Paper Angel Press is a small press focused on publishing general fiction, literary fiction, mysteries, historical fiction, and short stories collections. They also have a number of imprints open to other genres. Each imprint has a separate website and guidelines, so I’ll only cover Paper Angel Press in this article. They usually are open to submissions from February through September. Unlike most small presses they don’t allow simultaneous submissions. I’m leading with this fact, because I know it is a deal breaker for some.
They have a well organized and mostly easy to navigate website. I wish they shared more about the founding of the company on their website or their masthead. I was not able to find out much about either on their own website, although by reading one of their imprints’ blogposts here, I was able to see a link to the managing editor’s page here. This is on their company website but I’m not sure how to access it outside of the URL.
Their about us page focuses instead on pushing the narrative that they are not a traditional publisher, because they are quicker in terms of turnaround time (two months according to them), and they expect their authors to do marketing. Some of the language on this page I found to be very much an orange flag, but they make it clear in their FAQs on their submission page that they never charge authors for publishing. For me this is where the real line is drawn between traditional and vanity presses, and they do have a blog that actively promotes their authors and the events their authors attend which is more than many presses. I still find the language used less than ideal, and if you are approached to pay them anything, or pressured to spend money on hiring someone to do the marketing please reach out to support@authorspublish.com.
They don’t disclose who their distributor is, which makes me think it must be Ingram, which is only helpful in terms of online retailers, outside of their sub-distributors.
As far as covers go, in my personal opinion some are good and genre- appropriate, and others not. It’s clear from their website organization that they prioritize selling books over recruiting authors, which is a good sign, and that their books are available at most online retailers of books. Their books are organized by genre, which is helpful also. I’m only linking to the fiction catalog here, but it is easy to get to the other genre pages from this one. Based on the Amazon sales pages books seem to get between 5 and 50 ratings, which is better than other small publishers. But that’s just based on the 5 or so books I checked.
They have an active blog and share author events there, which is nice. They also don’t allow authors to use AI and don’t use AI themselves.
To learn more about their 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 2024 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.
