ED- We are talking with Daniel J. Reitz, Sr. of Mundania Press. Daniel please tell our readers about your Publishing House.
DJR- Mundania Press LLC has four active imprints, Mundania Press, Phaze Books, Awe-Struck Publishing, and Hard Shell Word Factory. Mundania was established in August 2002, Phaze came online December 2004. Both Awe-Struck Publisher and Hard Shell Word Factory have been in business for well over 10-12 years and are two of the oldest ePublishers in existence. We acquired Awe-Struck Publishing in January 2009 and Hard Shell Word Factory in September 2009.
ED- What type of genre does Mundania Press represent?
DJR- Mundania Press carries primarily Science Fiction, Fantasy (including Dark and Urban), Horror, Mystery, and some Paranormal Romance. We’re even looking for steam-punk now as that is getting popular again. Awe-Struck is all varieties of romance, except erotica. Phaze Books handles Women’s Erotic Romance and Erotica, and Hard Shell Word Factory currently handles all genres including all fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s and young adults books.
ED- In what format do you release your publications in?
DJR- We release most books in both trade paperback and ebook formats. Some releases are ebook only such as short stories or small novellas. We also release some books in hardcover as well as some signed limited editions.
ED- Daniel, tell us about your writers and can you give us some of their names?
DJR- We currently have around 670 authors covering just about every conceivable genre, and we are very pleased to include several bestselling authors in our family, such as Piers Anthony, Robert Adams, Michele Bardsley, MaryJanice Davidson, Anne Logston, Don Callander, Louise Cooper, Frank O’Rourke, Kate Burns, Jeff Strand, Darrell Bain, and Elaine Corvidae just to name a few. We consider every author we have a star.
ED- As you may already guess, our readers love reading mysteries and stories about ‘things that go bump in the night’. How do you believe these current genres will do in the future?
DJR- One of our authors, Jeff Strand, specializes in comedic horror (think Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (or more like Kevin James meets Freddy/Jason/Michael Myers). Recently, Jeff has been doing quite a few limited edition books with publishing houses that specialize in limited edition horror novels. Some of these books are very limited with extreme binding and packaging coming in such things as small coffins. These types of books, and the interest in horror genre in generally seems to be growing exponentially.
Mystery experienced high popularity in past decades, and while the mystery market seemed somewhat lean for a few years, this genre has also seen a resurgence of interest, especially when paired with the paranormal themes.
ED- Eerie Digest has started a program with eight Universities from coast-to-coast, to promote writing with their students. How can they contact you and what type of stories are you accepting?
DJR- Each of our imprints has its own website. Mundania Press is at www.mundania.com, Awe-Stuck is at www.awe-struck.net, Phaze Books is at www.phaze.com, and Hard Shell Word Factory is at www.hardshell.com. Each of the sites will have a “submissions” link that takes you to a page that lets you know if submissions are open, and what we are looking for specifically. An important point is to read through the submissions guidelines and follow them as exact as possible. If anyone has a question, they can send it to inquiry@mundania.com. The reason we have the submission guidelines is that we do receive a large number of submissions per month (up in the many hundreds) and we want to make sure we give each submissions the attention it deserves, so we have a system in place to process the submission and get it out to one of our editors for evaluation. We do need the entire manuscript to be finished and sent along with the cover letter email. We’ll also need a synopsis of your story, a few paragraphs up to a couple of pages. An author needs to peak our interest in his or her story. Their novel should grab us from the first page and make us not want to put the book down until we are finished. The submissions email address will be posted on each submission page.
ED- What words of encouragement can you offer to them about their future in writing?
DJR- Once a writer learns the mechanics of what makes a good book, develops the basic skills with grammar, spelling, punctuation, voice, tense, etc., they have a good basis for working on their novel. Take the time to master these mechanics. Publishing is a tough business and authors have a LOT of competition. Hundreds of thousands of new novels are published each year, chosen from millions and millions of submissions. An author must look at his or herself as an entertainer, and must compete for the shrinking entertainment dollars people have to spend in this economy. Even with all this doom and gloom, our authors tell us they write books because they HAVE to write. They cannot stop writing. With enough persistence, and the skills to develop a great book with characters that the reader cares about, and a story that grabs the reader, a writer can be successful. While your book may or may not be the next “Harry Potter,” someone out there is writing it right now. Learn all you can about the business of publishing, as well as the mechanics of writing. And keep writing!
ED- Daniel, we appreciate your time and I know that our readers will love hearing about you. We, at The Eerie Digest Magazine, wish you much luck and hope to hear more from you in the future.
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