Nightingale Press
For this installment, we’re talking to Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator , owner of Nightingale Press & Publishing. If you spend any time exploring fiction on Substack, chances are you’re familiar with her. She’s always out there promoting and supporting other writers. She’s also no slouch as an author herself. NP&P’s debut anthology, Les Oiseaux du Mal, is due out soon.
- Founded: 2026
- Founders: Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator/Tiffany
- Website: Nightingale Press & Publishing
- Substack: Nightingale Press & Publishing
- Publishes: Dark fiction (grimdark, psychological horror, etc.)
- Formats: Novels, novellas, anthologies, etc.
- Open to Submissions: Soon. Check out the guidelines here and subscribe to the newsletter to get the announcement about general submissions.
- Imprints: None beyond NP&P
- Contact: All requests: Contact
- Contests and Anthologies: Yes
- ARCs: Yes
If there’s one thing that’s become apparent through this series of spotlights, it’s that every small press is different. Getting your book out into the world through one requires more than just hitting the submit button over and over again. You need to find one that fits you and your story. So, let’s see what makes Nightingale Press & Publishing unique.
About the Press
Finish the sentence: this press exists because ______. What did you feel was missing, and were you right?
Nightingale Press exists because there has got to be a better way to do this shit. And by “this shit,” I mean traditional publishing.
The big presses treat authors like disposable content engines and readers like spreadsheets. What was missing was basic human respect paired with genuine craft. We wanted an environment where gorgeous, deeply unhinged dark fiction could be cared for with immense gentleness and zero corporate sanitization.
We were 100% right, as far as I can tell. But we’re still pretty early.
How many books do you put out in a year, and how many people does it take to do it?
We’re currently gearing up to release our inaugural anthology, Birds of Rot Vol. 1 — Ornithomancy and Other Bad Omens, before the end of the year.
We have a five-person team covering editorial, design, marketing, screenwriting, and administrative wizardry (myself, Laura, Johanna, Birdie, and Kitti Vi/Sal). We don’t run on an artificial quota. We publish based on the quality of the work and our capacity to treat each project like the precious, terrifying miracle it is. We move slower than the conglomerates on purpose; we’d rather do three titles with total devotion than churn out thirty half-hearted paperbacks.
Where do you stand on different lengths/formats, like novellas, collections, and anthologies?
We love them. Dark fiction often thrives in shorter, high-intensity formats. Novellas and anthologies get treated with the exact same prestige design and editorial care as standard novels.
Where do you sit in the genre? Any additional imprints for works that are solid but might fall into a different area?
We live squarely in dark fiction. No secondary imprints just to catch spillover. If a story doesn’t belong under our branch, we won’t pretend to be the right home for it. We do plan to accept special submissions outside our regular genre, but these will be few and far between.
What Are You Seeking?
Describe the book you’d sign tomorrow if it landed in the inbox this afternoon.
We want visceral body horror or eerie psychological tension that serves the characters rather than existing just for shock value. If you hand us a story featuring unhinged, morally bankrupt antiheroes navigating grief or rural decay with pitch-black humor and exquisite, deliberate prose, we’re clearing the afternoon schedule to sign it.
What do you get so much of that you’ve stopped being able to say yes, no matter how well it’s done?
Vampires and romantasy.
Truly, we genuinely appreciate both genres, and when they’re done well, they’re wildly entertaining. The problem is purely volume: our inbox gets flooded with them, and they tend to follow the exact same rhythm, character beats, and brooding tropes.
It’s reached a saturation point where it’s nearly impossible for a piece in those lanes to bring something new to our table, so we’ve stepped back from acquiring them entirely to make room for weirder, less charted territory.
What’s the fastest way for a submission to make you stop reading the query letter, and in the first five pages?
We’re actually big fans of skipping the traditional, agonizing query letter altogether and prefer running open pitch events.
When we open our general submissions, though, a letter or brief introduction becomes necessary. We don’t want the standard, cookie-cutter industry letter; you don’t need to stress over customizing it or pandering to us. Tell us whatever you genuinely think we need to know before we jump in.
Every single submission is read by a real person on our team, so please skip the soulless, AI-generated summary. We just want to read what you wrote.
In the first five pages: waking up to an alarm clock, staring into a mirror to rattle off an inventory of your hair and eye color, or rushing into immediate, detached gore before giving us a single reason to care about who is bleeding.
How Do Submissions Work?
Walk a writer through what happens after they submit. Who reads it first, how many passes does it take to get to yes, how long before they hear anything, and what does a “no” from you look like?
Submissions land in our intake portal, get stripped of identifying details for blind review, and go to our editorial team. If an editor connects with a piece, it moves forward to our full-team table read. For acceptance, it just needs to pass through our qualified editor, Sal. A reply, acceptance or rejection, is ALWAYS sent. We respect your time and effort too much to leave you hangin’.
