Carina Press

Hi! If anyone is in the Seattle/Bellevue area, Stephanie Doig and editor from Carina Press will be taking pitches at the Emerald City Writers' Conference. Here's a link if you want to check it out: http://gsrwa.org/ecwc/conference/

It's in October. Also attending agent/editors are:

Nephele Tempest - The Knight Agency
Laura Zats - Red Sofa Literary
Nalini Akolekar - Spencerhill Associates
Tera Cuskaden - Entangled Publishing
Elle Keck - Avon/Harper Collins

The schedule's posted too so you can see the workshops we have planned.

If you are in the area and can attend, it's a good time to meet them and ask your burning questions of each agency/publishing house.

Any word from the proposal requests?!

I looked at Submittable yesterday and mine is still "in progress." Good thing, because I got involved writing something else and haven't gotten back to the Carina ms. in a while. They did give a three-month/12 weeks time frame, so I'm not worried. Yet.

Okay good to know. My Carina MS has been pretty untouched as well. Thank you!

Scratch that. I got a full request today. Better get busy!

Can anyone shed light on how long Carina generally takes from contract-signing to publication? I know there can be variables (e.g., spacing books with similar themes), but what's their typical timeline? Also, what kind of advertising do they do for each title, or is the brunt of marketing solely on the author?

I received a full request as well. Writing like mad!

ccbridges said:

I received a full request as well. Writing like mad!

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Congrats! Did your request say anything about time frames or anything interesting?!

JustWonderin said:

Congrats! Did your request say anything about time frames or anything interesting?!

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I replied asking about that for clarification, and they told me six months.

Thanks for sharing! You saved me from having to do the same!

Cheers to those with acceptances! May the next six months be fruitful.

Zombie Fraggle said:

Does anyone know why Carina has decided to accept proposals for unfinished manuscripts? I could understand it more if it were limited to authors already published by them, but to accept work based on partials from authors unknown to them seems inherently risky.

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We're always trying new things with submissions, different submission drives, calls for certain things, offering feedback with submissions, pitch opportunities on social media and the blog. Part of being a publisher is trying to be adaptable to acquire new books and authors, so the proposal call was one of those ways. You're right that accepting work from authors we're unfamiliar with is risky--though I'd probably argue that publishing itself is risky! But in this case, the proposal call wasn't about accepting work on proposal, but about seeing it on proposal. In the call, we noted that we reserved the right to ask for more pages. For the most part, we actually found that people responding to the call already had their full manuscript written--but submitted a partial/proposal because this particular call for submissions is the one they saw!

We did have a great response to the call, we are acquiring several things from it, and we went back to about a dozen authors asking for more pages.

Aggy B. said:

So, having an open call doesn't equal accepting proposals from unpublished authors. It just means they'll look at all of them. But I'd suspect they would be more inclined to make offers to folks who have an established record of finishing and selling books.

(And I say this based on past experience subbing non-romance centric MSs to Carina - because they say they publish stuff that isn't just romance driven - and then getting rejections that specifically mention that there are not enough romantic elements to interest them. They seem to want to hedge their bets by looking at everything, but still wind up focusing on smaller subsets.)

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We changed our requirements about a year ago, maybe 18 months (time blurs!) We publish mystery without romance but otherwise, we are publishing romance and romance-driven stories across romance sub-genres.

Pterofan said:

I'm writing more M/M these days. Are there rescue rules for that?

(BTW, Carina said on their blog they were interested in M/M)

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We are always interested in male/male and other LGBT but mostly m/m, because it is what we are most successful with.

No rescue rules (is that an actual term?) , but we don't like it when the dog dies, so try to avoid that

Laurasaurus said:

They do genuinely seem very interested in M/M. I think it's Angela James that keeps asking for a good, dark, step-brothers romance. (Which I really want to read!)

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Yes, please (still looking).

Deb Kinnard said:

Wonder if it's due to the fact they may not these days get the volume of subs they once had? At a recent conference, an attendee reported that Harlequin's pitch appointments were not filled up, and HQ editors were standing in the hallways looking lonely. And Carina is a division of Harlequin, q.e.d....

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Our submissions are actually up year over year over the last three years. But submission drives are an excellent way to spread word of mouth and get new authors submitting, so you will always see us doing them, and we *try* to think of new ways to do it.

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akaria said:

I decided not to submit. Something doesn't feel right when a publisher puts out an open call for WIPs. I can't really articulate what it is. Just the spidey sense tingling. SP has made me even more hesitant about putting my work in the hands of someone else. After seeing what I can do on my own, a publisher really has to bring a lot to the table and prove they can move some books. While Carina looks like they are successful with M/M of all kinds, I don't think they can do much for my M/F paranormal.

Good luck to those who've answered the call though.

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I'm sorry to hear that, but our doors are open to submissions if you ever change your mind!

Zombie Fraggle said:

Can anyone shed light on how long Carina generally takes from contract-signing to publication? I know there can be variables (e.g., spacing books with similar themes), but what's their typical timeline? Also, what kind of advertising do they do for each title, or is the brunt of marketing solely on the author?

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Contract to publication can be anywhere from 4 months to 12 months. Ideally, my sweet spot is about 6 months, because that gives time for editing, copy editing, proofreading, marketing and PR, and not rushing cover art. But we've crashed things into the schedule if an author wants to get it out quickly or we have an opening in the schedule. The longer time frame, 12 months, is generally because an author is acquired on proposal (most often via an agent) and the book needs to be written. Or they have other publication commitments to other publishers and want to hold off. We prefer to publish around the 6-9 month time frame, though, not to hold on to a book.

