Submissions Due: June 1, 2025
Rainbow Skull is now open to submissions for its first season as a trade publisher. We're seeking "one-sitting reads"—works of singular purpose that are about a fourth of the size of the average book. By the numbers, these works will mostly fall in the 12,000 to 20,000 word range.
Here are just a few of the many ideas that would fit this format'
A long interview
A memoir of a very specific time or place
A short novel or a long story (you don't have to call it a novella)
A compilation of substack newsletters
An edited transcript of several podcast episodes
A collection of song lyrics
A set of critical reviews
A very detailed recipe
A long narrative poem or linked poems*
Some of the topics we like: Food, space, people, nature, history, architecture, biography & memoir, music, and politics. But we'll try anything.
Your book should tell one story. It should call out to a specific audience. Niche is not the term. More, your secret obsession, on the page. Your passion project. Your thing that doesn't fit anywhere else but you know will interest someone else. Or, it's like a band's EP: a few songs that don't fit anywhere else.
And it's our first season, so we're still figuring it out, too.
Authors can expect quick turnaround to market—a matter of months from submission to publication. The primary market for your work will be e-books. Together, we'll decide whether to sell your books as downloadble e-book files from our own site, as Kindle Books on Amazon, or both. Print copies would be created as limited editions or printed on demand.
Our offer to you, our future author:
Beautiful packaging - E books and printed books matter to us as objects, and the reading experience matters to us as an aeshetic experience.
Quick turnaround from submission to publication.
Generous royalties and easy to understand statements .
Serious marketing (that's our day job).
Friendliness.
Send us your stuff, please.
We'd like a two-paragraph synopsis, a one-paragraph bio, and 10 pages of your draft (if you don't have that, a TOC and links to writing samples will work). Send that as attachments to [email protected]. Put RAINBOW SKULL SUBMISSION in all caps in the subject line.
Submissions Due: Dec 31, 2024
*Please note: Right now, we are only looking for poetry collections with a strong and delineable theme connecting the works. For example, if your theme is "moving to Davenport, IA," then the poems should be about living in Davenport, not a collection of poems you wrote while living there where only the title poem is about Davenport. To allay some of the strictness here, we will reiterate our enthusiasm for shorter books. A 20-page chapbook consisting of three linked poems? Yes!