Answer the four things writers are nervous about asking directly: simultaneous submissions, unagented work, reprints, and AI-generated or AI-assisted text. Where do you stand on each?
- Simultaneous submissions: Fine by us. Just email us the second someone else makes an offer so we can celebrate for you.
- Unagented work: Enthusiastically welcomed. We built this press specifically so brilliant writers don’t have to jump through traditional gatekeeping hoops.
- Reprints: Generally no, unless explicitly requested for a curated theme or retrospective call. We want fresh rot.
- AI-generated or AI-assisted text: Absolute zero-tolerance policy. If a human didn’t suffer, bleed, and draft every sentence from their own mortal brain, keep it out of our house.
Without naming any figure you’d rather not publish, describe what your standard contract looks like: which rights you take and for how long, whether there’s an advance, how royalties are calculated, reported and paid, and how an author gets their rights back, including if the press ever winds down.
We laid our exact math out publicly because secrecy only protects bad publishers.
- Advances & Royalties: We don’t do advances, which means you have zero unearned debt hanging over your head. We pay a clean 50/50 split of net receipts from copy one. When a copy sells—wholesale or direct through our storefront—the printing and payment processing fees come out, and we split whatever is left right down the middle. For a direct hardcover sale, that means you make roughly $8.50 a copy, compared to the $2.80 to $4.20 you’d scrape together in traditional publishing after earning out. Submitting is free; being published is free.
- Rights & Reversion: We license exclusive print and digital rights for a defined term, but the intellectual property stays yours. If a book goes out of print, or if Nightingale ever ceases operations, all publication rights immediately and cleanly revert to the author. You made it; you own it.
Print run or print-on-demand, and how does that decision affect what you can acquire?
We utilize high-grade print-on-demand through partners like IngramSpark for broad wholesale reach, combined with direct fulfillment for premium runs. It keeps our overhead lean, keeps books perpetually in stock, and ensures we can sign bold, unconventional work without needing a corporate hedge fund to foot upfront warehouse fees.
How much say does an author get over things (cover, final title, etc.) and where do you draw the line?
It is a genuine creative partnership. We talk through concepts, cover visual language, and title integrity together because nobody knows your story’s soul better than you do. Where do we draw the line? Legibility, print production realities, and market positioning. If your proposed title is forty syllables or your cover idea looks like a 2004 Microsoft Word flyer, we will gently, warmly save you from yourself.
What does your editorial process consist of, start to finish, and how long does it last on average from signed contract to finished book?
Once under contract, you get assigned a lead editor for deep developmental work. We provide comprehensive Story Docs—structural critiques focusing on pacing, psychological weight, and prose rhythm. From there, we move through line edits, proofing, interior typography, and cover packaging.
We’re still in the trenches bringing our inaugural project—the anthology—over the finish line, so we’ll have firmer calendar specifics once that run is complete.
This is also precisely why we have Brand Ambassadors. There is nothing in their contract requiring them to promote us or say glowing, curated things about working with our team. They are real writers walking through our ecosystem in real time, with full permission to be honest about the journey. So if you want to know more about what it’s like to work with us, you should check them out!
What’s Life Like for One of Your Authors?
Split the work of selling the book. Specifically, what does the press do for every title, and what is the author expected to do?
We handle cover design, interior formatting, ISBN registration, distribution setup (wholesale distribution plus our direct storefront), ARCs, press releases, social assets, and targeted promotional pushes across our platforms and newsletter.
We ask authors to do what feels organic to them: engage with their existing audience, share their excitement, and talk about the book. We don’t force anyone into rigid promotional quotas or hostage-style TikTok dances. The goal is to build a brand and storefront where our shared work actually pays you properly when people show up.
Who is this press wrong for? Describe the writer who’d be happier somewhere else.
Anyone looking for a purely passive transactional relationship or instant, mass-market airport fame. If you expect a publisher to drop your book into 5,000 grocery store kiosks while you never interact with readers, or if you view developmental feedback as a personal attack, you will be miserable here. We make dark art with nice people.
Last Call
What’s the one thing you wish more writers understood about small-press publishing?
Every single title is a labor of pure love and manual effort. There is no shadowy conglomerate pushing automated buttons; there are just five real people agonizing over margin widths, font ligatures, cover textures, and pitch emails at midnight. When you sign with an indie press, you’re joining a tiny, passionate crew rowing a boat together.
While NP&P is about to launch their first anthology, they’ll be opening for general submissions soon. Keep an eye on their website/Substack to be in the loop.
Make sure to subscribe to the Speakeasy to get the full spec-fic small press series in your inbox, and if you know of or run a small press that focuses on horror, sci-fi, or fantasy, let us know!
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