Quills & Quartos Publishing was founded in 2019. They started with a very specific vision, to focus on publishing the best Austenesque romance fiction. This is of course a niche market within a niche market, so if this is not the right fit for your work, please don’t submit or read further. However if you are a fan of Jane Austen’s work and write work that is inspired and influenced by her work, they might well be the right fit. You can get a good feel for what they have previously published here.
Because they have such a narrow focus, they also appear to have an established audience of readers and many of their books are well reviewed on Amazon and elsewhere.
I did notice a few broken/mixed up links on the website, but generally it was well organized and easy to navigate.
They are not interested in erotica, but allow sexual content as long as the story stands alone without it. They state that all “sexual scenarios must be consensual”.
They ask that submissions be made via email, and that you submit your full manuscript, alongside a synopsis, word count, and short author bio. All should be Word doc/docx format, double spaced in 12-point Times Roman font. They are open to novellas (30,000-40,000 words) and novel (70,000-1000 words) length submissions. They do not want headers or page numbers (which is rare and unusual), but they do want page breaks between the chapters.
One of the other unusual stances they take, is that they are fine with authors submitting work that has been previously posted online as long as you can provide the link to the content that proves you are the author. This isn’t a complete surprise given their focus. They are looking for Austenesque work and much of what they publish is technically fanfiction, work that features characters originally created by a different author. In this case because they are focused on an author whose work is no longer under copyright, there are no barriers to other authors using these characters (and many of the big five publishers have in fact published books featuring these characters by different authors). Since many fanfiction authors share their work as they write, asking for work that has never been published online before, might be tricky.
They do make it clear that if they publish your work all work that has previously appeared online must be taken down when the contract is signed.
To learn more, or to submit, 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.
