To all the potential authors out there- hello, and thank you for your interest in the company. Below are outlined our offers, some of the things we’re looking for, and opportunities we have for you to work with us.
What We’re Offering for Your Book
While we refuse to disclose our exact rates of payment, we do intend to give the majority of profits (Profits, not the total price) to the authors, depending on various factors, mainly the contributions of illustrators, editors, etc. Although this is a for-profit company, we’re not mainly interested in money as much as we are in distributing affordable and quality literature, so we aren’t going to take your book, make a pile of gold from it, and toss you a few coins. If you write a good book, we intend that you should get a good share. We’re not promising you the sun and the moon here, but what we can reasonably spare will be yours.
We do also plan on giving a portion of our cut of the revenue to certain charities each month, typically pro-life, missions, or for Christian education and literacy or such, so if you aren’t in favor of any of these things, you may wish to put your book out with a different publisher.
We provide cover illustrations, marketing materials and support, and we allow authors to retain the rights to their works. Knowing how complicated being an author is, we do not want to set up predatory contracts, messy rights claims or legal grey zones, so we also promise to keep records of all dealings, free for authors to privately access and go over with us at any time. Our intent is to give as much responsibility and ownership to our authors as they desire, both for their sake and for ours. Our only main condition is that anything done independently of the company- marketing and promotion mainly- be done with the acknowledgement that it is independent work and may not reflect company values. We are an explicitly faith-based business, and that comes with the responsibility to not say or do the wrong thing, and we intend to distance ourselves from any authors we deem to be doing so. Keeping author-ran publicity separate from company-ran publicity is our best way of keeping safe from such dangers.
What We’re Looking For
Every Christian publishing company invokes C.S. Lewis at some point, for better or for worse, and we are no better. We’re wanting stuff that reads the current times like the back of one’s hand- we want to hit the nail on the head, just like Clive did. If you aren’t aiming to do that or better, feel free to apply elsewhere. This isn’t your regular Big-Eva publishing company, and as such, we want groundbreaking stuff, especially in the fiction arena; We want fantasy that starts revivals (and occasionally riots), sci-fi that doesn’t leave the speculative to the godless, and romance that isn’t pastel cover art and endless gray morality. We want words that leave marks like a hot brand in the reader’s memory. And we also want nonfiction- godly like Lewis’s Mere Christianity, accurate like Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live, and hopefully frank like Chesterton’s What I Saw In America. We aren’t even very concerned what it’s about, so long as it’s righteous to talk about and talked about in a righteous manner- if you’re passionate about it, we are too. So come along with that 300-page thesis on Connifer trees- it sounds worthwhile to us.
As a final note, I would also like to say that the main thing we want is failures- not quitters, who fail once and get out of town, but failures, people who value what they write about enough to keep sending in flawed drafts, and once those drafts are accepted, to work on perfecting them with us. Come and fail alongside us until we have a success; they don’t tend to appear out of the blue as much as after a long string of losses. Give us your best shot, and if it isn’t enough, try again. We’re all on a journey of progression, whether in faith, writing, or elsewhere, and really, nobody ever reaches ‘there’ until they’re dead. We aren’t complacent, we don’t expect perfect writers, and we want to help authors get good at their craft. Don’t wait if you’re interested- get involved.
Contact Info/Submissions
If the previous paragraph was stirring enough to garner your interest, we would encourage you to reach out to us.
If you have a book to pitch to us, send us the following information at bombastpublishing@gmail.com:
-Your Name
-Working Title
-Genre
-Elevator Pitch (a less than hundred-word summation of the content/purpose of the book)
-Caveman Pitch (a less than fifteen-word summation of the content/purpose of the book, to show that you know what you’re talking about- optional but appreciated)
-Expected Length/Current Length
-Current progress on Manuscript
-A several page sample of the book- it can be any pages, so send in what you consider to be the best, but we would request that you always send in the first two pages as well, just to get a sense of how you open things. We won’t judge solely on the basis of the opening, but it is rather informative, hence why the practice is so common.
We do not accept physical manuscripts at current except at special request (We are wholly sympathetic to those who prefer physical paper to screens), but we will happily send physically marked-up copies to a requested address at your discretion, if you want to see our comments physically. We only ask that you pay for postage on your end, and we’ll pay on ours.
At current, it costs nothing to submit to us, given our small size. This is subject to change based on how the future of the company turns out. We do have a one-week cool-off period for you to try fixing your submission if we reject it, just to manage potential traffic better, so please keep that in mind if we do not respond to further questions after a rejection; we may be busy with other authors, but we have not forgotten about you.
Finally, please title all submission emails as “submission from (first inital, last name)” when you send them, so they don’t get sent to spam.
Thank you, and God-speed to all you writers. Your contribution to the reformation and sanctification of the arts is much appreciated, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll do.