Are you tired of querying into the void? Annoyed by the delays in placing your work? Or just eager for detailed and constructive face-to-face feedback from an actual publisher, at a schedule of YOUR choosing? We’re offering a luxury submission and critique process—a chance to avoid the void. (And possibly place your work.)

If you submit via this process, we will not only make a decision on your work within four weeks—we’ll also schedule a half-hour Zoom feedback session to discuss it in detail. If the work is not to our liking, we’ll let you know why it wasn’t a good fit, where we lost interest, what we liked about your writing, and what you may want to do to improve it, and will provide a page of written notes about characters, plot, and dialogue. If it is a good fit, we’ll determine what work needs to be done to sign a publication agreement—and once that’s in place and the book is on our release calendar, we’ll refund the submission fee. (As of August, 2026, we have signed publication agreements for five of the thirty-one manuscripts submitted via this process—including two of our six 2026 titles.)

Interested? Let’s GO!

"I had been sending out queries for my novel with no luck. I was not sure if I had a product, and I was not sure if I was selling it well, but I didn't know how to get those answers. When I saw Tortoise Books offered a submission critique service, I was happy to pay for that insight and feedback. What I did not expect was an offer to publish my book!" — Bristol Vaudrin, author of Afterward, launched in November of 2024

“When I finished writing my memoir, I began querying agents and small publishing houses. 95% of the query letters I sent out disappeared into the void without so much as a rejection notice. So I decided to reach out to editors to get some feedback on my manuscript; I thought maybe they could provide some insight into why I wasn’t getting responses. But the cost was way out of my price range: most charged well over $5,000 after factoring in word count and hourly labor costs.

Then I discovered Tortoise Books.

For an affordable price, I was guaranteed critical feedback from a publishing professional within four weeks. On the day of my Skype meeting with the publisher, I learned that he was interested in my memoir and wanted to publish it. Turns out, submitting my manuscript to Tortoise Books was one of the smartest decisions I ever made!” — Nathan Weidman, author of Thirty-Six Fighting Holes, forthcoming in November of 2026