Helga Schier

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to https://camcatpublishing.submittable.com/submit/154272/camcat-books

We’re a traditional boutique book publisher, and we’re open to submissions.

We’re looking for quality fiction: from fantasy to mystery to romance, with a little of everything in between. We use the Submittable.com platform for managing manuscript submissions from authors. Don’t have a Submittable.com account yet? Go ahead and sign up, it’s free.

For the latest author news and tips from our editors, please join our author mailing list today.

Submissions Guidelines

What We Want

We publish adult (over 18) and YA (9th-12th grades), novel-length genre fiction. We’ll look at any good tale, but what we want to see most urgently revolves around these genres:

• Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Romance
• Historical
• Paranormal
• Horror
• Adventure
• We’ll even look at Westerns

We’re looking for polished, edited, and properly formatted manuscripts.

What We Don’t Want

At this time, we’re not interested in:

• Stories for children, middle-grade and younger
• Poetry
• Erotica
• Fiction with strong religious or political slants
• Previously published works (This includes titles published with another company and self-published titles. Please do not submit to us if your title has ever been for sale anywhere).
• Titles in a series that has previously published titles (see this article for clarification)
• Anthologies
• ANYTHING COVID/pandemic related, we see too many of these

And we really have too many:

• Vampires
• Vampires + any other paranormal creature
• Schools of magic

Word Count Guidelines

2022 started off with some kerfuffles about word counts on social media, so we decided to clarify our own guidelines. We’re not looking for novellas (shorter than 50,000 words, give or take) or tomes big enough to serve as door-stoppers (longer than 125,000 words, give or take, depending on genre). It depends on the genre.

Speaking of genre, here’s what we’re looking for:

Adult:

• Mystery/Thriller/Suspense: 70-95K
• Horror: 70-95K
• Romance: 60-100K
• Action/Adventure: 60-100K
• SciFi/Fantasy: 80-120K
• Paranormal: 75-90K
• Historical: 80-120K
• Western: 50-65K

YA:

• Mystery/Thriller/Suspense: 50-80K
• Romance: 50-80K
• Historical: 70-100K
• SciFi/Fantasy: 70-100K

If you’re still unsure about the appropriate word count for your novel, please see this excellent article on WritersDigest.com, Word Count for Novels and Children’s Books: The Definitive Post.

On Formatting

A note on formatting: It isn’t arbitrary. Proper formatting indicates that you are a professional who takes the craft seriously. For more detailed guidelines, please see this article on WritersDigest.com, What Are the Guidelines for Formatting a Manuscript?.

Yes, we know that’s boring. But sometimes, you just have to stick with the industry standard. Please don’t send us manuscripts that are formatted to be e-book or print-ready. Send us the original manuscript in the standard format. And here’s an infographic to lend a hand.

Note: Please follow our manuscript guidelines. Don’t send us a book that is already formatted and ready to be published. We are a traditional press, which means we go through months of editorial before formatting a book for production, and to do that work, we need the plain old double-spaced, 12-point manuscript starting at chapter one. Also, please don’t send us your cover. That’s our job.

Ways to Submit

Please note! We don’t accept submissions via email, snail mail, fax, carrier-pigeon, or bicycle messenger. We ONLY accept submissions via Submittable.com. Don’t have an account yet? Go ahead and sign up for one—it’s free, and it’s the only way you’ll be able to submit.

We welcome agented and un-agented manuscripts.

Note: We don’t welcome simultaneous submissions. If you have submitted to another publisher, or are shopping for an agent, please wait until you’ve heard from all of them before submitting to us.

We’ll be updating this portal with new content and resources to help our authors regularly. In the meantime, do you have a Book To Live In? Head on over to Submittable.com to get started!

And, please, only one manuscript at a time!

Guidelines & Details