A historical mystery makes two promises at once: a puzzle worth solving and a period rendered right. The reader holds the author to both. She notices when the poison could not have been bought in 1817, when the inspector uses a phrase coined forty years after the book is set, when a hemline is wrong for the season. Reviews in this genre are written by people who checked.
We publish a lot of it. Our catalogue runs from Regency cozies — amateur sleuths, murders that happen politely offstage, wit and manners and a romance that simmers — to darker period crime where the streets are less pleasant and the bodies less tidy. The span matters, because the first decision on any historical mystery is where on that spectrum the book sits, and the whole launch follows from it.
Tone is the axis. A cozy cover on a dark book recruits the wrong readers, and the wrong readers write the reviews that poison a product page. The same is true in reverse. Cover, blurb, categories, and advertising all have to make the same promise the book keeps — cozy signals at thumbnail size, or period-noir signals, but never both. Getting that choice right is most of the metadata work, and it is the part we spend longest on.
The readership binges. Series run long, much of the genre reads through Kindle Unlimited, and a reader who loves book one is inside book four by the weekend. So the series is the strategy: back matter that carries the reader forward, pricing that makes starting easy, and every new release treated as a doorway into the backlist. For long-running series we maintain a series bible and check each new manuscript against it — ages, dates, marriages, the thread closed in book three that must stay closed in book seven — because the reader who notices the wrong poison also notices a character whose age drifted between books.
The engagement runs our standard shape: we read and assess the manuscript before fees are discussed, then proofing, formatting, cover direction, the metadata pass, an advance-reader campaign through NetGalley and BookFunnel, and ad creative tested in small steps before it spends real money.
You keep your rights, royalties, and accounts. We charge a fee for the work and promise the work rather than the outcome.
Some of the mysteries we have published
The full catalogue is on the Titles page. Pricing is covered in the FAQ. If you write in this genre — cozy, dark, or in between — we would like to hear about your series.
