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New Sheriff in Town – Riptide Publishing

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On October 30 Riptide Publishing will open its doors for all those M/M readers looking for something new and different. This is what their PR announcement says:

“We are a boutique purveyor of some of the finest gay fiction, romance, and erotica available today. Riptide Publishing seeks to fill a critical niche in the M/M market.”

Riptide promises: “quality books, pristinely packaged, that will satisfy readers’ desires for rich, plotty, well-edited stories.”

The company is co-owned by Rachael Haimowitz, Managing Editor; Aleksandr Voinov, Senior Editor; and Chris Hawkins, Marketing Director.

The authors currently under contract include L.A. Witt, Damon Suede, Peter Hansen, Andrea Speed, Cat Grant, Storm Grant, Brita Addams, Bryl Tyne,  Rhianon Etzweiler, Kari Gregg and of course Rachel and Aleks. The Art Director is L.C. Chase.

Books can be pre-ordered starting tomorrow, October 1.

For more information check out Riptide’s website.

Website: http://riptidepublishing.com

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40 comments

  • I’m excited by the entry of Riptide into the market, it’s always good to have publishers who recognize the need for a quality product.

    I’ve been to the website a few times and really like the way it’s organized. The FAQ answered my questions, (glad they take Paypal!)
    Great authors on board and I’m ready to place some orders, so glad I can preorder!

    • I’ve read a couple of the books that are being provided for review and so far I’m impressed with the editing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this quality will continue as they get more authors on board and the editors become extremely busy with the slush pile.

      • We don’t actually have a slush pile, as we’re invitation-only (but we go out there and invite authors, who are often happy to give us a shot).

        We *will* open four open submission calls very soon (I’ve just finished writing up my two), but by then we have another editor on board, and I’m in talks with a couple freelancers with relevant experience in mainstream editing/book design and who’ve been working at literary agencies. We hope to close a couple deals very shortly.

        We’re aware that the real danger for a start-up is in growing too fast and then imploding because the structure/processes can’t support this. We’ve put in a number of failsafes to make sure that doesn’t happen with us. We’ll only grow as fast as is sustainable for us – we owe that much to our authors and readers.

        • Aleks

          I as well as other M/M readers wish you well but we will be looking for the telltale signs of growing beyond your capacity to put out a quality product. M/M readers are concerned about what we see as a downward trend in the quality of our books and we hope that Riptide will help to turn that tide.

          I know it’s a lot to put on your virtual shoulders but your marketing materials stress quality books that are well edited, and we’ll hold you to that. 😀

          • Wave – I agree with you on the “downward trend”. I have so many grievances with the genre and the overall industry I’d have fodder for hundreds of blog posts. But as they say “don’t bitch about the darkness – light a damned candle.”

            We don’t think we’re the only ones, though. There are a number of – often smaller – indie houses that put out terrific quality but don’t get quite the exposure that “author mills” get that just churn through dozens of releases a week and hundreds of authors.

            This much I promise: We’ll never be an author mill. Every author gets a maximum of support and plenty love and attention. I’m constantly talking to “my” authors about their works-in-progress. This means, naturally, that I can’t look after a hundred authors, so there’s a natural limit of growth.

            The other limit is editors. We expect our editors to have so many skills that we’re basically looking for unicorns (I’ve worked with a few, so I know they are out there). They have to be people who can analyse a story, a writer’s style and suggest improvements and fixes – in a concrete way taking the author by the hand and guiding them through it, if required. (A lot of authors need that support, others do very well without it.)

            Getting somebody who can do developmental edits and copy-editing and who also enjoys the coaching/teaching/support side isn’t easy. Another important element is that they have to see eye-to-eye with the other editors (in this case, Rachel and me), since we’re putting two editors on every single text, and then a proofer.

            We hope to hire a full editor come November, but we’ll probably never hire 20-30 freelancers churning through hundreds of manuscripts a month. Others do that with great success and often solid to good results, but it’s not our model.

          • We don’t think we’re the only ones, though. There are a number of – often smaller – indie houses that put out terrific quality but don’t get quite the exposure that “author mills” get that just churn through dozens of releases a week and hundreds of authors.

