Updated March 17th 2020: They have not published a book or an update in over a year on their website. I am considering them defunct.
Astrea Press officially launched in 2010 and published it’s first e-book in early 2011. It was founded because the owner, Stephanie Taylor saw a gap in the e-book market when it came to “wholesome” mainstream romance novels. Astrea does not publish anything erotic. To this end in the last year they seem to have re-branded as Clean Reads.
They were primarily a romance publisher when they first started out but their focus seems to have shifted in the last year or so, and they are now open to all fiction genres, although they still publish a lot of romance.
Clean Reads gives their authors a fair contract. Authors receive 50% of the royalties from sales on the Astrea website and 40% of sales from third party websites (they also sell their books through Amazon and Barnes and Nobles). They are also open to making print editions of books that are longer than 50,000 words. They allow their authors to work one-on-one with their cover artist in order to create a cover that properly represents the book. After all, they say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but a lot of people buy them based on the cover anyways.
All books will be thoroughly edited before publication, but that editing will happen with the authors knowledge, consent, and contributions. They also make sure that authors can buy copies at a discounted price, although they don’t go into specifics on their website.
They accept all genres of fiction. They also publish books for young adults, so they are open to those works as well. They do not publish work that is less than 15,000 words or more than 100,000.
Their website is currently under construction so there is not much information on it, but they are active on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in the meantime so that is a good start.
They only accept unagented submissions through emailed submissions. You can learn more about Clean Reads by visiting their website here.
