We accept unsolicited submissions the 1st-7th of each month and are currently looking for MG and YA novels for our 2025 catalog.
We accept agented submissions and queries from referrals by a SBB team member or author anytime. 

What We’re Looking For:
At Stag Beetle Books, we want your best middle-grade and young adult speculative fiction, which means all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. All sub-genres are welcome to include horror, cyberpunk, paranormal, etc!  We love interesting characters, unique premises, and a fast-paced plot.  Make our acquisitions team stay up all night flipping pages with such interest they get paper-cuts but they're so invested in your story they don't even mind. 

Do NOT send: 
- PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED MATERIAL or related material such as a prequel or sequel.
- manuscripts you intend to self-publish regardless of our response.
- manuscripts with fae, faeries, fairies, etc. We like them but have enough in our current catalog.
- submissions with sexual content.
- queries for unfinished manuscripts.

We would LOVE to see: 
- a male protagonist
- ghost stories
- enemies to lovers
- found family
- middle-grade that deals in emotional truths
- a highly intelligent YA MC
- bilingual characters
- a MC who isn't 17-years-old

NOTE on sexual content and Language: 
 If there's sex in the book, we will not publish it as a young adult novel.
   We want plot-driven/character-driven stories that don't touch on sexual explorations.  Sexual discovery is a theme within many young adult novels and in many young adult lives, but it's not the angle we are interested in as a publisher. There are many books out there for readers actively seeking those themes and many publishers who are happy to add steamy content to their catalogs. Stag Beetle Books is primarily a publisher of clean young adult fiction. Many young adults are not sexually active and we want to provide them with fiction that is accessible and relatable to them. We love non-sexual romantic relationships, friendships, brotherhood, sisterhood, etc. 
    We will let one well-placed f-bomb into a YA novel if it lands well. Despite the prevalence of strong language in media and schools, many readers of YA, both young adults and adults, read young adult fiction because they don't want the weight and content of adult books.  
​   While we do not pander to a sheltered demographic, we want to normalize clean fiction for tweens and young teens again and we respect the trust that young readers and parents put in as a publisher. 

GUIDELINES: 
Email us with:
-a query letter pasted in the email
-the first 30ish pages of your manuscript to submissions[at]stagbeetlebooks<dot>com (attached)
Formatting instructions: font size 12, page numbers at the bottom, Times New Roman, double spaced, new pages for new chapters, three asterisks centered for breaks within a chapter, and indent first line.
-any writing qualifications, awards, endorsements, etc that you have
-links to a website, (if you have one), and author social media accounts. IG, FB, TT, etc. 
-Include the word "Query" in the subject along with the title of the manuscript

We appreciate a synopsis but it's not required.

For YA Submissions:
- Target Audience is ages 12-17
- 70-150k word manuscripts
- standalone or series

For MG Submissions:
- Target Audience is ages 8-12
- 25-80k word manuscripts
- standalone or series

Be sure your query letter includes the name of the novel, whether it's stand-alone or part of a series, the word count, and genre. 
We welcome multiple and simultaneous submissions for the initial query. For multiple submissions please send a separate email for each work you'd like us to consider. 

Something unique about our acquisitions process is that we always consult actual young adults (and middle grade readers for the MG submissions.) That's right, we're going to share your submission with teenagers who have an appetite for sci-fi and fantasy. If they want to read more of your work, our acquisitions editor will request the full manuscript. 
We don't think 30-90-year-olds should define what makes great YA fiction today, so we ask young adults for their input on every single submission.

