Black Lyon Publishing - Getting Your Book Published
Black Lyon Publishing takes in a variety of romance styles. They prefer email queries and do take non-agent queries. They want only a 1-2 paragraph summary plus the first three paragraphs of your story. That's a pretty small sample to evaluate a novel with! You have to be a rather good writer to impress them seriously in only three paragraphs!Note that they are against abuse or adultery in their stories.
I submitted a proposal to them on October 8, 2008, for my novel "A Sense of Duty". Ironically (given their requirements) this is the only story I have written out of my first 8 that involves a married heroine. It is one of my favorite stories and is along the lines of Persuasion by Jane Austen. The heroine, Constance, had grown up loving her bodyguard Gabriel, but she was required to marry a much older neighbor for political reasons. She resigns herself to her fate, but is thrown into turmoil when Gabriel returns into her life six years later, strong, honorable, handsome. It is almost more than she can bear, to watch the local girls throw themselves at him.
I received a response from Black Lyon Publishing on November 6th (so a month and a day later) saying:
Please go ahead and submit the first three chapters as a PDF or Word file attachment. Thanks!
The Editors,
Black Lyon Publishing, LLC
I sent those three chapters to them in Word format, double spaced, on November 7th.
My only concern with Black Lyon Publishing is that they do not make it clear if they actually place your books on the shelves of bookstores. The publisher I have handling my Weddings & Courtships series (non-fiction) *only* sells the books on Amazon and via their own website. That means the millions of people who buy books in actual bookstores will never see the books. I am really hoping that Black Lyon does have the contacts to get romance novels on actual bookstore shelves. I felt it impolite to start quizzing them on their abilities until they actually show a serious interest in my novel, though, so I will bring that up if we get to the stage of them wanting to see the entire novel.
November 29, 2008 -
Thank you for letting us read your work. We enjoyed your writing style and the idea of the heroine adhering to duty and then finding lost love. The problem with this work for us, is that the heroine is still very married throughout the partial. If she had tried the marriage and the husband had long since died, or something to that effect, we would be able to request the full manuscript for review. However, this isn't the case, and we can't look at what's technically an adultery situation. Should you decide to rework the story, we'd be happy to look at it again.
As that story was a "Persuasion" story and that was the core of its situation, I really couldn't rewrite it. The challenge now was to find one of my other stories which didn't have anything 'questionable'. It's fascinating to me that my stories are too tame for most publishers - not enough (or any) sex. Here the fact that I sometimes have rape, or drinking, or a pending arranged marriage looming is causing a problem. Ironically out of my 8 novels the only 2 which match perfectly are Trusting in Faith which I am not sure I really want public (too personal) and Knowing Yourself which is my most recent book and therefore by far the least "polished".
On November 29th (i.e. the same day) I sent them the first 3 paragraphs of Trusting in Faith, figuring I could edit the personal parts of the story out if they did decide they liked it. It is a story about the elder of 2 sisters falling for a Templar Knight and the younger sister causing issues in the relationship - so no adultery, "other involved person" (besides the sister), no heavy drinking, no rape, etc.
December 14, 2008 -
Lisa,
Please go ahead and submit the first three chapters as a PDF or Word file attachment. Thanks.
The Editors,
Black Lyon Publishing, LLC
I didn't see this message until 12/26. When I did, I emailed a Word document in to them. They have an auto-response that reads "Thank you so much for thinking of Black Lyon Publishing! We will review your query and get back to you as soon as possible." which I got back immediately.
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