Want to write for us?

Guidelines

It is clear to anyone with common sense that contemporary Western literature is broken. Books filled with lies and propaganda rise to the top of bestseller lists and even win top awards, provided their politics are right. Editors choose books by the color of the author’s skin or his – more often her – gender presentation rather than the merits of the story. Blatant propaganda is pressed onto our children’s reading lists, along with sexual and other content far too complex for their ages, while tales of heroes and happy endings are denigrated as simplistic or unrealistic.

Conservatarian Press aims to change that, as much as a David of a little press can. We like classic heroes and happy endings, clearly demarked good and evil (not political good and evil, which is quite different), and respect for the past. Like the Superversive Movement, we want to bring brightness to the world. Stories that uplift, that shine the light of truth, are the ones we will consider; if you wish to be rejected, send tales that smudge and destroy, that take dark things and make them darker or that take bright things and seek to make them dull. 

J.R.R. Tolkien is far superior to G.R.R. Martin.

Charles Dickens has more to say about the human condition than Jodi Picoult.

Mark Twain was always funnier than Jim Gaffigan ever could be.

There are common threads that tie together our greatest classic writers: strong heroes, villainous villains, crisp writing, sharp story turns, truthfulness, and the happy ending as good ultimately defeats evil and proves that evil can indeed be beaten. That’s what we are looking for here. Some storylines that would ring our bell include:

* A young woman regrets her abortion and seeks absolution for what she has done
* A powerful politician is forced by a gypsy to tell the whole truth about everything
* A girl intended as a sacrifice to a dragon chooses instead to find a way to defeat it
* A family chooses to fight back against a school system that short-changes their children
* A Marine seeks justice against a politician who caused his wife’s death
* A community struggles to rebuild after an Antifa riot destroys their neighborhood
* A soldier and a liberal journalist meet-cute at a Trump rally
* A spaceship captain looks for a way to free Earth from collectivist (but well-meaning) alien conquerors

Most, possibly all, of these are NOT POLITICAL. However, they display the kinds of themes we are looking for: heroism, personal courage, freedom, responsibility, love. In a workshop, David Weber said that his number one requirement for a hero was that the hero took responsibility for something; that’s what we want. Told by a conservative-leaning writer, these stories will naturally incorporate everything else we are looking for.

And that’s part of the point. Our voices have been short-changed by a publishing industry that looks at everything through a political filter. The WAY they have chosen books naturally filters out most conservative storytellers.

Because the world view of a writer naturally comes out in his writing, this has made it easy for leftists to block out most conservatives – and silence our voices in the fiction world. All the books we might have written are ersatz pre-banned. Not only have we been disqualified from publication, we have been cut out of the traditional writers’ educational process; university writing programs are run and staffed by progressives, peopled by progressives, and funded by progressives. The MFA programs feed writers directly into the literary hoppers of the large publishing companies, and their books often rise due to marketing rather than merit. And the MFA programs are nearly entirely staffed by liberals, usually radical liberals.

SO.

What we hope to do here is not just create a place for conservatives and right-leaning libertarians to speak out, but to help develop these writers and advance their careers, here and elsewhere. We need not just writers, but good writers, people whose writing can seep out into the larger world and speak just as loudly as mainstream authors. That’s why we have an editing staff who understand, first, where you are coming from politically and ethically, and second, how to polish your writing and help you grow into a better writer.

And we want you to be successful, which is why we provide robust marketing support to get your stories in front of readers who will love them.

Nuts & Bolts

We prefer full manuscript electronic submissions in Word document format; query first about any other format. Please polish your manuscript yourself as well as you can; submissions that need a great deal of work are likely to be rejected with a list of things you need to do in order to improve your writing.

Length is negotiable. While a thousand-page opus is more likely to be rejected, that’s only because it is likely to be wordy. (I often tell writers to cut about a third of the word count without cutting the content – they complain, and I don’t blame them, but they also find it’s one of the best self-teaching tools they will ever find.) We will not reject for length, nor will we cut up a book that was never intended to be a series or serial. 

We are looking at publishing in the following genres: mystery, thriller, romance, women’s fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical, Western, and tween/teen/young adult. We also have an editor looking specifically for Gen Z writers, and we are open to queries about other genres as well. Christian or other religious content is okay and even encouraged, but we are not a religious publisher;  there are other outlets for that. We will soon be publishing illustrated children’s books and we will be open to graphic novels as well. PLEASE QUERY about these formats/genres.

We will consider pretty much any fiction genre. If you’re not sure, drop us a line and ask.

Send your manuscripts as attachments  in Word or PDF format with a brief cover letter introducing yourself and describing your story (including intended genre, if possible) to submissions@conservatarianpress.com.