Updated April 2019: Fireship Press changed ownership and there have been some issues since the transition. You can read more here. I would not recommend them at this time.
Fireship Press is a small press that focuses on publishing books with a nautical theme, historical fiction, and history books. Fireship press publishes about 15 books a year. Most have well chosen, genre appropriate covers. The website is fairly easy to navigate. They are open to submissions from authors without an agent or previous experience. Authors who have worked with them tend to have positive things to say about the publisher. They also have distributors in the US and Canada. All their books are printed on demand. They also have e-book editions of all of their recent books.
Fireship Press is looking to publish books that are between 90,000 — 150,000 words in length. They are not interested in manuscripts that fall outside of the genres of Nautical and Historical Fiction and Nonfiction. However, their new imprint Cortero is open to publishing fantasy with a historical setting, or Alternative history as well as Murder Mysteries with a historical setting.
Send them a query via email first. They do not accept any submissions via post. Include a brief synopsis of the work. For non-fiction books, also include an outline or detailed chapter list. Do not include a manuscript or manuscript excerpt in your first email query. If they are interested they will request three sample chapters. They prefer that these three chapters be the first three in your novel or non-fiction works. They try to respond to all queries within 2 months.
Fireship Press negotiates contracts on an individual basis. They only offer contracts for manuscripts that are already completed. However it is very important to note that Fireship Press does not provide an editing service, and expect that work to be done by an editor paid for by the author of the book. I think that is an important factor to take into consideration when submitting to them, because editing can be costly.
To learn more visit their website here. To read all the submission guidelines visit this page.
