Happy New Year, readers!

This is the post in which I make a resolution to be more faithful about my blog posting this year. You have my apologies for my December silence, but it was a busy month. Between travel (mine), a broken arm (not mine), two sets of submissions to track, a short story due (mine), and the underlying craziness of the holiday season, I figured the blog was the most expendable. Most of you were probably too busy holidaying and dealing with your own year-end craziness to follow along here, anyway!

This is also the post in which I share the redux of the Dragon Moon Press December open submissions. What follows is a lot of completely useless but hopefully interesting stats and facts, most of which have no bearing whatsoever on which submissions might turn into requested fulls, or signed publishing deals. As you’ll already know, though, I think trends are fascinating, especially unconscious trends, so here are some trends found in the submissions this year. All percentages are rounded.

By the way, no response letters have gone out yet…so if you sent in a manuscript and haven’t heard from us, don’t worry.

General Stats

Total number of submissions received: 80
Not bad at all, considering we severely limited our genre requirements this year!

Submissions which requested “representation” by our “agency” instead of requesting publication: 6
(We know you’re nervous, so we won’t hold it against you…but in the future, check the wording on your form letter!)

Submissions referred through Miss Snark’s First Victim: 19
Submissions from authors who have submitted (different manuscripts) to DMP before: 4
Countries represented, where country was disclosed: 6
US States represented, where state was disclosed: 19

Range of word counts submitted: 35,000 – 260,000
(though most fell in the 80,000-115,000 range, with only about 4 outliers on each end)

Author Gender:

Manuscripts where author gender was identified or could be implied: 76

Manuscripts submitted by female or female-identified authors: 41 (54%)
Manuscripts submitted by male or male-identified authors: 34 (45%)
Manuscripts submitted by male/female co-author teams: 1 (1%)

Essentials:

Manuscripts which didn’t include titles: 2
Manuscripts which included samples, as requested per submissions guidelines: 73

All of the following sets of stats are based only on manuscripts which included sample pages.

Fantasy manuscripts received: 45
Urban fantasy manuscripts received: 28

Prologue or not to prologue?

Manuscripts with prologues: 13 (or, about 17.5%)

Urban Fantasy manuscripts with prologues: 4 of 28 (14%)
Fantasy manuscripts with prologues: 9 of 45 (20%)

POV and Tense

Urban Fantasy manuscripts in first person: 17
Urban Fantasy manuscripts in third person: 11

Fantasy manuscripts in first person: 5
Fantasy manuscripts in third person: 40

Manuscripts in present tense: 3 (all Urban Fantasy, all 1st person)

No manuscripts received in second person, or in future tense.

Protagonist Gender:

Manuscripts with female or female-identified protagonists: 37 (17 urban fantasy, 10 fantasy)
Manuscripts with male or male-identified protagonists: 32 (9 urban fantasy, 23 fantasy)
Manuscripts with equal female and male protagonists: 2 (both urban fantasy)

(No manuscripts were received with gender-neutral protagonists, but a few were received where the gender of the protagonist was not introduced (i.e., there was no pitch, and/or the protagonist didn’t appear in the sample))

And there you have it. A lot of information and no information at the same time. And yes, I track all this stuff in my submissions spreadsheets, not because it’s useful or relevant, but just because I’m interested in trends.

There is no information available yet about how many fulls are going to be requested, because our elite submissions team now has to convene and make some difficult decisions.

Many thanks to all who submitted manuscripts, and all who helped to spread the word!

The tree is beautiful and they call her Eden. Her branches reach for the stars. But this tree does not sprout from the dirt. Eden fills the sky, high in orbit above the blue expanse of Uranus. Eden changes humanity’s very concept of extraterrestrial life.

From the second he sets foot on Lola, Malcolm’s own future is in jeopardy. He soon finds that love, friendship, and his own mortality tremble like a leaf at the sound of Eden’s call.

