Editor Interview: Blind Eye Books

LGBT+ fiction

Small Beer Press, Seven Seas Entertainment, Queen of Swords Press

Ginn Hale, Priest, Fumi Yoshinaga, Douglas Adams, John Steinbeck

The combination of traditional genre plots with LGBT+ protagonists.

Try and find the actual audience for your book and tell me who that is in the cover letter. It can be something like, "Fans of x will like this." Or, "I share an audience with x," if you already have published works and you know have some crossover with another author. It doesn't matter if the other author is famous or not--just understanding who your audience is is so important. I will automatically spend more time with those submissions.

A traditionally-plotted science-fiction, fantasy, mystery or thriller with LGBT+ protagonist and a strong romantic subplot with a happy ending. I don't publish bummer endings--especially not tragic romance.

Submitters often tell me a lot of irrelevant information about their personal lives or details of their emotional journey with writing in their cover letters. But really I only want to know relevant things. Like if you sent me a police procedural and actually are a law enforcement officer, that's something I'd like to know. Or if you are a physicist who sent me a sci-fi book that would also have some bearing on my decision. The only exception to this rule is if the submitter is under 18, I'd like to know that right away. Otherwise, I'm okay not knowing anything about an author before opening a manuscript.

I think this was mostly covered in the previous answer.
Publication credits sometimes matter, sometimes don't. Mostly those indicate that an author is capable of meeting deadlines and/or actively soliciting work which is usually a positive sign so I'd say include some if you have them. But if you don't that's also okay. Everyone begins somewhere.

One or two pages at the beginning and one or two at the end is my standard evaluation. If the work has some promise I might spend half an hour or so checking out the general flow of the prose and story.

If I'm seriously considering publishing an author I will run down their social media feeds for the last couple of years to see how they behave in public and to see what the author's core audience is like.

I read submissions at the beginning of each month. Normally it takes 1-3 days to do the prior month's unsolicited MS.

We do very extensive workshopping, then line and copy editing. The author must approve, reject or modify everything.

Yes, of course. All that are relevant. Blind Eye Books titles have won the Lambda, Rainbow and Carl Brandon Parallax Awards, and been shortlisted for numerous others.