Do you have a young adult piece about horses in need of a print home?
Fire and Ice, an imprint of Melange Books, publishes work in both e-book and print formats. Payment is 40% net royalties on e-books and 10% on print. They are looking for horse stories:
- From 10,000 to 20,000 words long. These pieces, if accepted will be released as individual e-books (ie, not in a collection but a stand alone ebook).
- From 40,000 to 60,000 words long. These pieces, if accepted will be released as ebooks and in print trade paperback formats.
What do they expect from a young adult submission? In addition to conforming to word count, here is some of what they look for:
- Main characters should be high school age, 15-18 years old.
- All genres and sub-genres (romance, humor, contemporary, historical, fantasy, etc.).
- Manuscripts should be single spaced with one inch margins all around, paragraphs indented .3, in HTML or a doc/docx file.
- Stories must be divided by chapters. For consistency, scene breaks should be divided by 3 asterisks (***).
These things will bring an automatic rejection:
- Sex
- Abuse towards either people or animals
- Foul language
- Gratuitous violence
- No smoking, alcohol consumption or drug usage by the main characters
- Characters can profess to have faith, but NO religious or anti-religious themes
Click here to read the full list of requirements. And please only send them your best work. It freaks me out just a little (okay, a lot) that publishers feel the need to tell people not to start with a flashback, that characters need to be three-dimensional, and that they don’t want typos and misspellings. Make me proud, people!
–SueBE
One Writer's Journey 