetry. Prose that bites back.

That we are not a periodical and accept only booklength submissions. Of course, booklength varies: a chapbook is 42 pages or fewer.

Cover letters help, but please, be spare.

It's VERY seldom we don't read to the final punctuation mark. Even then, more than one staff member must come to that conclusion.
With any rejection, we tell the submitter why, and we try to point them in a direction that (we think) would help make them more successful.

All staff members must agree before we accept a manuscript.

Our comments are intended to permit authors to edit their own material, which is largely successful. On occasion, we take work that requires extensive editing, but that process is understood upfront and entered into enthusiastically or not at all.
We outsource final proofreading to get our eyeballs away from it.

Yes; NBA, etc.

Books sales, donations, grants -- the usual suspects.

YES! And uniquely so. We work closely with our authors to book readings/outings/soirees/whatever it takes to raise awareness of their work and set them toward further success.