Publisher Spotlight Guest Post: Secret Cravings

Let's give a warm welcome to Jillian Chantal for coming in this week and giving us the scoop on Secret Cravings Publishing. (And be sure to check out the links at the end of the article - Jillian has a new book coming out tomorrow!)

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Thanks to all the Word Whores and especially Jeffe, for allowing me to pop in and share some information about one of my publishers. I started writing for Secret Cravings Publishing in January, 2012. Since that time, they have branched out to Sweet Cravings Publishing which is the arm of the parent company that publishes non-erotic romance. My stories are sexy and hot but don’t meet the criteria for erotic so I’m now considered a Sweet Cravings author. They have also recently started taking submissions for fantasy and sci-fi that aren’t romance in yet another division called Grimoire Books.

For ease of discussion, I’ll refer to them as Secret Cravings since we’re all under that main umbrella. I like that they haven’t separated us out into segregated sections like some organizations do. We are all equal authors and I love that. This publishing house was founded by Sandy Sullivan who started as a writer. She decided to make some changes and started her company so that authors could be given more of a voice on what happened to their stories and so they could make suggestions about their cover art without there being an issue over it.

I had the honor of meeting Sandy in person a couple of months after I signed with them and she really impressed me with her commitment to her writers and their happiness with the house. I’ve been published with four other houses (not that I’m hard to get along with- they each have distinct styles and I write lots of different things) and only one other been as involved with their writers as Secret Cravings. All the staff are active on the publisher’s loop as well as the Facebook page. Questions are answered quickly and with no sense of evasion. I like that I can do an on-line writing sprint with the owner of the company on a Saturday afternoon, too.

They are a royalty paying publisher and pay pretty much like the others as far as their percentages – they pay very promptly. I’ve been very pleased at the timeliness of sales reports as well as payments. There has never been any issue about payments.

They take submissions from agented and unagented writers. They have weekend reads that are from 5,000-10,000 words for which they pay a flat fee if the author chooses that over royalties. They take stories up to 120,000 words. They are also very prompt in their response time for submissions.

The cover artist is very easy to work with and she does a brilliant job. I’ve not been disappointed in one cover that she’s done.

They’ve started a kind of pilot program for authors for marketing assistance and seem dedicated to getting their writers’ names out there. They attend conferences and are generous in sending swag for the attendees. I’ve been very happy with them and highly recommend submitting to them since they are so willing to be an advocate for their writers and truly listen to feedback.

Here’s my fantastic cover for the release I have coming this week:   

How to contact Secret and Sweet Cravings: http://store.sweetcravingspublishing.com/  http://store.secretcravingspublishing.com/  

http://www.grimoirebooks.net/ 

BLURB:

American oil painter Charlotte Bolling travels to Venice, Italy for three months to study the architecture of the old city and paint. She meets Vincente Canaletto, an Italian man who owns a water taxi and gondola business. They’re attracted to each other and begin to date. Charlotte trusts Vincente with information about her past. She ran away from home at age thirteen when her mother, who was a madam in a house of ill repute, offered Charlotte’s virginity to the highest bidder. 

Vincente's son was abducted and Vincente's been on a quest to find him for years. When the boy is located by an investigator in Bangkok in a bordello, Charlotte insists on accompanying Vincente to the capital city in Thailand since she believes her own past will be invaluable in winning the child's trust. They embark on a dangerous rescue mission in the back streets of that city.  Http://Jillianchantal.com