Open Submissions, Postponed
Laura Stanfill, publisher
It’s a Forest Avenue tradition to open for unsolicited submissions early in the year. We love carving out hours and fresh mental space to honor writers’ work.
This year, though, has to be different.
We’re riding a wave of early successes for our two spring titles: Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas and The Queen of Steeplechase Park by David Ciminello. As a one-person, in-house publicity team, I have to keep my focus on these books right now. One’s in the SFF/horror genre by a seasoned author; the other is a literary romp of a debut novel, decades in the making. A few months later, we have Scott Nadelson’s Trust Me, a literary novel about a divorced dad and his tween daughter, coming out.
I am also, for those of you who read my newsletter, deep in the revising process for my next book, Imagine a Door: A Writer’s Guide to Unlocking Your Story, Choosing a Publishing Path, and Honoring the Creative Journey, forthcoming from Forest Avenue in 2025.
In addition to these projects, I’m team teaching three low-cost classes with Liz Prato in January to help writers start the year feeling empowered and ready to query.
I apologize to those of you who have been hoping to send your work to Forest Avenue after the first of the year. We’re excited to have so many dynamic projects in the pipeline and need to focus on bringing them into the world. Which reminds me: you might want to preorder Chicano Frankenstein and The Queen of Steeplechase Park from your fave independent bookstore to make sure you get copies! We expect to sell through our first print runs quickly.
Ideally we’ll open for novel submissions sometime this spring, but we might need to push that back further. If you’ve talked to me personally in the past few months about submitting in January, you’re welcome to reach out directly.
The good news, for those of you hoping to submit, is that we’re wide open, publishing-calendar wise, from 2025 on. In previous years, we’ve had two-year or even three-year lags because of over-acquiring and wanting to give each author our full attention. So: with this delay, we’re making space in our catalog. Maybe for you?