EDEN, Phil Rossi’s beautifully haunting podcast, is now a beautifully haunting novella from Dragon Moon Press. Available in trade paperback, ebook (forthcoming) and collector’s edition hardcover.

“Science can’t explain what is sometimes called ‘magic.’ Magic can’t explain the wonder of EDEN.”
– Scott Sigler, New York Times best-selling author of CONTAGIOUS

Please join Phil’s Amazon Rush on December 8th. Get your copy of EDEN and help propel the celebrated author of CRESCENT up the charts.

Thanks for your patience! The December 2011 Open Submissions guidelines are now up at dragonmoonpress.com, where they will remain through the month of December.

The rules are slightly different this time around. Most notably, DMP is ONLY seeking fantasy (traditional fantasy, sword and sorcery, epic fantasy) and urban fantasy. DMP is solid on science fiction for 2012, we just need a couple more great titles to round out a great list.

As always, opening submissions in December is a risk. It’s when many publishers are closed for submissions due to the holidays. It also immediately follows NaNoWriMo. As always, DMP does not want your just-completed NaNoWriMo manuscript. Let us consider it next year, once it’s been through NaNoEdMo.

As always, send an electronic query that includes your name, contact info, title, genre and word count. Paste the first fifteen pages into the body of the email. Please do not send attachments. Submissions that haven’t consulted the guidelines will not be considered.

Check out the guidelines for more information, and spread the word. We’re looking forward to a great month!

Just an early heads-up for blog readers — Dragon Moon Press will again be opening its virtual gates this December.

Send no manuscripts yet! Full submissions details will be appearing soon on the DMP website. Manuscripts arriving before December 1, or which do not follow submissions guidelines, will be deleted unread. Wait for posting of this year’s submissions guidelines before submitting.

DMP will ONLY be looking for novels in specific genres to round out their 2012 list:

* Traditional/Epic Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery
* Urban Fantasy

Other genres are already well-represented in our forthcoming selection and will NOT be accepted during this submissions period. Nor will your 2011 NaNoWriMo manuscript.

Look for more details on Monday, November 7!

Finalists have been announced for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards, and I’m pleased to see that five of the books I’ve worked on this past year have made the list!

In the Science Fiction category:

* Angel of Chaos by Nina Munteanu
* Destiny’s Blood by Marie Bilodeau

In the Fantasy category:

* Murder at Avedon Hill by P.G. Holyfield
* Scimitar Sun by Chris A. Jackson

In the Horror category:

* Toothless by J.P. Moore

Congrats to the authors and to Dragon Moon Press for this achievement!

One of the toughest things about being in publishing, on either side of the desk, is having to sit on good news. I think it’s even harder than getting rejection letters, because at least with rejections you can share your pain. Getting an exciting offer and not being able to tell anyone can be excruciating. At least it’s the good kind of pain!

There’s lots going on with me, including some developments I can announce…but instead of telling you about one of mine today, I’m going to share someone else’s good news. I’ve been waiting longer to be able to talk about this.

Dragon Moon Press is pleased to announce the addition of Fighting Gravity by Leah Petersen to the publishing roster for 2012.

Jacob Dawes is young, quick-tempered, and the most celebrated physicist of his day. His scientific genius gets him out of the slums and into a special place at the Emperor’s side; but when a very public mistake leads to charges of treason, Jacob discovers that fighting his own execution would mean betraying the one man who has become more important to him than anything else.

I’m very excited to be working on this book with Leah. We received the query early-on in Dragon Moon’s open submissions period, and the characters spoke to me at once. It’s a poignant gay teen science fiction love story, a roller coaster of ups and downs that propels you along for the ride even when it’s not easy.

I should also mention, Leah found us through the fantastic Ms. Authoress and her offer to spread the word about our open submissions on Miss Snark’s First Victim, her community for aspiring authors. (See also: my interview with the Authoress.)

