Please be familiar with Keyhole. Below is a free copy of a Keyhole book. Download it or don’t submit. If nobody downloads, we may charge submission fees to weed out those who do not care about Keyhole beyond what Keyhole can do for them.
It’s available in iTunes on your computer or iBookstore on your iDevice, in the Kindle Store, and from B&N.com or on your Nook. The add to cart icon links to a zip file containing DRM-free ePub and mobi file formats. Thank you.
17 very short stories by the author of Without Wax, Questionstruck, and Ampersand, Mass.
- eBook free
Magazine
There are no guidelines. Submit whatever you want here.
Books
Before you submit your book to Keyhole, please consider the following. We have a limited amount of time and we prefer to be on the same page at the start so that we don’t waste what little time we have.
We are are looking for books and submissions are open, but we’re not just looking for good books, or even books in general. We’re not looking for books so much as we are looking for authors.
Keyhole will only release books from authors that are interested in a long-term relationship with Keyhole. Not one where authors are contractually stuck on Keyhole forever, but one where the author has the option to leave Keyhole at any time but prefers to stay and release all of their books with Keyhole.
We believe the publishing industry fails to build meaningful branding and meaningful art when the goal is primarily money and/or fame, or even when the goal is just to leach off of a major publisher’s large readership. We believe that the small press community is where the best writing is being published, and rather than let the big publishers buy it out and bury it, we want to cultivate it and nurture it through a strong publisher-author relationship, stronger publisher-author branding, and, for the author, absolute creative freedom (we believe that doing away with the tasks, time, and stresses involved with finding a publishing home, that authors will be more able to write what they really want to write), and above all, by working harder. We want authors that are more interested in working for something rather than having it handed to them. We don’t do advances. We put the horse before the cart. We don’t do large print runs until authors have proven that they can sell large amounts of books. We have the ability to print ultra-low print runs, and we have the ability to print large print runs and distribute nationally. Which we do depends largely on the amount of interest each author is able to build for him/herself. We believe that only authors can build real interest in their books. People respond to people, not to cover art or blurbs or press releases and, initially, not to publishers either. We believe a publisher is only as good as the sum of its authors. Without a good roster of authors, a publisher is not much more than an assembler of random books and a bookshelf with buy buttons. Books need faces and personality, and only authors can truly provide that.
We believe that a large readership is possible without major publishers, and that by staying with the small press community we will make it grow.
So if you are here just to publish as many books as you possibly can as fast as possible on as many presses as possible so that you can have the widest exposure, then you’re in the wrong place, especially if you’re doing that with the intent of catching the attention of a major publisher. But even if you’re not, we think presses and authors passing each other around is not a good way to build anything worthwhile, especially when every press and author has the exact same customer base: each other. It’s just a waste of time. And please do not send your book to Keyhole.
Don’t misunderstand: We want authors to succeed, and we want people to read these books, but we feel that the entire small press community should not take the path of least resistance to success and readership. Instead we should try harder, work harder. We should build, and hold on to what we have built, then build some more. We want to build something bigger than just the successes of individual authors. Because if we don’t strive for that, then there is no reason for small press to exist at all, and authors should just put their books out themselves.
We will also be using Keyhole Magazine as a way of discovering new authors, so submitting to the magazine is probably a good idea. Because we’re people and we respond more to conversation than to random book queries, and if we accept your story or poem for an issue of Keyhole, we’re more likely to get to know you while we’re putting the issue together.
If you like the sound of the above and you want to skip submitting to the magazine and just send a book now, then send it to books@keyholepress.com. Any format is fine.