Zombie Fraggle said:

Can anyone shed light on how long Carina generally takes from contract-signing to publication? I know there can be variables (e.g., spacing books with similar themes), but what's their typical timeline? Also, what kind of advertising do they do for each title, or is the brunt of marketing solely on the author?

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Sorry, I didn't answer the second part of the question. We do marketing and PR for every title and author. Some of it is dependent on author/book, of course, but we have a minimum level of support for every author, and it grows as backlist grows. Here's some examples of minimum support:


· ARCs made available to a large network of reviewers via NetGalley
· Titles offered to RT, PW, and other trade publications for review
· Genre-appropriate blogger outreach
· Opportunistic pitching and inclusion in Harlequin- wide PR efforts
· Titles promoted on the Carina Press blog, individual genre pages
· Titles promoted via our Facebook and Twitter accounts (crossover with Harlequin social media if appropriate)
· Titles included in Carina Press newsletters
· On-sale: featured placement on the CP.com homepage via banner ads

From there, our dedicated marketing and publicity staff treat each title individually, seeking and taking tailored opportunities and working on additional genre-based adverts, content opportunities, and price promotions as available.

When opportunities arise, we don't just look at "top" authors for them, we look across the schedule, to try and grow as many authors as possible. It's one of the reason we reduced our title count around 3 years ago, from 3-4/week to 1-2/week, to be able to better support individual titles and authors. That was probably one of the best things we did for the business all around, in the past few years.

Angela James said:

We changed our requirements about a year ago, maybe 18 months (time blurs!) We publish mystery without romance but otherwise, we are publishing romance and romance-driven stories across romance sub-genres.

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This was back in 2013. Well before the change in guidelines.

I will also point out that one of those MSs went through heavy revisions after I received an offer from an agent to rep it. However, much of the feedback from Carina focused on the fact that it didn't have enough romance for that editor's taste. Which was thoroughly frustrating because at the time y'all said you weren't looking specifically for romance. I would never have subbed either MS if y'all had been more forward about preferring romance. (One MS ends up with the protagonist dead. The other concludes with the protagonist and her lover separating for an unspecified length of time to deal with other plot-related complications. They don't fit romance tropes, although both are books that have romantic subplots.)

All of which is to say, I don't write Romance or its sub-genres. I write SF/F/H with romantic elements, so it quickly became clear that Carina was not an appropriate press for me because I don't write what y'all are looking for.

I think I've hit all of the questions that were out there in this thread. I tried not to interfere too much with the speculating and suppositions, but did try to clarify as much as possible w/out feeling like I was killing the conversation. I usually try to do a better job of coming in and answering questions regularly, but I slacked off over the summer. Please let me know if there's anything else anyone is curious about or any questions I missed.

Aggy B. said:

This was back in 2013. Well before the change in guidelines.

I will also point out that one of those MSs went through heavy revisions after I received an offer from an agent to rep it. However, much of the feedback from Carina focused on the fact that it didn't have enough romance for that editor's taste. Which was thoroughly frustrating because at the time y'all said you weren't looking specifically for romance. I would never have subbed either MS if y'all had been more forward about preferring romance. (One MS ends up with the protagonist dead. The other concludes with the protagonist and her lover separating for an unspecified length of time to deal with other plot-related complications. They don't fit romance tropes, although both are books that have romantic subplots.)

All of which is to say, I don't write Romance or its sub-genres. I write SF/F/H with romantic elements, so it quickly became clear that Carina was not an appropriate press for me because I don't write what y'all are looking for.

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Ah, I understand why you were frustrated. I certainly don't know your particular situation, but with publishing being so subjective, it does make it hard for us to say exactly how one thing will work and why another won't, we do try to give information on our website but it's not going to cover every scenario. I would say that having a protagonist die at the end or love interests be separated at the end of a book is a hard limit for anything we'd be hoping to sell to romance readers, since it does preclude us from selling it as romance, if an explanation several years later helps at all. Saying things need to have "romantic elements" leaves a lot of room for interpretation and subjectiveness and it sounds like we have a bit different idea of it than you might. That's what makes fiction publishing both great (variety!) and sometimes hard to navigate!

Angela James said:

We are always interested in male/male and other LGBT but mostly m/m, because it is what we are most successful with.

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Thanks so much for popping in to respond to questions, Angela. I have two more, if you don't mind.

Question #1
At the end of the Spring 2016 What the Carina Press Editors Want blog post on your site, several of the taboo items are things I happen to write, namely:

1. real, unredeemable bad boys (M/M)
2. dark step-sibling romance (M/M)
3. dark, power-imbalance featuring older woman/younger man

My question concerns which editor(s) is looking for these sorts of stories, because that last part of the blog post is the only place than mentions these particular themes.


Question #2
Once an author is in your fold, do you ever accept previously published work from them?

Thanks again for showing up to answer questions!

Does anyone have any idea how long the current response times are, I'm way past the twelve weeks

Not sure re times, exactly, but my editor, Kerri Buckley, just had a baby and is on maternity leave and they've hired someone to help out with all things editorial. HTH.

Thanks pisco, sweet of you to reply, and lovely news for your editor