Updated March 5th, 2026
Update January 1, 2022, ALL submissions to Shadow Mountain Publishing must be represented by a literary agent.
Shadow Mountain Publishing, however, will open to unagented and unsolicited manuscripts ONLY during the following dates:
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March 1 through March 7
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June 1 through June 7
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September 1 through September 7
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December 1 through December 7
Unagented and unsolicited manuscripts submitted at any other time will be discarded without review.
Shadow Mountain is an imprint of Deseret Books. Both publishers have their roots in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Deseret Books focuses more on producing faith-based content. Shadow Mountain publishes primarily fiction and they have published a number of New York Times bestselling books. They are very firm about publishing “clean books only”. However the authors need not be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Only the Ensign Peak imprint of Shadow Mountain focuses on books that are religious in nature. Even the Ensign Peak books are intended for a general, nondenominational audience.
While they publish general fiction and nonfiction books for all ages, a lot of what they sell is aimed at middle grade readers, or could be categorized as clean romance.
Below I share their current genre guidelines for what they are seeking, as of March 5th, 2026.
Fiction
- Empathy-building, contemporary middle grade novels
- Middle grade fantasy
- Contemporary Romance
- Women’s fiction
- Young Adult Romance
- Young Adult Fantasy
- Young Adult Contemporary
- Multicultural
- Mystery (Cozy Mystery or Suspense)
Nonfiction
- History
- Biography
- Memoir
- Multicultural
- Middle Grade and YA Nonfiction
- Cookbooks
- Religious content for non-denominal audience
They are not interested in considering books in the following genres: business and finance, family histories/personal journals, religion, or poetry.
They have a special section of the site devoted to their New York Times Bestselling books and it is easy to see that the majority of them are middle grade fantasy books. They have good distribution, a good website, and good covers.
Shadow Mountain uses Submittable to manage their submissions. All submissions must be made through them. They try to respond to all submissions between 12 and 16 weeks.
Submitters must query first and then only submit a full manuscript on request. Learn more here.
Emily Harstone is the pen name of an author whose work has been published internationally by a number of respected journals. She is a professional submissions adviser and spends much of her time researching manuscript publishers. You can follow her on Facebook here.
