Submissions

Artesian House is a new, small, fast-moving press. We are not the right home for every writer, and we won’t pretend to be. We are the right home for the writer whose book doesn’t fit the shape the large houses are buying, and who would rather be read closely by a few people who care than filed by many who don’t.

Not long ago, the founder of this house was on your side of this page. It was not much fun. We have tried to build the process we wished we’d found.

What we’re looking for

Books for any of our nine imprints: literary fiction for Artesian House, thrillers and suspense for GoodNYTE, satire and comic fiction for Sodium Loft, hard subjects handled with care for Sackrilege, non-fiction for Literally, romance for Love, Possibly, puns and wordplay for Sigh-Attica, children’s books for Just Kidding, and young adult for Coming of Page. The imprints have grown; the bar hasn’t moved. We publish books that ask the reader to think, and make the thinking a pleasure. We don’t hand readers answers. We hand them good questions.

If your book doesn’t fit neatly on any of those shelves, make the case in your pitch. We would rather read it than rule it out.

What we promise

• No fees. Ever. You will never pay us for anything. Money flows toward the writer, not away.
• You see the full contract before you commit. No surprises.
• A larger share of sales than the industry standard, in writing, before you sign.
• A fixed, fair term, with rights that revert to you on clearly defined terms — not “out of print” language that means nothing in a print-on-demand world.
• A real say in your cover and your edits.
• An answer. Everyone hears back, within thirty days.

What to send

As little as possible. We can always ask for more.

• A short pitch — a few sentences on what the book is
• Which imprint you think it belongs to (a guess is fine)
• A one-paragraph synopsis
• Your first chapter, or roughly the first 3,000 words — pasted in, or attached
• Approximate word count
• A plain statement about AI use (see below)

How we read

You’ll get an acknowledgment within a day. Every submission gets a first read by an AI reader working from our house standards — we’d rather tell you that plainly than not. Anything that passes goes to a human reader, and a human makes every decision. You’ll hear back within thirty days, whichever way it goes.

On AI

We use the same line Amazon uses, and the same one we hold ourselves to. The test is where the prose came from. If you wrote a draft, however rough, and used AI to edit, tighten, rewrite, or improve it, that’s AI-assisted: it’s your book, and no disclosure is needed. If there was no draft of yours for the AI to work from, and it wrote the prose from an idea, a prompt, or an outline, that’s AI-generated, and we ask you to say so. Disclosure isn’t a rejection; the book still has to earn its place on its own merits. Undisclosed generation discovered later is grounds to end a contract.

We hold ourselves to this. One of our own titles carries a disclosure. We mean it.