Submissions will remain closed outside of these intervals. If we directly request your work through private communication or a pitch contest, please submit it to us at anytime.

 

As a general rule, Midnight Meadow Publishing is looking for anything with queer protagonists or by queer authors so long as the story does not fall into the “bury your gays” trope. Authors need not be “out” personally nor professionally to submit, and we will be respectful of your identity whether you choose to entrust it to us or not. 

 

– Contemporary YA or adult romance with characters who identify as LGBTQ+, including transgender,  asexual, and/or pairings that depict healthy ethically non-monogamous poly relationships 

– Steampunk

– Hard sci-fi, including any of the following elements: time travel, alien species, robots/AI, etc 

– Horror of any kind; however, we are likely not to accept anything with gratuitious violence, body mutilation, or torture/death of LGBTQ characters 

– Westerns, historical fiction, or speculative fiction set in 1700-1900 time period
– Winter holiday/Hallmark channel style romance 

– Friendship/coming-of-age adventures, especially set between 1960-1990

– Sports-themed romance

– Music/band/musical artist theme, whether contemporary or sci-fi/fantasy

– Retellings, especially gender bent, and especially fairytales, lore, legends, myths, and the classics, i.e. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens.

Ultimately, Midnight Meadow’s goal is to publish engaging and unique LGBTQ+ stories while elevating marginalized voices. 

If your work does not fit into a particular genre or category, we may be the right fit for you.

– We do not consider previously published material, except under unique circumstances where the work has been significantly revised. 

– We are not currently accepting novellas (under 50k words) unless they are part of a series.

– We do not accept Male/Male erotica written for cishet female audiences.
– We do not accept excessively dark “torture p0rn”.

– We accept agented and unagented work, however, if you are working with an agent in any form and this is not explicitly stated, we are likely to immediately cease all discussions/correspondence until we have written permission from the agent to contact the author directly. We do this to protect our relationships with agents and their professional role.

 

*Also it’s important to state that several members of our editing staff are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and abuse. If your work contains these themes or depictions, we ask you to include a trigger warning.

– All queries should go to: submissions (at) midnightmeadowpublishing (dot) com. Address it to Acquisitions Team. 

– Begin your subject line with QUERY.

– We accept and consider queries formatted in any manner, however, we prefer the following format: state why you’re querying us, followed by book title, Word Count, genres and age category, LGBTQ+ representation, political/social/BIPOC representation and themes, comps, synopsis/summary of the book, author bio, salutations, first 10 sample pages.

– It’s our job to market your book so we do not place much weight on comps. If you don’t have them, please do not feel pressured to include them. Also, we accept comps with all manners of media (i.e. popular film, video games, board games…) so if your book is Treasure Planet meets Bridgerton, feel free to tell us!

– Please do not send attachments or links of any kind unless you’ve had a conversation with our staff and the attachment was requested.

– Please don’t sweat the details of your submission if you make a mistake. We are all authors too, and we know how stressful the querying process can be. Rest assured we will *never* reject an author for human mistakes, such as addressing your query to the wrong person. We understand!

– Feel free to submit multiple works to us at a time. If you have more than one, send them all! But please send them each in separate emails so we can organize our responses.

– We provide thorough feedback with every pass, including critique on your work. We do this in hopes that you can polish your sample pages and benefit with a stronger query in your future endeavors. However, we understand that some authors suffer from rejection sensitive dysphoria or otherwise do not wish to receive feedback. If this is the case, please feel free to include the following line above your salutations: “I desire sensitive feedback in your response” OR “I desire no feedback in your response”. This will notify our staff that we need to either respond with a basic “no”, “R&R”, or “conditional yes”, and invite you to ask for our feedback when/if you have mental space to hear it. 

– If you’ve previously submitted to us, always tell us so in your query. And on that note…

– If you are submitting a different work than the one we passed on. We love to see this!

– If you’ve made significant revisions with the guidance of several beta readers and/or editors, AND it has been at least 9 months since our pass.

– If we explicitly said in our pass either “not right now”, or that we did not see a place for your work in our “current” catalog. We are growing as a press and a pass for these reasons may change over time. We still ask that you wait at least 9, but preferably 12 months, before resubmitting.

– If you pulled your submission from our consideration for some reason, but the situation has changed, you may resubmit. I.e. you accepted an offer from another small press but it has not worked out. Please ensure in this case that you are legally free to pursue another publisher for your work.

 

Finally, we strive for transparency in all we do and we aim to be as author-focused as possible. That being said, our entire team is part-time here and full-time elsewhere, so here are some details about how our acquisitions process works:

– We aim to respond to all submissions within 6 weeks of receipt.
– About 20-25% of submissions result in full manuscript request.

Once we request a full:

– It can take us up to 3 months to respond to full manuscripts.

– A member of our acquisitions staff receives the full, reviews it quickly for editorial “fit”, then passes it to the appropriate member of our editing staff.

– The editing staff makes a recommendation based on multiple factors/considerations, such as how much developmental editing the work needs, the time until the next window in publication, and if we believe an author with a full-time job elsewhere can complete said edits within that window. We know you are likely not doing this full-time… yet, and we want the editorial process to be as low pressure as it can be!

– If the editing staff determines a large amount of developmental editing is needed, we may reach out to the author for an R&R or request an Editing Interview. The purpose of the Editing Interview is to find out if the author’s vision aligns with ours and if the author is willing to make significant changes. 

 

*Note: We understand that the Editing Interview is not conventional for the publishing industry. We believe it’s a critically unique and thoughtful step in building relationships with the authors we interact with. We have received negative feedback on the Editing Interview, and determined the right solution going forward is to be even more transparent about our process so this is not a surprise to any author.

– If the editing staff answer is “yes” at any point (with or without an Editing Interview), the editor gives their recommendation to the Acquisitions Staff.

– The Acquisitions Staff provides a template/boilerplate contract for the author to consider.

We hope these details help you to fully understand what you can expect from Midnight Meadow Publishing and our staff during your submissions process. We also hope that you find querying with us to be much-less stressful than it is elsewhere. Above all, we wish you success on your publishing journey.