Hummingbird House Press

No website (as you point out); they ran a contest in order to find a logo via "99 Designs"; Nancy Siegel is listed as CEO, but Michael Collins and Ms. Siegel are listed as "organizers" on Bizapedia.

They posted the following description of their publishing house on 99 Designs:
"We are a company that publishes/edits/sells horror books. We want the kind of logo that doesn't scream horror at you but is tastefully done in a sinister manner."

They have a placeholder of sorts up on Facebook with a total of 3 likes thus far and there endeth what little I can find at a glance.

ETA: *sighs gustily* I hate typing on my iPad some days. Typos repaired (while you wait!) and adding that Ms. Siegel is listed as registrant on the West Virginia business registration/registration which was taken out in August of last year.

The logo on that flyer reminds me of the original cover for Jurassic Park

No luck so far finding anything out about either Siegel or Collins. The only (public) info available on Siegel on Linkedin lists HHP as her only experience. Perhaps someone more familiar with Linkedin can say whether that's common or not. I note that someone with the same name has the equivalent of their entire resume posted. It may be brief simply because it's a placeholder.

The address listed on the business license as both the official and the designated office address appears to be a house on a cul-de-sac, if Google maps is to be trusted. It may be a new enough company that they don't have a commercial building yet or that they do, but the business license info hasn't been updated yet.

Pet peeve alert: Don't advertise nonexistent webpages or use placeholders on FB or Linkedin or...well, anywhere, really. Don't get me interested and then leave me with a, "Safari can't find the server" message. By the time your page is active, I'll have forgotten about you and never (except under a very narrow set of circumstances) go back and recheck. At minimum, have a decent placeholder/under construction page to pique my interest further and make me want to recheck it. Get all your danged duckies in a row before you go live/advertise. End Pet peeve alert.

What convention are they planning on attending, JL? I confess I neither read nor write horror, but I do love a good mystery.

ETA: Disregard. I believe I found it. It's interesting that they're accepting pitches at their booth, but not taking part in the convention pitch program; perhaps they registered too late to do so. Having never been to a convention, is accepting a pitch at your booth normal? I would think it'd be a pain trying to be heard in a crowded salesroom, not to mention possibly creating a bottleneck, but what do I know?

JL_Benet said:

The fact that they recognize the importance of this convention to the industry does say something about them.

Click to expand...

Or they did what I did: type "United States largest horror con" into Google. That's how I found which con it was.

In any case, I'll be interested when their website is up and running. Admittedly, the phrase from their logo request, "We are a company that publishes/edits/sells horror books..." makes my teeth itch. It may be that they were just trying to give a bunch of non-writers an idea of what it is publishers do. Or they may have a pay-for-editing section--that's the itchy part. But it's all a moot point until they actually give us some facts to go on.

Looks like a heck of a good convention, in any case! And New Orleans...*sighs jealously*

Gotta say, I love that logo. I'm a sucker for skulls.

Yeah, I'm digging that logo too. I'll give them some time to get on their feet, ect. But if their book covers look as nice as the flyer, I'd be willing to give them a second look.

JL_Benet said:

For those not in the genre, World Horror Con is THE professional convention for the horror publishing world (especially when it's held in conjunction with the Horror Writers Association's Stoker Weekend). For those of you who haven't gone, it's fundamentally different from your local fan con as the focus is very strongly on the publishing industry and business of writing. That's not to say it isn't a fun time, or that fans don't enjoy it.

Click to expand...

Sheesh. That's the same song and dance about it being a professional rather than a fannish convention that you hear about World Fantasy Con. It's not true in either case. Fans do the work of putting on both WHC and WFC -- and the conventions should damned well be grateful, because the fan community is much better than J. Random Pro at running conventions.

You don't prove that you're professional by snubbing or deprecating the people who are working to put on your annual convention. You prove that you're a pro by making sales.

It isn't normal to do the pitch sessions at the booth. Perhaps they did miss the cut-off deadline. I don't know.

Click to expand...

It makes as much sense to hold pitch sessions at the booth as it does to hold them anywhere else.

As far as where there office is located, you will find that even the top publishers in Horror are often run out of someone's house.

Click to expand...

That's because horror collapsed as a commercial genre in the late 1980s. Genre stalwarts have carried on publishing it, often undercapitalized and in difficult circumstances; but that doesn't mean that every horror publisher operating from home is created equal.

Anyone can put out a flyer at a convention.

Just an update: out of curiosity I tried their webpage again today. A little over 2 weeks to go until the convention where, according to one website, they're debuting a book entitled, "Barbers & Beauties", an 8 story flip book anthology and they're still not live. It's also almost 3 weeks since JL_Benet made the first post containing their flyer advertising their website. I can only hope they go live soon, because that's not good for their business.

And no submission guidelines anywhere, so apparently they don't want submissions.