Submissions
If you would like to submit to Bayou Wolf, please send a query letter and the first 10 pages of your manuscript in the body of the email to bayouwolfpress@gmail.com . In the subject line of the email, please put your first and last name, the title of the book, and if you have a preference, which editor you would like to submit to. (See our Publisher Bios for more details about what we’re looking for.)
We are a new press and our selection pool is EXTREMELY limited. As a team of two doing all the editing, marketing, blogging, and so forth, we only have the time and means to choose projects that we just can’t live without. Please ONLY submit if you have a polished, completed manuscript that’s a little too weird, a little too wonky, a little too hard to market, for traditional publishing to do it justice. BONUS POINTS if you've read any of our current titles. Familiarizing yourself with our current and forthcoming projects is also a good way of feeling out our tastes. That said, we are always on the hunt for something we've never seen before that can BLOW us out the water.
Elizabeth Gilliland Rands
You should consider submitting to me if... You can combine commercial genre plot with polished literary prose and complex characters. And/Or You like to create genre or style hybrids – e.g. noir meets fairytale (Oh, God, send me that book!). Retellings of the classics are a passion of mine, but it needs to be quirky, unique, and not under copyright. I love books that make me laugh, make me feel, make me think, and understand genre conventions but aren’t afraid to strategically break them.
Yes to: Genre hybrids! Mystery (especially if it’s funny), retellings, fairy tales, ghost stories/gothic, female POV westerns, action/adventure, magic realism, mythology. Fantasy/sci fi that’s more literary than commercial (focus on character over plot/world building). Romance IF it’s literary, smart, and funny (think Rosie Walsh’s Ghosted). ONLY historical fiction and crime/thriller/suspense IF they’re hybrids. I’m looking mainly for Adult but could be persuaded to YA if it blows me away.
No to: Horror, dense plot-heavy sci-fi with lots of terminology and almost no female characters, erotica, memoir, short story/essay collections, biography/autobiography, self-help, Middle grade, children’s. Anything set during World War II will be a hard sell for me (unless it’s, say, a retelling of ancient myths set during that time period, ala Julie Berry’s Lovely War).
Books/Authors/Films/Series I Love: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Agatha Christie, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Game of Thrones/ A Song of Ice and Fire, E. Lockhart, Tana French, Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma, Jane the Virgin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series. Old epic stuff like King Arthur legends, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome.