Robert Rosenwald’s Blog

My wife, Barbara Peters who is also our senior editor, our daughter, Susan Malling, and I started Poisoned Pen Press ten years ago (yes, this is our tenth anniversary year and we do have a great party at Bouchercon planned) because we were unhappy with the direction we saw the large NY publishers heading. We felt that there were a core number of readers who wanted well-written, well-edited, intelligent mysteries to read. After ten years I feel I can say we were right. And before anyone screams at me about editing mistakes in a couple of recent books, all I can say is that in the course of growing and changing how we do production we made some mistakes. I think we have identified them and have come up with fixes. But we will still err from time to time and when we do we’ll do everything in our power to fix it. Just let us know if you find a typo or other error by dropping an email to production@poisonedpenpress.com

One question I keep hearing is whether we will share information with anyone else re. the people who signup for our enewsletter. NO! NO! NO! Emphatically, no, we will not. We use contact information to send requested materials from us, not from some third party. Just to put this into perspective I get, on average, 500 email messages per day of which 420 are flagged as SPAM by my SPAM blocker. I will NEVER permit our list be used by any anonymous third party for marketing anything to anyone.

Another question that I’ve gotten is along the lines of whether we are a self-publisher. Poisoned Pen Press is an absolutely conventional publishing house. We pay authors advances (albeit they are small) and we pay better royalties than most mainstream publishers. We make no demands for money of any sort from our authors. We edit all manuscripts, we pay for typesetting, we hire illustrators to do cover art, we create ARCs (advance reading copies) which we mail out to all mainstream book reviewers and independent bookstores, we pay for all costs of manufacturing finished books. Our typical print runs are between 3,000 and 3,500 hardcover copies.

To those who are thinking of submitting to us, we work directly with unagented authors as well as agented authors, with no preference given to one over the other. However we are not able to pickup authors who have had their series canceled by other publishers. Our main focus is on introducing new, previously unpublished authors. And for all practical purposes we won’t publish an author who self-published themselves. I’ll be posting an entry on this blog soon to explain why for those who aren’t happy with that policy and think it is arbitrary. Anyone who is is interested in submitting a manuscript to us should go to our website to read our manuscript submission guidelines. They are clear and explain what we are looking for and how we want to receive it.