Quietly Testing the Waters

It's been over five years since I gave up publishing books. Looking back, I have always felt good about those books and have been pleased to see everyone I published go on to subsequent successes. I feel like the time and money I put into that venture was time well spent.

It's a time consuming venture and not lucrative. No one became rich from it or even made a car payment out of it. But it was time well spent.

I miss presenting other people's work and have thought about starting up the press again. To that end, I thought I'd quietly put out a call for manuscripts.

What I'm Looking For: Poetry

That's all I'm looking for at the moment. Poetry. Full length collections, about 75-100 pages of poetry. 

What kind of poetry? 

Solid craft, probably nothing too experimental or difficult to format.

Themes that I'm most sympathetic to swirl around Christian imagery (note the two collections I published years ago: Jill Alexander Essbaum's Necropolis and Alan Berecka's The Comic Flaw).
Nothing sentimental, hopefully with some wit about it, revealing and understanding of the human condition with all the grief and hope that might imply. Easy stuff.


I would LOVE to find a worthy collection by a poet of Christian faith who is also LGBT. I'm not going to be so narrow as to say that's all I'll consider, but if you've ever had your work denied because it was too gay or too Christian because it's a little bit of both, I would like to see your work.

For non LGBT, non-Christian folk, don't let that discourage you. Some of the writers in the neoNuma catalog are neither. Just be aware that I'm not interested in anything that denigrates either LGBT folk or Christian faith (questioning is always allowed---again, see Essbaum's and Berecka's work).

What to send

This is fairly specific, so read carefully:

10 - 15 pages of poetry that would be representative of the full collection.

A list of publications, where you've published poetry. It doesn't have to be a long list, I just want to know that you're not just writing a book of poems without also sending out your poetry for publication. I need to know that if you haven't built a reputation, you're working on it. I say this because I've known far too many people who write poetry but are not submitting and getting published anywhere, but want to publish a full volume just because. That's not how this works.

That's all. If you want to include a brief bio, feel free, but I'm more interested in your work.

What you can expect, if selected for publication:
 
This is the tiniest of outfits---basically a one man publishing house. I'll do my best to create a good looking book for you (you'll be part of that process) but there is next to no budget for p.r. You'll have to do a lot of marketing yourself. Having been published a couple of times myself, I know this is pretty well how it is anywhere without a large corporation behind them. The books will be available for order on the main bookselling sites online and people will be able to special order the title at most brick and mortar stores, but it will not be found on bookstore shelves. That's the state of most literary small presses in this century and I apologize in advance.

I'll do my best to figure out the pricing so it has a competitive SRP and you'll be paid 10% rolalties on the cover prices.

Finally

I'm not publicizing this call for work. I'm hoping LGBT Christians will be googling for places to send their work, honestly. That also lets me know you're looking for opportunities and not just waiting around for the opps to come to you. If you know someone who fits what I'm looking for, of course please share this post.

Send the samples and publication list to neilellisorts at yahoo dot com. Arbitrarily, I'm going to say Deadline of December 15, 2016, but if you find this after that date, email me and see where I am with this test.

Thanks for reading. I hope I find something amazing to present to the world.