Hydra Publications is based in Indiana, and should not be confused with Random House’s Hydra imprint, or Hydra House, a Pacific Northwest based publisher of speculative fiction. Hydra Publications started out publishing a wide variety of genres, but now publish mainly speculative fiction, with a few imprints outside of that.
Hydra also has a number of other imprints. These seem to be active to varying degrees, but if you are interested in submitting to one of them, you can sign up to be notified here.
Their website is a little hard to navigate and not particularly well designed. It appears to be mostly a one-man operation, run by Tony Acree, They talk about winning the 2015 Jason Sizemore Award for Outstanding Small-Press Publisher, which they won again in 2021. But I can’t find any more information about the awards online, outside of their site and press releases. This means I do not know if the award means anything, or which other presses won it. I do assume that it was given out by this Jason Sizemore.
Tony Acree has published his own books with Hydra, but he has primarily published other authors. Most of the books they’ve published have reviews, which is always a good starting point. Some of the anthologies they have published, including Writers Workshop of Horror 2, which is forthcoming, feature major authors. They do not list print distributors.
Hydra Publications is currently open to submissions. They are accepting works of speculative fiction, including thriller, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, and dystopian. They are particularly interested in LitRPG submissions. If your submission is LitRPG, please say so in the subject line. LitRPG stands for Literary Role Playing Game, and is a genre that combines the conventions of computer RPGs with other genres. They list subtypes as “VR, no logout, sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, dungeon core, harem, crunchy, light, moba, portal fantasy, town builder, and LitFPS”.
All manuscripts must be a minimum of 70,000 words, but LitRPG should be around 100,000 words in length. Manuscripts can not be previously published in any format. They need not be professionally edited but the excerpt should be relatively error free. To learn more or read their complete submission guidelines, go here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2021 Guide to Manuscript Publishers.
She regularly teaches three acclaimed courses on writing and publishing at The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish. You can follow her on Facebook here.
