Our First Open Call 1st - 15th October

WHO WE ARE:  Crossroad Press was built on a model of bringing back out of print books, then collaborating with the established authors who had written them on new projects. We have a very slim staff, a hybrid business model, and it has kept us in business and profitable for many years now.

We also realize that there are only so many out-of-print books, and the stories, styles, and literature of previous decades are giving way to a flood of new talent, diverse themes and voices, and progress. We want to be a part of that, and we’re hoping some of you will want to join us.

WHAT WE DO:  We edit and create our covers in house in about 99% of the cases, and we promote through Bookbub and social media. We do what we can with our limited staff (two out of three of whom have day jobs) and we’ve had a lot of success.

WHAT WE DON’T DO: We are a publisher. We don’t charge to read manuscripts, edit them, create covers, or anything else. Publisher pay writers, that’s how it works. Anyone who charges for those things, or deducts them from future royalties, is a service, not a publisher.

WHAT WE PAY:  Before I get into any details, I need to be up front about how our publishing model works. There are no advances. We pay an extremely high royalty rate compared to most (or all) of our competitors. Our rates have been and will remain:

Eighty percent of all money that comes in on eBooks / 80% of all money that comes in on KDP Paperbacks / 65% of all money that comes in on digital audio. We pay 50% on books published through Lightning Source because, while they allow Ingram distribution, their printing price is huge compared to Amazon, and they simply don’t result in the numbers of sales to warrant it. That’s a subject for a different post.

HOW TO SUBMIT:  With that out of the way, here is what we have planned. We will be open to novel submissions in the first two weeks of October 2023. Please do not send manuscripts of fewer than fifty thousand words, or collections. We want to see the first three chapters and either a detailed synopsis, or an outline of the book. Cover letters are good, but nothing to spend a lot of time worrying over. We are interested in finished novels, not works in progress. The genre is not as important as the writing. We publish horror, mystery, science fiction, Romance, fantasy, thrillers, metaphysical, westerns, weird westerns, young adult and middle grade books, and have published some mainstream works by bestselling authors. We love true crime and have published a large number of non-fictions works. We will consider novel-length non-fiction during this open call. We have different imprints for each genre.

All submissions should be sent via e-mail to: [email protected] with the subject line Open Call Submission – your name – the name of the book. Do not send hard copy submissions, or text copied into the body of an e-mail.

WHAT WE WANT TO SEE: Good, solid books, novels or non-fiction,  that you actually care about. We do not want formulaic books, books trying to fit a tight genre category or ride on the coattails of popular authors. Show us the book you want to write, not what you think will sell, or what others tell you that you need to be writing. Or, if you do any of those things, do them very well. If you are sending non-fiction and the market for the book is a very small niche, we probably aren’t the right home.

The three of us who will be doing the first reading could not be more diverse in our literary tastes. We have crossovers, of course, but vastly different tastes. Myself, my better half Patricia Lee Wilson (who writes as Patricia Lee Macomber) and David Dodd, who you all know from the amazing covers he has created for so many books, and some of you for his collection of horror paperbacks, of which he has been a fan and a reader since the mid '80s, which consists of over 3000 titles.

Please do not submit before October 1st, or after October 15th. Please do not send us letters or queries ahead of time about your books. The format will be very open; Microsoft Word documents or .rtf, single or double spaced, no fancy fonts. Please avoid the urge to use creative styling. Please don’t quote poems, lyrics, or books unless you intend to contact the agents / authors / songwriters and acquire the rights to use them. If you are writing about real places, things, events, etc., take 30 seconds to Google and make sure you are accurate and spelling things correctly. In other words, as long as the submission is professional, it will be fine.

Any submissions mailed, or sent in any other format, will be returned unread.