Better Than Starbucks
  Poetry & Fiction Journal

We do not charge reading fees or submission fees. 

Please do not submit more than two manuscripts per year. 

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We consider full length book manuscripts of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction (100+ pages).

Creative nonfiction includes essays, memoirs, philosophy, writing/poetry craft, history, biography.

We consider chap book length manuscripts for poetry (50 - 99 pages).

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We do not consider plays, screenplays, movie scripts, etc.

We do not consider cook books, physical how-to books, hard science or math.

We do not consider graphic novels.

We do not consider sex or fetish books.

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Our preference is for works that are engaging, entertaining, interesting, informative, and/or transcending. We want readers to forget about the world and become immersed in the book.

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We prefer works that illustrate some aspect of the human condition and which elicit a personal response or connection from the reader.

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We do not publish works with a thematic emphasis that pontificates, proselytizes, or pushes religion, partisan politics, beliefs, and/or ideologies on the reader. However, we understand characters in books obviously have their own wide range of beliefs and ideologies and that is absolutely essential to a good book and character development. Exploration of life, and life-principles, and/or philosophic musings are welcome.

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We welcome dark or controversial themes, but we do not publish works that are thematically salacious, hateful, or gory (just to be gory). We reserve the right to determine what is salacious, hateful, and gory.

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​We prefer books of 100+ pages, single spaced, including front and back matter such as TOC, foreword or introduction, credit pages, etc.

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Poetry manuscripts must be complete with poems in the exact order in which you want them to appear in the book.

 

If you want your book to have a table of contents, foreword, introduction, index, or any other front and back matter, you must supply it with the book. We will add page numbers to TOCs and indices once the layout is complete. 

 

​Remember to give first publication credits to all works that have been published before so we can properly attribute them.

 

Please send your full manuscript (no samples please) in MS Word (.doc or .docx.) format.

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Name your file with your last name, the number of manuscripts you have submitted to BTS to date, and the genre of your submission.

 

For example, if it is your second ms submission and the content is poetry, label it Smith2 Poetry Manuscript.  

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Please single space poems, double space between stanzas, and format poems as you would like them to appear. Please send a high resolution image of your shape/concrete poems so we know how they are supposed to appear. 

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Include in your email:

• Your real name.

• Your pen name (if any).

• Your biography.

• Number of words or pages.

• Your real physical address (Not work or your PO box.)

• Your mailing address (if different).

• Your email address.

• Your phone number.

 

​​Include a cover letter with a brief synopsis in your email and attach your manuscript as a .doc or .docx document then send to: betterthanstarbucks2@gmail.com​.

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We will acknowledge your submission in 1 to 3 days. 

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Please allow up to 90 days for us to read your manuscript and respond. Do not enquire on the status of your manuscript until 90 days after the submission acknowledgment.  

 

If we accept your manuscript for publication, we will work closely with you throughout the editing, layout, and design process. You will have input on the book size and cover design. Interior formatting is, by default, in the same style as our journal, although alterations can be made if appropriate to the work.

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Author receives a print proof (or more than one if required) and ten author’s copies upon publication.

Author may also purchase additional copies at a discounted cost.

Royalties from the sale of each book will be paid semi-annually via PayPal.

Amount of royalties to be determined based on the length and associated cost of the book, retail price agreed on, etc.

Royalties on sales through BTS/Lulu will be much higher than on sales through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

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Please note: Although our physical address is in the US, we are an international publisher. As such, all our payments to authors and contributors are made via PayPal. 

 

You must have a functional PayPal account to receive author’s share of the sales of any book we publish.

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Please realize that resources are finite, capacity is finite, and time is finite—therefore we cannot physically publish more than about 8-12 works per year. We may have 50 submissions at any given time. If your work gets declined, it is not necessarily because it was deficient in any way, we just had to choose a limited number of manuscripts to work with. So, you may get a declination simply because we have reached our limit of manuscripts to work with for the year.