Pyr® publishes only science fiction and fantasy novels. We are not currently looking for short story collections, anthologies, novellas or nonfiction. We do not consider material under 80,000 words in length. We strongly prefer that you query first. The required method for having manuscripts considered for publication is through an established literary agent. Agents can be found in such literary guides as Literary Marketplace and The Writer's Market.I repost them here because it keeps coming up. We don't consider anthology proposals, ever, no exceptions. I love anthologies, but I don't have a big enough list to publish more than the ones I do myself! And you gots to have an agent.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Pyr's Submission Guidelines
They are online here, and say:
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11 comments:
But my 45,000 word thriller "The Mars-churian Candidate," in which aliens capture the President and replace him with a clone, is sure to be a bestseller! It is written entirely in crayon on cocktail napkins, and I will be sending it to you via carrier pigeon. Don't worry about an agent; genius needs no representation.
See, you think you are joking...
Awwww. C'mon Lou!
This makes me curious. I'm sure you've gotten some very weird proposals delivered in very weird ways. I'd love to see the list "Top 10 Weirdest Proposals."
See, but it isn't actually like that. If it were all a sea of crazy I could dismiss it easily. What it is is thousands of competently written pitches that just don't excite as much as the few gems buried among them.
So... no more passing you manuscripts packaged in brown paper bags while you're trying to shop for groceries?
/sigh
I thought my store had an odd selection of produce.
Do you actually read, word-for-word, every one? or is there a synopsis that comes with each one that you read, and then if it reads like it might be a gem, you read the entire manuscript? And how many a week do you get? I'm just curious.
I get pitched several times a day. I ask that agents send me a couple paragraph synopsis before sending me anything more, but I still get tons of full manuscripts, unagented manuscripts, etc.. every week. You can usually tell in a chapter or two if it is worth continuing. Sometimes you can tell in a page. Its very rare for me to read past the fifth chapter and not end up making an offer, though there have been a few books that went south in their last quarter. But generally, if someone is talented enough to hook you at the opening, they are talented enough to carry it through. The problem is not the bad manuscripts - they are easy to weed out, it's the "just okay" ones. I will say to my wife, "I don't know how I feel about this..." and she will respond, "You don't like it. Put it down and move on to the next one." She knows that if I am not looking up every five minutes in elation to bug her about how great it is, that it's not great. I use that Robert DeNiro line in Ronin: "If there is any doubt, there's no doubt."
Thank you very much for the response! My husband is just like your wife when I'm reading a new book - except I work the opposite. If I'm very quiet, he knows I like it - if I keep talking, he knows I don't like it.
It's good to have these external backup systems in place. ;)
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