Elana Gibson is an associate editor & acquisitions manager for CamCat Publishing.

She is responsible for developmental editing titles as well as assessing submissions based on story mechanics, narrative structure, and developmental potential. Elana holds a BA in English and French from Grinnell College and is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course. Elana has been working with books since she was a library page in high school and loves nothing more than finding a riveting, one-of-a-kind read in the stacks. She spends her free time baking cookies and tackling the mountain of fantasy novels she checked out from the library.

She is seeking:

We publish adult (over 18) and YA (9th-12th grades), novel-length genre fiction. We’ll look at any good tale, but what we want to see most urgently revolves around these genres:

Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Romance
Historical
Paranormal
Horror
Adventure
We’ll even look at Westerns

What We Don’t Want

At this time, we’re not interested in:

Stories for children, middle-grade and younger
Poetry
Erotica
Fiction with strong religious or political slants
Previously published works (This includes titles published with another company and self-published titles. Please do not submit to us if your title has ever been for sale anywhere).
Titles in a series that has previously published titles (see this article for clarification)
Anthologies
ANYTHING COVID/pandemic related, we see too many of these

And we really have too many:

Vampires
Vampires + any other paranormal creature
Schools of magic

Word Count Guidelines

2022 started off with some kerfuffles about word counts on social media, so we decided to clarify our own guidelines. We’re not looking for novellas (shorter than 50,000 words, give or take) or tomes big enough to serve as door-stoppers (longer than 125,000 words, give or take, depending on genre). It depends on the genre.

Speaking of genre, here’s what we’re looking for:

Adult:

Mystery/Thriller/Suspense: 70-95K
Horror: 70-95K
Romance: 60-100K
Action/Adventure: 60-100K
SciFi/Fantasy: 80-120K
Paranormal: 75-90K
Historical: 80-120K
Western: 50-65K

YA:

Mystery/Thriller/Suspense: 50-80K
Romance: 50-80K
Historical: 70-100K
SciFi/Fantasy: 70-100K