Before You Submit.

To prepare your manuscript for submission to Aqueous Books, please read the guidelines below.

Submissions of previously unpublished novels, short story collections, flash fiction collections, and memoirs are read year-round. If a portion of your manuscript has been published elsewhere, please provide credit to the original publisher in the appropriate place in your cover letter and front matter of your manuscript. We accept literary, philosophical and serio-comic philosophy, memoirs, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and general speculative fiction. Please do not send religious, romance, mystery, women's or chick lit, how-to, children's or young adult, or anything in a genre other than those specified above. Contracts will be royalty with no advance.

Word count should be 17,500 and above. Please indicate the type and genre of work you are sending in the subject line of your e-mail, followed by last name (i.e., Short Story Collection: Magical Realism: Gaiman). Entries should be included as a single attachment, along with a brief 3rd person bio. Please do not use Courier or cursive fonts, text smaller than 12 point, or anything containing unnecessary formatting, such as excessive bolding and italics, unless it is inherent to the spirit of the work. Submissions should be double-spaced with only one space between sentences. Please send .doc, .docx, .wps, or .rtf attachments. Anything else will be deleted unread.

Important: If you are not professional enough to notify us as soon as your work is accepted elsewhere, we will not consider any submissions from you in the future. Our time is very valuable because it is very limited—asking someone to read an entire manuscript and telling them it is not available only in response to an acceptance letter is unprofessional and discourteous. Our current average response time is 4-6 months.

For more insight on what we are looking for and our manuscript reading process, read our interview at Duotrope's Digest.

Electronic submissions should be directed to pubs (at) aqueousbooks (dot) com. If you would like your snail-mailed manuscript returned clean and without mark-up, please specify this in your cover letter; alternatively, if you would like us to include editorial mark-up in your returned copy, please mention this as well. Please direct postal correspondence (including self-addressed, stamped envelope with adequate return postage, or e-mail address for reply on submissions) to:

Prick of the Spindle
Aqueous Books
P.O. Box 12784
Pensacola, FL 32591