About the Author:

Leah Petersen lives and writes in North Carolina when she can get some time away from her day job and her husband and two children. Rather than waste her life getting fresh air and sunshine, spending time with family and friends, or pursuing an actual career, she reads books.

Every Tuesday at 1:30pm EST, Leah Petersen runs a #5MinuteFiction Challenge. It’s fast and it’s furious and there’s a slight chance of injury. But it’s fun. Join Leah at @LeahPetersen or www.leahpetersen.com.

Do you run or contribute to a book review site?

Are you looking for more science fiction, fantasy, adult or YA-friendly books to review? Do you accept electronic copies?

Dragon Moon Press is looking to form relationships with book review websites and blogs. If you’re interested in receiving PDF reader copies for review, please drop me a line at eic @ dragonmoonpress.com with the following information:

• Your name and contact information
• Your blog’s address and title
• Your estimated readership (hit count)
• What genre / age range you prefer
• Whether you prefer to review pre- or post-publication

Reviews must be posted on review sites and/or bookseller sites.

To celebrate the release of Podthology, Dragon Moon Press’s new anthology of podcast fiction, editor Timothy G. M. Reynolds chatted with me about the making of an anthology.

GH: You mentioned on the Blog Talk Radio interview that Gwen Gades from Dragon Moon Press approached you with the idea for the theme. How familiar were you with podcasting before that?

Tim Reynolds: I knew very little about podcasting at that time. What little I knew came from attending a Tee [Morris] & Evo [Terra] panel at Westercon and one or two conversations with Jen Rahn about what she’d been doing with it. Although I knew very little, I was keen to learn more. It all sounded very cool.

GH: How did you find the authors and stories for the anthology? Was it all by invitation or were there authors who approached you when word got around? Did people give you one story, or multiple stories to choose from?

TR: Gwen gave me the initial list of Scott Sigler, Tee Morris, Pip Ballantine and one or two others. I asked Jen to come on board because I knew and liked her writing and she recommended two or three more, I think. Jack Mangan was referred by Tee, and Pip made some recommendations. It really amounted to me putting out a couple feelers and then the podcasting community supporting itself by sending me names and recommendations. I got multiple submissions from most authors, usually in the form of “Here are the links of stories I would like you to consider,” and then I listened to the podcasts and made my short list from there.

GH: Was there anything in particular about the podcasts you listened to, as a whole, that surprised you?

TR: I was blown away by the production quality of most of the podcasts; from the multi-cast productions to the sound effects, original music… it was like listening to the old radio shows like The Shadow. These people took there audio story-telling VERY seriously. It was great.

GH: How did you decide what story you were going to submit? Did you write it for the anthology or was it already written?

TR: Hmmm… good question. I don’t have a lot of finished short fiction so the decision wasn’t hard as to which ones I would submit. The hardest part was rewriting them. The original stories were written a few years ago, before podcasting existed, but they were missing something. When the podthology project came along I rewrote both of them to include the podcasting elements and suddenly the missing pieces were found. My own editor was actually Jennifer Rahn, who read my new draft and then fired questions and suggestions at me to help clean the stories up and make the new elements blend with the originals.

The reason I chose these two stories for the anthology was two-fold: The other stories were all dark and scary and violent, so I wanted something light. No one submitted anything light with a feel that would fit. “Uncle Julius” fit. It was simple and homey and yet the rewrite brought up some of the moral issues of podcasting that I thought should at least be mentioned in what I think is a unique collection. “From Anna to Yousef” addresses the issue of ‘where do podcasts go and what are they limited by?’ It wasn’t as much the future of podcasting that I wanted to address, but the idea that a lot of stuff gets sent out on the digital currents of civilization but we don’t know where it goes. The idea is very similar to the movie Frequency with Dennis Quaid and Jim Cavaziel about a radio message from the past.

“From Anna to Yousef” was done as a news article in order to give a ‘maybe it’s possible’ spin on what’s essentially a supernatural tale. I used my previously unknown pen name to make the story seem more plausible. Using my own name would have simply made it a piece of fiction in a collection and I wanted to get past that to finish the collection.

