Blind Eye Books publishes science fiction, fantasy and paranormal romance novels featuring gay or lesbian protagonists. We do not publish short story collections, poetry, erotica, horror or non-fiction. We would hesitate to publish any manuscript that is less than 70,000 or over 150,000 words.

To submit, please send a recyclable copy of your whole manuscript, with or without a cover letter to the mailing address below. Please adhere to standard manuscript formatting practices. (You can learn more about what this is and why you should comply here.)

Please include your real name, real street address and real phone number as well as your email address (presumably real) in the upper left hand corner on the first page of your manuscript. If you write under another name, you would put your pen name underneath the title on the first page of your manuscript.

See our example.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to return your manuscript, so please save yourself the postage by including only a self-addressed, stamped envelope (business-sized) for our reply. If you’d like to be assured that your manuscript made it to us intact, you may also send a self-addressed postcard that we’ll return to you when we receive your package.

Please do not send queries, outlines, synopses, or partial manuscripts or shoot the editor any emails full of great ideas for novels that you haven’t written yet, but might be induced to bash out for money. The editor only wants to see what you already accomplished on your own, printed legibly on 8 ½ x 11 paper. Then, if she likes it, she’ll give you the bad news about the money.

Authors living outside the United States may email the editor for electronic submission guidelines.

Our readers may keep the manuscript for up to four months. Please do not query before then. If, however, we’ve kept your story for longer than that, feel free to email the editor and ask for an update.

Blind Eye Books will not consider anonymous writings or manuscripts currently under submission to another publisher.

Please send manuscripts to:

Nicole Kimberling, Editor
Blind Eye Books
1141 Grant Street
Bellingham, WA 98225

What the Editor Prefers

I have been asked, by one of our Tangle authors, Astrid Amara, to write a short piece where I give hints and tips for submitting to Blind Eye Books. But lists of preferences are hard for me to write, since one of the things I most prefer is novelty.

So I’m going to stick to a short list of things I strongly dislike in stories.

1. Male Pregnancy—So tired of this.
2. Forcibly Impregnating Lesbians—I’m convinced that this is just some sort of wish fulfillment on the part of people who hate and fear lesbians.
3. Getting Arrested in Order to Break Yourself Out of Prison—We’ve all seen that show already. And for the record it was a lame idea then too.
4. Stories Where Four Guys Get Down—I don’t know why, but every story I’ve ever read where four guys got down seemed to lack focus.
5. Downer Endings—Why would I bother to pay money to vicariously fail and die through the transportative power of fiction when I can fail and die on my own anytime I want for free?
6. Second Person—You read this and you think that I’m gorgeous and insightful. You go to your checkbook and you write me a check for one thousand dollars… Wait a minute! You don’t want me telling you how you feel? I don’t either.
7. Virtuous Characters Who Suffer So!—Honestly, I’ve never been Virtue’s biggest fan.
8. Rape, especially Rape as a Motivation—I can’t think of a funny line for this. Probably because I just really don’t think it’s all that humorous. And clinical studies also suggest it’s not really all that “motivational” of an experience either; at least not in the traditional “Anthony Robbins Unleashing the Power Within” sort of way.
9. Number nine is a softer, gentler dislike. It’s the reason I pass on 75% of all stories: Lack of a strong speculative element. I like my genre fiction like I like my homos—out and proud. If I suspect that the author is cringing away, embarrassed to be writing genre fiction, trying to “legitimize” it by downplaying the dragons and amazons and interstellar space battles by including lofty (and usually dull) Universal Human Themes I will drop it like it was a stinky crawdad. Similarly, if I suspect that the author has just added a perfunctory teleporter, psychic soul mate or centaur simply to qualify as spec fic, while having nothing at all to say about physical disassociation, telepathic codependency or the pitfalls of the weird kentauroi lifestlye then I will sigh heavily and let the pages of the manuscript drift gently to the floor wondering why, oh why, won’t anybody send me anything interesting.
10. Suicide—Even Virtuous Suicide. Even suicide that is a metaphor for the larger piece. Just don’t.