If you’re looking for permission to write the book you think someone else will approve of, we’re probably not the publisher for you.

If you’ve written something strange, difficult, ambitious, beautiful, funny, disturbing, unconventional—or simply something that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing category—we’d like to see it.

We won’t ask “What space on the shelf does this sit on?” We think great literature makes its own space.

We have an interest in:

• Literary Fiction and Autofiction
• Nonfiction (history, art, culture, linguistics, philosophy, economics, ecology, etc.). We are especially interested in short format books (70 to 150 pages) that can explain a challenging topic succinctly and be engaging to the general reader.
• Biography (but only if it is about an exceptionally interesting life that thousands of people would love to know about)
• Young Adult fiction and nonfiction, provided it has something worthwhile to say and isn’t built around the usual formulas

We do not have an interest in:

• Commercial genre fiction (i.e., romance, fantasy, crime, horror, ‘book club’ fiction, etc.)
• New Age spirituality
• How-to guides and books about business, performance, etc. (nothing that smacks of an advertisement for a course in personal development)
• Scholarly papers
• Manga, comic books, etc.
• Anything even remotely pornographic. We don’t care how many copies it might sell.
• Anything that cultivates a sense of entitlement.

How We Work

We are a small publishing house that operates like a cooperative.

We are not a vanity press that will publish anything for a fee. We will not charge you for editing, cover design, etc.

Our business is in finding great, undiscovered writers, providing them with a cost-effective and professional printing solution, and pooling the resources of an ever expanding community of writers, journalists, and alt media personalities to promote our work.

Writers retain the majority of revenues (after printing costs) of books sold through the Fringe Books website and affiliates. People who buy one book from another Fringe Books author are highly likely to purchase yours. That’s the model: mutual support, profit sharing (after certain sales targets are achieved), and the satisfaction in knowing you’re breathing life back into real literature.

We are on a mission to provide aspiring authors something that is desperately missing: a community of like-minded authors sharing their expertise, quality printing solutions, a distribution portal, and marketing.

If this sounds like something you would like to be involved with, send us your work.

If we like what we see, we will get back to you as soon as possible. That can be anywhere from a few days to a couple of months.

Submission Guidelines

In the body of the email, submit the following in order:

1. Query Letter

A query letter that illustrates the intelligence of your own voice and which covers all the bases, including whether this work has been published before. (No AI-generated or AI-assisted.) No more than 250 words.

2. Synopsis

For fiction, send a synopsis (no more than 500 words).

3. First Ten Pages

Send us the first ten pages of your completed text (do not send us book ideas or excerpts from partially written books).

4. Your Best Ten Pages

Also, send us 10 other pages which you consider to be your best work and, in a few lines, do a critique of this work, explaining why you think it is stupendous writing.

5. AI / MFA-Edited Work

If your writing smells like AI or has that generic, MFA-edited voice, we are certainly not interested. There are plenty of agencies and publishers who welcome that sort of thing—not us.

We are open to English language submissions only at this time.