submission call Archives -

It is Fantasycon Friday so I hope everyone at the event today is having an amazing time! We can’t attend but there should be just a little paw print on the Mother’s Milk Books table on Saturday.

We are opening our doors today too, but for submissions. We have a couple of slots for 2018 and we are looking for fiction to fill them. We will update the submissions page with this call in time for the 1st Oct when we officially open.

What we want: You know our genres by now, sci fi, fantasy, horror, crime, blasphemous mixes of various genres, anything speculative. It can be dark or fun as long as it is packed with great characters and fantastic plot.

Length wise, well, we hate to say it but we were doing novellas before it was cool, so really anything that is long enough to need it’s own book works for us. It needs to be completed though. Adult or YA is fine. If it leans toward middle grade, there will be another call for Fennec in due course, please wait for that.

What we don’t want: We don’t do shock, extreme or body horror, it makes Aunty Fox squicky and if she can’t read it she can’t publish it. We don’t publish romance, erotica, literary or anything we haven’t actually asked for. We will reject without reading.

Our submission guidelines are on the Subs page and we do suggest reading them.

Please make sure you use ‘submissions@foxspirit.co.uk‘

Doors open on 1st October and remain open until 31st October, please submit within that window.

How we work.

Fox Spirit is a small press, we work on profit split, our terms will be 65% to the author 35% to us, but we will be taking all out costs for cover art, editing etc out of our %, so you get you % of every sale. We sell via Amazon using print on demand.

As a small press we are working on a limited budget and limited range so if you have expectations of retiring from your dayjob on book income you need to talk to someone like Penguin. If we are interested in your title we will be happy to discuss expectations in more detail.

What happens now?

During October we will gather submissions and send acknowledgements. If you do not receive an acknowledgement in 24 hours please let us know in case your sub hasn’t reached us.

When submitting please send a short synopsis and the first three chapters. We may come back to you to request a full manuscript during the process.

Depending on submissions we will read over November and December and finalise in January.

Commissioning Editor Aunty Fox and Editor Daz will be reading submissions.

This is also up at awesome editor Kate Laity’s site

We are also planning on bringing Weird Noir cover artist S.L.Johnson back on for this project.

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A call for stories from Fox Spirit Books, publishers of Weird Noir and many more superb volumes.

Dark’s Carnival has already left town, but it’s left a fetid seed behind. There’s a transgressive magic that spooks the carnies and unsettles the freaks. Beyond the barkers and the punters, behind the lights and tents where the macabre and the lost find refuge, there’s a deformity that has nothing to do with skin and bones. Where tragic players strut on a creaking stage, everybody’s going through changes. Jongleurs and musicians huddle in the back. It seems as if every one’s running, but is it toward something—or away?

Carnival: whether you picture it as a traveling fair in the back roads of America or the hedonistic nights of the pre-Lenten festival where masks hide faces while the skin glories in its revelation, it’s about spectacle, artificiality and the things we hide behind the greasepaint or the tent flap. Lead us on a journey into that heart of blackened darkness and show us what’s behind the glitz.

Touchstones (to give you a sense of the breadth of the net cast):

John Webster’s “skull beneath the skin” • Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love • Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus • Gargantua & Pantagruel • Pinocchio (the novel! Not the Disney atrocity) • Papa Lazarou • Doctor Lau • Ray Bradbury’sSomething Wicked This Way Comes • Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal • Leonor Fini

Surprise me, delight me, make me afraid of the shadows of a warm summer night, rip my guts out and stuff them back in again. Just don’t bore me. All editors have their tastes or quirks: if you want a clue to my sensibilities, check out my extensive bibliography and of course, read Weird Noir.

Stories should be:

Previously unpublished anywhere
Not submitted anywhere else
Length 3-8K
Formatted: Times New Roman, regular, 12 point. 1″ margins. 1 space after full stop. Spaced 1.5 lines. Use paragraph formatting to indent first line nottabs. No header/footer.
Identified with a title, your name (and pen name identified as such),working email address on the first page: file name should include your surname & title
Submitted in RTF format via email to katelaity at gmail with at least your name, the story title and total word count included in the body of the email; make sure the Subject line includes “Submission: Noir Carnival” + your name
Due by Walpurgisnacht

We will ask for world-wide print & ebook rights for a year and pay $10 via Paypal as an advance against the royalties to be split with the publisher. We plan to launch the book at EDGE-Lit in Derby in July 2013.

Tag: submission call

Submission Call

Call for Stories: Noir Carnival