Tips:
- Check your first sentence and your first paragraph. Is it interesting? Does it make us want to know what's going on?
- Grammarly is free. We strongly recommend you download it and use it to go through your document. It catches a bunch of errors and helps make your writing smoother. We do not recommend that you blindly accept all the suggestions it gives because sometimes it can't appreciate the poetry of your writing. 
- Have beta-readers give you feedback. Consider hiring an unbiased editor on a site like Fiverr to help you polish your writing. Errors distract us from the story and make us less inclined to keep reading. Once we pass on a project, we will not reconsider it in the future. Give us your best from the start! 
- Brandon Sanderson has a whole page of writing advice that we recommend for novice and seasoned writers alike. 
- Check for Copula Spiders. See how often forms of "to be" like "was, were, is, are, am" show up in your writing. Swap them out for active verbs or switch from present continuous to past tense. 
Ex. I was sitting in my chair while she was brushing my hair. We were both so tired that we were nodding off. 
Change to: I sat in my chair while she ran the brush through it slowly, slowly, as my shoulders drooped along with my eyelids. 
Ex.  I was excited. 
Don't tell us that. Show me. Prove it. 
While "Excitement flooded through me" is slightly better, we'd still rather see it than have you state it.  

We are only looking to publish novel-length work either stand-alone stories or series. Please note, you have to have all the books in that series complete before we will publish the first book. You can query us to see if we're interested, but we won't proceed with publication until the final chapter in the final book is finished (or we've seen and approved a detailed outline). 
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WHAT WE DON'T DO:
To reiterate: We do not accept submissions for any erotica, or books containing graphic sex scenes, no, not even if they're both consenting. Yes, we understand that in real life many young adults have sex. We just don't want to read about it. What's that? A blackout scene where it's implied but lights out? Maybe. We're open to considering it. 
We do not consider any stories that have excessive profanity. We can appreciate a well-placed swear word and will occasionally let a dramatic F-bomb in if it lands well, but as we are a young adult publisher, we want to keep all content PG-13. 
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We are also generally not interested in previously published books but we love previously published authors.  (If you feel we should make an exception for your previously published book, send us an email and let us know the circumstances.) 

If you are selected for publication, you will join our family of authors. We will not make any promises of fame and fortune but we can assure you that we will do all we can to get your book into the right hands and help you build a reader base. We want to know about your writing ambitions and see how we can connect you with your readers.  

We are a full-service publisher so you can keep writing your books and we'll take care of editing, covers, scheduling, hiring a dedicated marketing team for your book specifically, and in some cases, audiobook casting.  We will provide you with excellent marketing material to help empower you in your own marketing efforts so we can collaborate for the greatest impact upon your book's release. 
***Stag Beetle Books is committed to publishing young adult books by writers of all genders, ethnicities, colors, orientations, nationalities, and religious or political beliefs. We are only concerned with great books and great authors, not with the personal backgrounds of the authors.

If you have any further questions contact us at contact(at)stagbeetlebooks.com 

RESPONSE TIMES: 
For Submissions: We respond within 14 days with specific reasons why we love it and want the manuscript or reasons why it's not the best fit for us with constructive feedback on how to improve your story.
For Solicited Manuscripts: We respond within one month with specific reasons why we love it and want to be your publisher, or with reasons we don't believe we can offer you publication with constructive feedback on how to improve your story. 

Please feel free to reach out if we have not responded within the timeline above. 

Things we want you to keep in mind before submitting:
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Part of the ethos of Stag Beetle books is fun. Writing is fun. Publishing is fun. Polishing, editing, and sharing our worlds is fun. Marketing is fun. And with marketing, you can have a lot of fun. That doesn't mean we don't take it seriously because obviously, being a business, we want to make money and you do that by selling books, but we don't forget to have fun in the process of creating, marketing and learning better ways to reach our target audience. It's an opportunity to put your creativity to the test.

We put a big emphasis on the author/publisher relationship. Be honest with us. Reach out with any questions. We will always be honest and transparent with you. Don't submit to us if you don't want us to publish your book. Don't have us read your full manuscript if you fully intend to go self-publish anyway. 
Don't send manuscripts that you've already published.
Once we request a full manuscript from an author we start looking into that person. Obviously, we want authors who can write really well. We are interested in your stories but we are also interested in your career as a writer. Part of our process before deciding if we will extend an offer for publication is learning about the individuals who would be joining our author family. We want authors who are honest, hardworking, tenacious, personable, and communicative. 
We invest time, talent, and money into your story from the moment you submit it to us. We urge you to be personable and professional.

We WANT to invest in and champion your sensational stories. We want our authors to be so happy working with us it inspires them to write more books for us to add to our catalog. ​