GH: How did you decide how to order the stories in the finished book?

TR: The structure is actually VERY deliberate. I divided the stories into ‘from the podosphere’ and ‘ABOUT the podosphere’. Then I lumped all of the deal-with-the-devil stories together and put them in the middle of the ‘previously podcast’ group. Once that was, decided I started with hard and fast terror – Phil Rossi’s “Stranded.” I then went chronologically (in terms of setting), starting with a story about a timeless god, then a steampunk one about playing God, followed with a forever-spanning dark love story. Before getting into the stories about deals with the devil, I thought one about the price we all should pay for our sins would set the mood. The deal-with-the-devil stories start a bit silly, then dive as deep down as you can get before they start to climb back up, until the dark mood is broken by a terrific story about an angel.

The stories which follow are done in a rough chronological sense, but also with a sense of mood and balance in mind. Steampunk, Space Pirates on another world (far future or a galaxy a long time ago?), near future, not-as-near future, then far-future-or-present (“Asleep at the Wheel”) and finishing with a another distant-future or different-galaxy story that has a distinctly far-future feel to it. I finished off the ‘these stories have been podcast’ section with Scott Sigler’s “Hero” because although it’s about Empire destruction, it’s about three people. It’s a world we don’t live in, but the characters are so well-sculpted that for me it has a real human sadness, like Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (aka Bladerunner).

Now, with the stories about podcasting I aimed mostly for a chronology of setting: Present day, near-future & far-future dark, so they each build upon what came before them, even though the stories are totally unrelated. From Anna to Yousef was placed at the end not because it’s my own story (written under my pen name Alex T. Crisp), but because it’s meant to send readers away with questions, to keep them thinking after they’ve closed the cover and put the book back on the shelf (or loaned it to a friend).

GH: What was the hardest part of putting together an anthology?

TR: At first, the hard part was finding enough stories to fill 100,000 words, but once the word got out I had more than enough stories and then the tough part was saying good-bye to stories that no longer fit with the whole or were too similar to a stronger story.

GH: Did you do much line-editing on the stories? Was it easier that they’d mostly been podcast, so that they were “finished product”?

TR: The short answers: No, Yes. The longer answer: The stories which were previously podcast were all quite polished and needed almost no line editing. There were a couple spots where I thought I would express an idea differently that the writer but I left those alone because I wanted the individual voices to stand out and not start sounding like I’d had my editorial thumb in all the pies. That said, the stories about podcasting had not been podcast or previously published and so I spent more time working with a couple of those stories and doing the editor’s job of asking questions, making suggestions and coaxing the writers to take the stories to new heights.

GH: What’s the biggest lesson you learned from this experience that you can share with other people looking to put together anthologies?

TR: There are four lessons, none of which work without the others:

1. Have a solid idea of what you want to create with your anthology. Maybe a theme or a style or a time-period or a commonality amongst the writers (all Canadian or all women or all ginger-haired SmartCar drivers with one lazy eye). This allows you to set expectations from the beginning and save yourself much time down the road when accepting or rejecting).

2. Create a style sheet/submission format standard for the project and give it out before you accept any submissions (this will save time at the end when the finished manuscript is being assembled for the printer!)
3. Allow a lot of time for the project to come together. Give specific deadlines, then stick to them rigorously. Then be prepared to be flexible.
4. Communicate with your writers. Make them feel like they’re part of the process, which they are. Some may delete your emails and others will reply with questions. It’s their choice and it’s all good.

Podthology is available online from retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore!

A lot has happened while I’ve been away. Notably, the release of P.G. Holyfield’s debut novel MURDER AT AVEDON HILL. Available from Dragon Moon Press in print and kindle editions.

Catch up with P.G. Holyfield at Balticon, Memorial Day Weekend in Baltimore, MD, and around the web.

