Forest Avenue Press seeks 2 Novels. Deadline: March 5th.

Submissions

Submissions

Forest Avenue Press is open for national submissions from January 1 to March 5, 2015. Our titles are distributed by Legato Publishers Group, a division of PGW/Perseus, and are available through local bookstores and online.

We’re seeking two literary novels (no short story collections, please) for publication in 2016/17. In your query letter, please be sure to explain why you think Forest Avenue Press is the right publisher for you. Specific knowledge of at least one of our titles is highly encouraged. Writers must submit their query letters and the first 50 pages through Submittable.

For information on our next short story collection, which opens for submissions on February 1, 2015, see our Story Project page.

Here are some more hints and thoughts about what we would like to see, novel-wise:

• We seek plotty literary novels that enchant and surprise while breaking our hearts.
• We want to see characters with page presence: clear, original voices, ready to say something to the world, begging us to pause our busy lives to listen.
• We want all of our authors to support each other, loudly and with great joy, so if you’re not willing to be a team player, you might want to query a press that has less of an emphasis on community building.
• No nonfiction, and no straight-up genre, please—we’re not publishing sci-fi/fantasy, or horror, or romance, although we love fabulism and magical realism and might be persuaded to peek at a character-driven speculative novel with an unforgettable voice.
• Our motto used to be “Quiet books for a noisy world.” We define “quiet” as when the hero is changed by the world instead of forging ahead to change the world—and we still like quiet books—but we were flooded with submissions where people sat around chatting with each other for the first fifty pages. Plot is necessary to any quiet book, and if yours is quiet and character-driven without sacrificing plot (Dan Berne’s The Gods of Second Chances even has a chase scene!), then send it our way.
• That being said, our editorial board includes an organ grinder, a circus clown, and a tap dancer. We are big fans of eccentric characters, humor, and whimsy, as long as those qualities are grounded in the story—and by some measure of devastation and personal loss. Humor without heartbreak can fall flat too quickly.
• While we’ve been on a kick of accepting manuscripts set in recent history (such as Carry the Sky, Kate Gray’s 1980s boarding school bullying novel, and Ellen Urbani’s Landfall, set during Hurricane Katrina), a well-written contemporary novel is on our must-find list. Study our titles and see what we’ve published since 2012—and what we haven’t—and think about whether your book would bring something fresh to our catalog. Internationally set fiction is another thing we’d like to see more of. And fiction by or about various ethnic groups.)
• We’ve had a lot of submissions from YA authors in the past year; at this point, we are not publishing YA because our established audience is adult fiction oriented. We would absolutely consider an adult novel that happens to feature younger characters—although Landfallfeatures two eighteen-year-old girls so we wouldn’t want to follow its August 2015 release with another book about eighteen-year-olds.
• We’re also not seeking linked short story collections at this time, despite the success of Stevan Allred’s A Simplified Map of the Real World. But we’d love to see a multi-narrator manuscript that authentically renders each character’s voice the way Stevan does in his collection, or a manuscript that gives voice to a community the way he fictionalizes a rural Oregon town.
• While we’re incredibly excited to open nationally to submissions, we do plan to retain a Pacific Northwest flavor to our catalog with at least one book each year set here or by an author living here. So feel free to submit, Northwesterners!

We are looking to fall desperately in love with a book. To love it so much we’ll put everything else aside for eighteen months to help birth it. Perhaps that book is yours.

We’re a small team, real people with books to publish and dinners to fix and kids needing help with homework, so please be patient with response times, and before asking us to spend hours with your work, and potentially years, please consider reading one of our books.