We are a literary imprint that happens to live online — not a content platform that happens to publish stories.

I spent eleven years acquiring novels at Penguin Random House. I read twelve thousand manuscripts, fought for mid-list authors in rooms where nobody else would, and watched three of them win National Book Awards. I loved the work. I hated what was happening around it.

The algorithm ate the slush pile. The serialized novel — the form that gave us Dickens, Dostoevsky, Elena Ferrante — was being abandoned by every imprint that needed a quarterly earnings call. And the writers who used to make a living on chapter installments were migrating to platforms where the only criterion was "did the user scroll past the first paragraph." We were losing a craft tradition in exchange for a retention metric.

So in the spring of 2021, I signed the lease on a fourth-floor walkup in Williamsburg, hired eleven editors I had worked with across Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins, and we did something deliberately inefficient: we started reading slush again. Slowly. With red pens. Every Friday at 4pm, the twelve of us sit around a long oak table — in person when we can, on a grainy video grid when we can't — and we argue about sentences for three hours.

The numbers are not the point, but I'll share them because I know writers and press want to know them: we accept fewer than 6% of submissions each month. We have published 1,840 original serialized stories across fourteen genre categories. Forty-seven of our authors have been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, including Mira Solano, our 2024 Nebula finalist for The Cartographer of Sleeping Cities. Our readers spend an average of twenty-eight minutes per session — three-and-a-half times the industry benchmark — and 92% of them tell us they found a new favorite author in their first week.

If you are a writer considering us: we pay our authors well, we edit their work the way the Big Five used to, and 94% of our published authors land a paid deal or a screen adaptation within eighteen months of joining. If you are a reader: thank you for trusting us with your midnight hours. We take them seriously.

— Jack Mendelsohn
Editor-in-Chief & Founder · formerly Penguin Random House