Crooked Lane Books Submissions

Crooked Lane Books

(Novels, Crime Fiction, SS Occasionally)
crookedlanebooks.com
crookedlanebooks.com/submissions
inquiries@crookedlanebooks.com
#crookedlanebooks

Crooked Lane Books was founded in 2014 to publish the highest quality crime fiction titles in both print and electronic editions. They are distributed through Penguin Random House Publisher Services.

Crooked Lane Submissions

Crooked Lane accepts submissions from agented and unagented authors alike.

Crooked Lane publishes novels and an occasional short story collection. They do not publish individual short stories, novellas, or essay collections. Word count should be between 60,000 and 100,000.

What they are looking for:

– Genre
– Historical
– LGBTQ+
– Multicultural
– Young Adult: Mystery
– Non-fiction: True Crime

There is a longer list here
https://crookedlanebooks.com/submissions

Crooked Lane 2025 titles

– What the Dead Can Do
– Death at an Irish Village
– Not Who You Think
– A Lonesome Place for Murder
– The Mango Murders

2026 titles

– The Devil in the Details by Vicki Delany
– A Deadly Clue by Victoria Gilbert
– A Field Guide to Murder by Michelle L. Cullen
– Where the Truth Lies by Katherine Greene
– DIG by James Markert

Meet the Editors

Faith Black Ross (Senior Editor) – Faith has been with Crooked Lane Books since 2016 after more than a decade in publishing. Previously she handled mysteries and historical fiction for the Berkley Publishing Group (Penguin Random House). She is particularly interested in mystery projects with strong voices, precocious protagonists, and a touch of humor—dark humor included.

For Crooked Lane, Faith is looking for book club fiction, traditional mysteries, and cozies of all shapes and sizes, historical and international mysteries, amateur and female sleuths, as well as thrillers, particularly those of a psychological, suspenseful, upmarket and/or historical variety.

Melissa Rechter (Editor/Acquisitions Manager) – Melissa joined Crooked Lane Books in 2019. She has had the pleasure of working with ITW nominees, New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, as well as a myriad of talented writers. For Crooked Lane, she is looking for cozy mysteries, psychological thrillers, horror– either social or psychological– a la Jordan Peele’s Get Out or When No One is Watching, and historical mysteries with a feminist bent.

Marcia Markland (Editor) Marcia thinks crime fiction writers in general are a most admirable and ingenious bunch, and she is grateful to have been following their literary escapades for a lot of years with acquiring editor jobs at The Mystery Guild and St. Martin’s.

Meet the rest of the team.

Crooked Lane in the news…

Spotify Partners with Crooked Lane

Spotify Audiobooks has entered into an exclusive audiobook publishing partnership with Crooked Lane Books/Alcove Press, a leading publisher spanning commercial fiction genres and select non-fiction.

Under the partnership, Spotify Audiobooks will publish titles from Crooked Lane and Alcove’s frontlist catalogs beginning March 2025. Titles will be distributed widely on Spotify via Spotify’s Audiobooks in Premium offering and available to purchase a la carte, as well as across more than 30 other digital retail and library channels.

Spotify Audiobooks and Crooked Lane have partnered previously on multiple audio titles, including The Darkest Night edited by Lindy Ryan, I’ve Got My Mind Set on Brew by Stephanie Jayne, and A Dream in the Dark by Robert Justice.

See if your book fits in with these Crooked Lane titles.

Crooked Lane Books
34 W 27th St, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
USA

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