Updated Feb 27, 2025
Sheltering Tree Media is a small company mostly focused on podcasts and book publishing. They are founded in 2021 and are run by Evelyn Rainey. They are based out of Florida, and were originally focused on book publishing, mostly just the founding editor’s work, but they’ve since expanded beyond that scope significantly. In the last year or so they have starting working in the podcast space and they plan to also expand into games in 2025.
They describe their mission as “to share stories of faith through the use of various media tools such as books (e-books, paperback, and hardcover), audio and video podcasts, photography, videography, and game designs.”
They also say, “We endeavor to be an example of how media can be used to spread the Gospel and the Shema and Love with a capital L, create meaningful connections, and bring people together.”
This what they say in terms of what they are looking for when it comes to manuscripts: “We will consider any books that are positive, uplifting, supportive, or spiritual in nature.” They are very interested in work in translation and publish work across a wide variety of genres, including children’s books.
They appear to be very much a small one-person operation with limited distribution, and there are a number of minor spelling errors and inconsistencies on the site. They are focused on getting site visitors’ email addresses, which can be helpful. They are more focused on recruiting authors than sharing books on the site, which is also not ideal. But they do really encourage reviews and sales in some sections of the site, just not on the home page.
Their shop section contains all of the books they’ve previously published so you can get a good feel for their back catalog here. The books are not listed in the order of release, but once I started searching around, it did become clear that they were still actively releasing books, and that the covers were generally improving over time. None of the books I looked at appeared to have sold many copies or received many reviews.
They also have a yearly contest that struck me as strange, it’s free to submit to, but they list the prize as having a 30,000 dollar value, when it is editing, publishing work, and the site very much emphasizes that they are a traditional press.
They now have an AI policy that is as follows:
As of Feb. 25, 2025: Our publishing house (ShelteringTree.Earth, LLC) has taken a stand against the use of AI generated illustrations in our children’s book division. We will still accept AI-assisted images (whereby the author creates a prompt and then uses various images to create their own illustration) for middle reader, young adult, poetry, and adult books, but proper citations must be given. Effective immediately.
They also stress that authors are responsible for their own cover art and paying for it if needed. When I initially reviewed them they were not upfront about this. I would not have reviewed them if the AI policy was in place at that time, and if I knew they were outsourcing the work of the cover.
All manuscript submissions to their press must be made through their submission form. You can go here to access it. Please only submit to them if you feel like your work is a good fit, and you would be happy with your work being published by their press. Please follow all of their submission guidelines carefully.
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.
