[Past Imperfect]: Book-Length Historical Fiction Manuscripts

This is the Past Imperfect submission portal for book-length historical fiction. Please know what it is before submitting.

• HISTORICAL FICTION ONLY. Book-length historical novels, novellas, short-story collections, play scripts, or hybrid. We do not publish nonfiction, poetry, or books that are not historical in theme.
• Stories should take place before the 1980s-ish as a soft cutoff point.
• Open to all historical subjects, events, places, or long-ago-dead people (no recently dead people with immediate living relatives, please).
• Any length over 20,000 words.
• Preference will be given to fact-checked and accurate work.
• WE DO NOT PUBLISH A.I.-GENERATED MATERIAL. FULL STOP. We expect work to be written by actual humans for actual humans.
• Any interior illustrations will only be printed in grayscale. We don't publish full-color interiors.
• Must be 18 to submit.
• We pay 30% net proceeds for paperback and ebook sales.
• Submit a cover letter that briefly explains your book, pitches or hooks, audience, interested regions, special marketing ideas or connections you have for sales, any tropes/formulas used, history/readers groups you're part of, expertise with the subject(s), education if it pertains to your time period or story, or anything else you think we need to know about you or your book. Please put the major Who (for real-life people), What (specific events, wars, battles), When (time period or year), and Where (location, region) of your story front-and-center in your cover letter. You can either attach this cover letter as part of your submission or paste it into the cover letter field.
• We do consider completed historical anthologies by multiple authors. The editor should describe any credentials for the anthology in the cover letter.
• Submit your entire manuscript. Once we start reading, we won't want to stop!
• There is a $12 reading fee to support our press and pay our readers. Reading submissions takes an incredible amount of time, and charging a small reading fee allows us to give your manuscript the care and attention it deserves. We thank you so much for your support. Each submission comes with an ebook of our latest title, but since we're new and don't have a published title yet, the included ebook is Silt, a historical noir novella about Cincinnati in 1856 by Chris Geier.

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