Updated August 2023
Black Lyon Publishing is a small but established publisher of romance novels, eBook and printed, out of Oregon. Some of their books also have audio versions.
They just recently started to publish works of non-fiction. The non-fiction categories they are interested in are as follows: Politics & Government (Opinions or satire, American History); Self-Help and Spirituality; How-to; True Crime; and Biographies or Autobiographies.
I am not a huge fan of the covers or of the design of the website, but that is a matter of personal taste. They do seem to be actively trying to make audiobook versions of their books, and that’s a good sign. I did notice a couple of typos on their website.
They seem to lean Republican based on this 2022 publication.
They are a rather small publisher, so they do expect their authors to do a lot of self-promotion. They are now producing more and more audio books, which seems like a good idea.
When you query them do not attach any material. It will not be opened. Do not submit any manuscript over 90,000 words in length. They have a response time of three months. A history of previous publications does not seem to be particularly important.
The body of your query email should contain your name, manuscript title, the type of novel/nonfiction book, word count, a 1-2 paragraph blurb similar to what you might imagine the back cover of your book to read, and the first three paragraphs of your manuscript.
They are not interested in a synopsis so do not include one. Nonfiction queries should also include a table of contents.
They are currently only open to nonfiction queries.
To learn more read their submission guidelines here. You can visit their main page here to have a better idea of what kind of books they publish.
