Editor Interview: Cold Caller Magazine

Mayhem and mistakes

All Due Respect and Tough were two publishers that heavily influenced how I thought about launching a new crime and mystery fiction review. I also absolutely love Rock and a Hard Place. They're one of the most exciting crime fiction publishers in the market, and they're doing great work to make the genre feel vital.

Some of my favorite writers include Donald E. Westlake, Jordan Harper, Megan Abbott, Patricia Highsmith, Mary Thorson, A. D. Schweiss, Nick Kolakowski, and P. G. Wodehouse.

We take a "big tent" approach to crime and mystery fiction, by which I mean we're interested in publishing widely across the genre. That includes grittier crime stories, historical mysteries, comic heist stories, etc. We also showcase work from established, well-known names as well as emerging authors. Our goal is to function as a true review of the genre, always entertaining and hopefully surprising.

It's cliche, but please read some of the stories we've published as well as our submission guidelines. Between the two, you should get a good sense of what we're interested in. We also appreciate a cover letter. It can be short and sweet, but you'd be surprised how many blank emails we get with nothing but an attached submission.

An ideal submission should have a strong plot and voice. It should do something new. It should open with a great hook and surprise us along the way.

We sometimes get submissions that aren't genres we publish, or that don't follow our guidelines. We try not to put people through too many hoops, but the guidelines we do have are there for everyone's benefit.

A cover letter is a helpful introduction. Previous credits can be noted, but they won't make or break your submission. A cover letter is an easy way to tell us that you're familiar with Cold Caller, understand our submission guidelines, and make a good first impression.

It really depends on the piece. If we receive a nonfiction essay, for instance, that's just not something we publish, so it doesn't make sense to read the whole thing. But if a submission is in our wheelhouse, we'll give it a fair shot.

We have a limited number of publication slots, so when work advances to the final rounds we have to evaluate it against the full editorial schedule. We try to vary the types of stories we publish, so if we have half-a-dozen hard-boiled private eye pieces, we'll have to pick and choose which makes it to publication. That doesn't mean the story was bad, it just means we have too much of that particular subgenre.

Our typical turnaround time is about 3-6 months, though we're starting to shorten that timeline. Once a piece is submitted, it goes through a couple rounds of review before either being rejected or accepted. Once accepted, we'll send a contract to the author, work together through any edits, then conduct an author interview to follow the story after publication.

Our edits are pretty minor. If a story needs substantial work, we generally just don't accept it. But we'll never reject a piece just because there's a typo or spelling error.
Even with minor edits, the author will have a chance to approve them before publication.

We've nominated work for Best American Mystery and Suspense, Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and the Pushcart Prize, and will continue to do so.

We are funded by subscribers. Part of our foundational mission is to pay our authors without charging submission fees, and we're very fortunate that our paying subscribers make that possible.

We promote our project and author online, primarily through Substack as well as social networking.