Editors and agents reach a certain point in their slush-reading careers where a quick glance at a query will tell them whether it’s worth reading onward.

You start to learn a certain set of warning signs, over time. For example, you learn after reading lots and lots of submissions that a query letter riddled with spelling errors and misused punctuation will usually accompany a submission with the same sorts of problems, and will be indicative of a would-be author’s lack of attention to detail. Therefore, if you see a query letter that looks like it was typed in the dark, you can expect that the manuscript is going to require a lot of extra work.

I don’t decide on correlations like that arbitrarily. They’re observations I’ve made based on lots and lots of data points. And the more new data I receive, the more they’re continually supported.

Other editors and agents have written about the sorts of problems they see in manuscripts and queries, and their reasons for rejection. Look at the posts from:

Colleen Lindsay and Janet Reid at FinePrint Literary
Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey
Rachelle Gardner at WordServe Literary
Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (see especially #3), and
Jessica at BookEnds, just to name a few.
And I’ll even include my own post from Dragon Moon’s open submission period.

Really, read these posts. They’ll teach you a lot about what editors/agents see and why they reject what they reject.

The more I work with submissions, the more I’ve noticed that they filter down, mostly, into a very simple six-point system.

Ready? Here it is.

0 – “Ow, ow, my eyes!”

This speaks for itself. It’s the stuff that horror stories are made of. Spelling, punctuation and grammar so badly lacking that the text is just about indecipherable, or worse, a narrative or plot so seriously flawed on so many levels that indecipherable would be an improvement. This either gets a form rejection because there’s absolutely nothing appropriate that I can say, or it gets a gentle recommendation to work on writing skills.

1 – Sigh of disappointment.

Weak voice, weak writing skills, weak narrative, wooden characters, or weak/flawed plot. Heavy-handed, contrived, too slow to get moving, or just not well thought out. Not scary-bad, just not strong enough for publication.

2 – Eh.

Nothing stands out about these manuscripts at all. They’re not deeply flawed, but they’re unremarkable. Sometimes the plot has been done too many times before in the same way, sometimes the language is too bland. There’s no interesting voice, no particular style to it, and just nothing special that stands out about the characters, the plot or the writing to set it apart and make me want to know more. Submissions that just don’t fit our requirements (length, genre, target market age, etc.) go here, as well.

3 – Aw.

Now we get into the top three rankings. Most submissions will already have fallen by the wayside before this point. “Aw” manuscripts have potential — there’s some spark that sets them apart from the “Eh” manuscripts — but they don’t quite get there. I want to like it, I see the seed of something interesting in it, but the spark never quite catches. Maybe there’s a neat premise that just isn’t executed well, or an interesting plot twist that comes too late after a reader will already have lost interest. Or there’s a good voice and pleasant writing style, but the plot is deeply flawed in ways too complicated to be easily fixed. Basically, there’s something compelling about these, but whatever it is, it’s lost amidst other problems that overwhelm the strengths. “Aw” is disappointment. These are the ones that I want to love, but can’t.

4 – Ahhh.

Where “Aw” is disappointment, “Ahhh” is relief. It’s the sound I make when I start reading a manuscript with good, engaging writing, proper technique, an interesting premise and engaging characters. I’ll ask for a full on an “Ahhh,” to see where it’s going and determine whether it lives up to the promise that it shows. Sometimes it won’t, and it’ll get bumped down to an “Aw.” Often, though, it will.

5 – Oooh.

This doesn’t need an explanation, does it? “Oooh” manuscripts grab me on the first page and don’t let go. They have it all — engaging voice; a strong writing style that’s technically clean, polished and error-free; an immersive world and characters; and a premise and a plot that keep a reader turning pages. These are the submissions that I end up falling in love with. I request the full already knowing that, barring some unforeseen turn of events, I’m going to want to acquire it. These are rare, but they’re what I hope for every time I open a submission. I want to say “Oooh” and fall in love with every book.