Submission Guidelines and Considerations
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- Published: Wednesday, 19 October 2016 20:37
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Submission Guidelines and Considerations
Submissions closed on October 1, 2024
and will reopen on May 1, 2025
Do you have a creative book project that you would like us to consider for publication? We're currently open for new submissions though we are still working through the samples which came in over the past several months.
What we ask for is an email to this address describing your project or manuscript and including a sample of approximately 20 pages. We publish poetry, short stories, novels, novellas (if accompanied by other stuff), plays, and creative non-fiction. So tell us what you have and let your sample speak for you. If we find the sample irresistible, we will contact you and ask to see the full ms (doc or docx is fine). If we are not interested, we will try to let you know as soon as possible. If you're reading this in May of 2024, we should be almost finished working through the samples which flooded us earlier. We are sometimes overwhelmed with submissions which deserved full manuscript reading; still, we can only asked for a small fraction of those.
If we ask for and receive your full manuscript, it will be given to at least two paid readers who will enjoy and carefully evaluate it. Based on their evaluations we will offer to publish it as it is, or with revisions, or we will decline the opportunity to publish. We often have suggestions from our outside readers on ways to improve the work. We pass those along to you whether or not we decide to publish your work.
You should know that we are a small press with a very small promotional budget. We send out 10-15 copies with press releases to various newspapers, journals, and magazines for review; we get the book into our distributor's catalog, and maintain a web presence. But we depend on the authors to do any further PR. Several have done amazing jobs in promoting their work, organizing readings and signing events at their local libraries or bookstores, reading their works on radio shows or at other public events, getting their works reviewed in local papers or literary journals. Authors do get 20 free copies to use for promotion or to show or just give to friends.
If we publish your book, you will not pay us anything--though if you want more than your 20 free copies you will pay wholesale price for the extras. Once your "distribution threshold" is reached, you will receive royalties. (A distribution threshold is the number of books that must be sold for us to recover our publication expenses--the money we've paid to readers, artists, graphic designers, printers, distributor, ebook maker, etc.) Usually the threshold is about 200 books, including ebooks. Royalties start at 30% of our "publishers compensation," but if book sales reach 500 copies your royalty percentage increases to 50% of our compensation.
The books, once they are uploaded and approved, become available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble within about a week. Through our distributor, Ingram Content Group, they quickly become available all around the world. Though ebooks are optional and refusing the option means a somewhat lower distribution threshold, most of our authors have been choosing to have ebooks. Nowadays ebooks come with a (computerized) text-to-speech capacity so that listening to the book is possible.
So far Golden Antelope Press has published 49 books. We've also published 16 books as Blazing Sapphire Press for works relating to the literature, philosophy, and religions of India (Neal's area of expertise). We've also published 16 books as Naciketas Press for non-fiction works of general interest, and research not connected with India.
If you have any questions or would like to pitch a Golden Antelope book, just send us an email and sample at the site email address (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). The Nacitketas and Blazing Sapphire websites aren't up-to-date, but emails to ndelmonico@sbcglobal are welcome.
Neal and Betsy Delmonico