(rev. Jan. 12, 2026)
Call For Submissions
We are currently interested in submissions of books by contemporary authors to sell on our platforms.
We would like a non-exclusive right to sell your mystery, crime, intrigue and thriller book(s) on our platforms. You retain all copyrights to your work. This agreement can be voided at any time by either party with a 30 day notice.
We will host your books on our servers. We will pay you a royalty of 70% on all of your sales on our platform. (This is in line with the royalties that Amazon pays to authors on sales of their books.) We will pay out royalties on a monthly basis for the prior month’s sales.
We will create a Landing page for you and all of your books will be accessible from that landing page. Your Introduction (see below) will be seen on your landing page. Each of your books will have their own sales page.
We will also create a Private Portal page for you where you can track your sales and royalties.
Pricing and Payments
We sell all books in USD (U.S. Dollars).
We use PayPal to handle our outgoing transactions. (Royalty Payments to you.) You will need to give us your PayPal email address to get paid.
(We cannot use Stripe to make payments internationally. Sorry.)
You set the retail price of your own books. We only ask that if you are not a US writer that you calculate your prices in USD. We only pay royalties in USD. We let PayPal calculate current exchange rates.
We will pay royalties on or about the 10th day of each month for the previous month’s sales. For example, any sales you might make in March will be tallied and royalties will be paid in April, on or about April 10th.
We will not split commissions. If you have co-written a book, or you are the editor of a collection of stories in a book, we will only pay commissions to you. It is your responsibility to pay all other parties.
FIRST:
Please email us at submissions@hard-boiled-books.com and let us know of your interest. Please tell us a little about what you want to submit to us. We will get back to you as soon as possible to arrange for you to send us some samples of your work.
Samples should be representative of the major themes of your work.
You must own all of the rights to republish your work. We will not be a party to copyright infringement and will simply remove your books from our platform if any issue arises.
We will read it and see if we have an interest in publishing it on our site. If we accept your book(s) then:
Accepted books
We will send you a link to register as an author on Hard-Boiled-Books.com.
At this time we are only able to carry books in the .pdf or .epub formats. We prefer .epubs in version 3.0+. However, we also accept .epub version 2.0+.
We will link to your web site for books in paperback or hardback formats and you will make the direct sale on those formats.
What we require from you
Length: We are looking for books of approximately 10,000 words or more. We don’t mind collections of stories but we will not publish short stories individually. We are also very interested in series. If you have several stories in a series, each of which totals less than 10,00 words, we would be interested in those stories combined into “bundles” or “collections”.
Covers: Covers should be in the .jpg format and should be vertical rectangles with vertical height of at least 800 pixels. You should also use your covers to make thumbnails at 250 pixels high. Please add a white border at either side to make the thumbnail 250 pixels square.
Synopses: In a separate text file please create a synopsis of your book.
This will be your sales copy!
This is what a prospective buyer will see in the Book Detail section of each book’s page. Please limit this to a couple of paragraphs. At the end of the Synopsis please list several Tags so that we can better categorize your book. We will copy the first couple of pages of text to insert into the books’s Read Excerpt section.
Your book’s USD Retail Price can be listed at the top of this Synopsis page.
If your book has reviews available on the web, please list the links at the bottom of this page. We will link out to them if at all possible.
If you have a large number of books to submit you can also list your retail prices in a spreadsheet.
Your Introduction: We would like for you to tell us a little bit about yourself. One or two paragraphs is really all that is necessary. Your introduction will top your landing page on our site and all of your books will be listed below it. If you have a series of books then we will list those first with other non-series titles afterwards. You only need to give us an Introduction once but please put it in a separate text file so we can easily find it.
Package
Package up all of the following files into a zip file and send it to us in email at submissions@hard-boiled-books.com
Alternatively put each zip file into a Dropbox folder and give us access to that folder.
Put each book with all of its files into a separate zip file!!!
We will need all of the required files to proceed. The files needed are:
- .epub file and/or .pdf file
- Cover file
- Thumbnail file
- Synopsis file
- Introduction file (if necessary)
- Your PayPal payment email address
If you have any questions regarding the above please contact us at submissions@hard-boiled-books.com
Thank you,
Hard Boiled Books
