Editor Interview: Hollow Oak Presents

Speculative short fiction

There are so many. I particularly admire anyone in the independent publishing spaces who is doing community-focused, analog work. Lefty Blondie Press is one who does limited-run, beautiful hand-bound chapbooks. They embrace the art of the physical book in such an interesting way. I also appreciate Baubles from Bones. I enjoy reading their stories, and I like their short fiction focus.

I am loving the emotion and complexity of Alix E. Harrow and Emilia Hart right now. Generally, I also enjoy Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley, and the masterful way they unravel a thriller, and I love Jennifer McMahon's unsettling and atmospheric writing.

We look for stories with heart written by authors who can connect us to a character in a brief story format. We love speculative, magical, fantastical elements, but we don't want those to be the center of the story. We're different than some other sci-fi/fantasy publishers in that we aren't looking for world-building or magic systems. We want an emotional core in a magical/fantastical setting.

I could repeat the same old advice here, like "be sure to follow the submission guidelines" or "read some of what we've published to get a feel for what we like," because those ring true for everyone, including us. Mostly though, my advice is this: if you've edited your piece and think it's ready to be sent, always do one more edit pass beyond when you consider it ready. And the best advice? Don't self-reject. If you meet our criteria, send it to us!

My ideal submission starts with the email. Putting the submission call and title in the subject line is not an arbitrary request from us. It's how we organize our busy inbox, and makes sure we don't accidentally miss your submission.
Outside of that, my ideal submission grabs me from the first line. With flash fiction, there's not room for a slow build, and I want to see an immediate hook that gives me the pull to keep reading.

Generally, people seem to do well following our process. We do occasionally get submissions from people who have clearly not read our guidelines, including whole manuscripts or poetry when we only accept short fiction.

I only look at bios and publication credits in retrospect if we want to publish the story. I want our stories to speak for themselves, and I like finding talented new and emerging authors. We do ask for a bio as part of the submission process though, more as convenience to our team. I don't really worry that much about who a cover letter is addressed to, but I do appreciate a brief, friendly cover letter. We're people too, and it's nice when there's a recognition of that.

For our first round of reading, with our flash fiction call, we read at least the first page. We can usually tell within a paragraph or two, but our team gives every story a real chance. Due to the volume of submissions that we get though, if our team isn't hooked by the first page, we may not finish reading the whole story. When we have open calls for longer short stories, we may read a few pages. Part of the process of reading submissions includes paying attention to how we feel as readers, and the difference between the desire to continue reading as opposed to feeling like reading is required. When I tell people how subjective publishing is, attending to this feeling while reading submissions is a big part of it.
Once a story has passed our first round and it comes to me, I read for adherence to our brand and mission. I'm looking for something different than our first-round readers, so I will read at least half of the story to determine if it's a good fit for our project, and most of the time during this round, I read the whole story.

Generally speaking, I don't like to accept too many similar pieces in a short time frame. Even if a story is wonderful and we love it otherwise, if we just accepted or published one recently that's too similar in an overt way, I will usually reject it. For our flash fiction call, this is as simple as recency. During our longer story calls for our print anthologies, this means choosing the best fit out of the small pool of similar pieces.
It's really hard to reject some stories, but for our print publications, I have to consider the overarching immersive component of the anthology, and then practical things like physical space in the pages and how the stories fit and flow together.

Sometimes I'm part of the first-round reading and other times, I'll work on the second-round submissions. It's a different headspace for me, and changes what I'm looking for. For some stories, we'll have a discussion between team members about its merits, while for others, it's a clearer decision. I make all of the final decisions about submissions, and once that happens, I'll file each of them in either an acceptance or a to-be-rejected folder. To keep ourselves organized, we file stories to batch them together, because sending out responses is a different task that we set aside time to do separate from reading and considering.
I'm responsible for a lot more than just submissions, and while it's a vital piece of my job, it's one of many tasks within my role that I juggle.

We expect that a story will come to us in its final edited version. I do light copy editing for grammar/spelling/clarity, but outside of that, we do not do substantive editing. Our accepted authors approve and sign a contract that includes a clause that they understand the level of editing we will do, so we do not seek final approval. At this time, we also don't send pieces back for revision and resubmission.

At this time we do not, however we are open to this in the future. I try to stay abreast of awards in the short fiction market, but have not yet participated in any of them.

I launched our debut publication through a grant intended to bolster a creative business venture, and from there, we have been able to profit enough from the sale of our printed anthologies that we can fund our projects through previous sales.

We use social media marketing, and we participate in many in-person events including conferences and vendor markets. I also work to establish a relationship with regional independent booksellers to market our print anthologies through them.