            There are some small indie houses that impress me and a couple of them are:-

            JCP Books; and
            Storm Moon Press

            Of course there are others but those two come to mind because I have read a lot of their books, especially JCP Books. There seems to be a direct correlation to volume, a lack of editing staff and poor quality books released, so I’m happy to hear that Riptide is emphasizing editing above volume. That’s not to say that some large scale epublishers are not doing a good job – a few of them are – and I try to avoid the rest.

          • Wave – exactly, those come immediately to mind, and we think they do great work. There are probably many more that do excellent work (and that I don’t know of). I’ve also had great experiences with bigger houses (especially Carina and Samhain) and have excellent books put out by those.

            Others have gone through such an appalling drop in quality that I’m reluctant to buy anything from them.

            So, yes, we’d be happy in any line-up with the high-quality boutiques.

          • We’ll be working hard as ever to keep to this promise, and we WANT readers to hold us to it. I’m sure people will still find the rare proofing error (even in Manhattan editing, the general “acceptable error rate” is three or four typos in 100 pages; it’s basically impossible to catch everything without a dozen proofing passes), but our intent is never to leave a reader scratching his or her head about a character or plot development or a turn of phrase. Strong developmental and line edits are sadly absent through much of our genre, and we mean to bring them back and do them right.

          • Hi Rachel
            I don’t think we expect perfection and a reasonable error rate of 3% is fine. I’m more concerned with the gross editing errors many readers are complaining about and a lack of plot in M/M books. Some authors seem to feel that these books are erotica rather than erotic and they don’t even bother with a plot. Sex is great but it shouldn’t be used to cover up plot deficiencies as well as characters who aren’t realistically drawn, even if the protagonist is a vampire or werewolf. 🙂

            We wish you well and will definitely hold you to your commitments.

            BTW I love the website.

          • Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, and therein our focus lies. We are doing some pure erotica, but they’re generally shorts under 10,000 words–Riptide Wet Dreams, we call them–and even those must be grounded in careful setups and exceptionally well written. The Romeo Club series by Brita Addams comes to mind in this regard–top-notch one-handed reading in a single-sitting bite with no absurdities to pull you from the story.

    • Thanks for your kind words. We’ve agonized over the website, and the next stage that should go live very soon is going to provide even more features. We’re dedicated to provide a website people actually like using and that provides all the information you need to make an “educated buying decision”, to lapse into corporate speak for a moment.

      Quality-wise… I’ve *never* been edited like at Riptide (exception being my print books, but those were from Random House and others). I thought I was a strong writer, but Rachel ripped the guts out of my story and made me put them back in. It was worth it, but that’s old-school editing at its finest.

      • Seconding this–that was some INTENSIVE editing.

        Not everything Riptide puts out is going to be to my tastes; although I’m a kinky bastard, I just don’t have the wherewithal for *every* kink. I have faith, though, that every story will be good on its own terms.

        • Yeah, but working so hard on a text is fun. It’s just about unlocking all the potential in there and really make it shine. And your story is brilliant. I can’t wait what people will say about “First Watch”.

      • Thirding on the editing here!

        Aleks and Rachel put me through the mill – but it was entirely worth it. I honestly think Once a Marine is the best book I’ve published to date.

  • I am excited and supportive of the new publishing house. I too liked what I viewed at the web site.

    I signed up for your news letter so I’ll be able to stay up-dated on what’s available.

    Wishing your staff the best!!!

  • Another Riptide First Waver here, who has been through the editing process. I’ve had nothing but comma policemen before and the experience was intense as they tore bad habits out of my writing, much like giving birth 😮 but ultimately, the time spent on a 6k short was well worth the effort. Across the board, the attention to detail is amazing. I can’t wait to read every one of the Riptide titles.
    As a reader, I’m ready for a change.

      • Hi Abigail – hah, that would be a good explanation (but the name was more about dynamics and force and power than disembowelment… 🙂 but it FITS!)

        BTW, I’d *adore* having you in our Second Wave of authors (which we’ll announce soon). If you have anything ready or almost ready (damn, I’d take a partial from you), drop me a line at aleks at riptidepublishing dot com? I’m happy to answer any question you might have.

