Welcome to Nightingale Press.
This is your formal invitation.
A message from our founder and publisher.
* please don’t actually sue us.
I don’t know about you, but I’m done waiting for an invitation to a house that’s falling apart.
Hear me out here.
Most traditional publishers spend their time scanning query trends and chasing comp titles. They want to know if the market is ready for “another one of these” or if you have enough TikTok followers to do their marketing for them. Frankly—the traditional approach has confused, dumbfounded, and left me utterly distraught.
Probably because I am far from “traditional.”
So we’re going a different route, and building this using a super secret combination that gives me an irrational (borderline institutional) commitment to disrupting an industry that has become a not-so-polite pyramid scheme.
The unholy trinity of internet access, autism, and a few friends that believe in you a little too much.
What We’re Looking For
Despite what the description “dark fiction press” might suggest, we’re not locked into one shelf.
The goal is to specialize in the dark stuff—grimdark, psychological horror, visceral storytelling that makes gatekeepers uncomfy—while also doing special edition prints for cozy, comfy, noblebright genres. Because the thing we’re actually hungry for isn’t a genre. It’s an author. The author.
You.
Don’t make it weird.
We want writers who are obsessive about their craft. Writers who revise until their fingertips bleed and then revise again. Writers who would keep writing even if no one ever read a word, because they can’t stop. The quality of the work matters—obviously—but we have great editors and developmental readers for that. What we can’t teach someone is how to care.
If you care the way I care, we should talk.
My Qualifications (or lack thereof)
Me, personally? I’m no editor. My degree is unrelated to literature. What I actually have—aside from a general disdain for the English language, social media, and marketing alike, useless, I know—is experience. I know what it’s like to be in your shoes.
I am a writer—one who spent the last year on Substack writing dark speculative fiction, psychological horror, and whatever other unhinged thing crawls out of my brain at 2 AM. I curate a Book Shop of indie Substack authors. I published an anthology. I’ve spent more time promoting other writers than I have promoting myself, and I’d do it again, because that’s the whole point. And along the way, I accidentally built a community of over a thousand readers. That’s not nothing.
The rest of the team is much more qualified: an editor with a screenwriting background, a decade-deep professional designer and marketing strategist, a software engineer who is also a published author, and a ground operations coordinator. That’s just the crew so far.
Two of them are based in Europe, which matters more than it sounds when we get to international distribution.
Again, this is still coming together. I just can’t keep my mouth shut and thrive under the persistent nagging pressure that comes with the possibility of letting people down. I call this accountability. My therapist calls it trauma.
Apples, potatoes.
Now Let’s Talk Money
In traditional publishing, an author typically earns somewhere between 7% and 15% on print sales. For a $20 paperback at 10%, that’s $2 per copy. And you probably won’t see any of that until your book earns back the advance—which, statistically, most books never do. So for a lot of authors, the advance is the only money they’ll ever see. Don’t quote me on that. It varies.
Nightingale Press plans to split revenue 50/50, as well as cover production costs. That’s the plan at least. (See: Donating to the cause).
The downside: There is no advance to earn back.
The upside: When your book sells, you get paid. Period.
We want to do it like this because we want to work with authors, not just on projects. In other words: No more transactions. 2026 is the year of commitments.
More info to follow.
The legal infrastructure is still coming together and submissions aren’t open yet. I’m still figuring out the boring logistics from my kitchen table, but the vision is locked. Prestige-level work and fair pay for writers who plan to be around for a long time.
If you’d like to donate to the cause—we’re all working for free; if I keep this up too long, the others might vote to eat me—you can use the PayPal link below.
If you can’t donate (or don’t want to—I get it), share this post. Spread the word. And while you’re here, subscribe to our Substack or follow us on Bluesky.
We’ll be in touch.
—The Narrator.