  • This is very exciting news Wave. Thanks for bringing it to everyone’s attention. I am looking forward to reading books with good plots and minimal editing issues. I wish them great success!

  • This sounds very promising! Great to see that quality is so important, a lot of publishers start to loose a lot of this… I will definitely keep an eye on this new publisher *ehm, I looked this up in the dictionary, I don’t mean it in a spying way :P*. I wish you all a lot of succes!

    • Hi Judi – thanks for commenting! We’ve been waiting for months now, so I feel your pain there. It’s very exciting.

      If you want to have a look around, our new website went up last night – plenty of excerpts, warnings, covers, and you can even pre-order (and win a year’s supply of books):

      http://riptidepublishing.com/

      Good luck!

  • Good luck, publisher with quality editing certainly sounds very attractive :). I have to say while so far I have not found too many books on your site that I want to preorder – only because of the subjects not because I dislike the writing of the authors you have, quite the contrary, but I am sure more variety will be coming soon, so far I really really like your website. That is from somebody who is so not a technical person. Oh yeah, so I am preordering Damon Suede’s book and I Love how you do warnings. Absolutely awesome and many publishers can heed your example IMO. Warning is something that is truly a warning, something triggering and you put everything else under additional details, and say that it may be spoilerish. And you give the type of the ending too under those details. OMG thank you.

    • Hi Sirius 🙂

      Funny enough, the impetus for that very careful warning/tagging system came from right here at Jessewave. There’s been more than one excellent conversation on Jessewave about how some people find all warnings spoilery and others very much want them. Our own team had several long discussions about this and decided that we’d warn clearly–not under a tabbed view, in other words–for dubious consent, non-consent, drug use, explicit violence, and heavy kink. If you then wanted to see what KIND of heavy kink, say, you’d need to click the “additional info” tab, and then make the conscious choice to toggle the kink list open. And since some people only like to read books with HEAs or HFNs, and some people don’t want to read a book where someone cheats on someone else, etc etc, while others would find that so spoilery as to ruin the reader experience, we decided to make all that information available under a toggle too. That way everyone gets to see exactly as little or as much about the book as they want to. We’re really proud of that display, and afaik, we’re the only ones out there doing it. Frankly, I’d love to see other pubs implement similar systems for my own shopping pleasure 🙂

      • I absolutely think that it is a perfect solution to the warnings system, Rachel – for me anyway. Warn for something that most readers want to be warned about and everything else goes under spoilers and who wants to look (Me) will look. And OMG, you do not have this crazy warning for m/m sexual practices. So yeah, love it and hehe, found two more books to preorder. Go me 🙂

        And yes, I wish other publishers will do something like this. Because it would have been so much better IMO than what we have from lets say Dreamspinner who does not warn for anything, and for example Amber allure who warns for anything under the sun that IMO does not require any warnings.

        • I totally do not get why M/M sexual practices is a thing you need to WARN people about. I mean, whut?

          Especially since we’re, you know, a GAY publisher :-p Obviously our explicit books will have gay sex in them!

          But sometimes, IDK, I think back on, say, Infected: Bloodlines, which was a BRILLIANT book, I loved loved loved it to pieces, and I wonder if I’d ever have actually read it if DSP had warned me for the Very Big And Upsetting Thing That Happens. In that case I probably would have anyway because I enjoyed Infected: Prey enough to pick up book 2 in the series (and let’s face it, that ending was not exactly a shock), but if that had been the first book in the series? I really don’t know if I would have read it, and I’d have missed a brilliant book. So we actually really agonized over even putting the Serious Warnings out in the open. But in the end we decided that if really broadly triggery warnings were under a cut, we’d run into the possibility that someone wouldn’t notice them and then have a very upsetting experience, and it just wasn’t worth the risk.

  • Looking forward to this new publisher. I’m wishing for long, plotty, mystery and suspect, dangerous endearing gun toting guys, clever dialogue, wit and a touch of romance. Is that too much to ask for? 😉

    • Oh, I’d love a good mystery or thriller, absolutely. But yes, our books are definitely pretty plotty on average. We don’t believe that “two guys meet, falls instantly in love and fuck” is enough plot for anything but a short erotica story.

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