The Skullgate Team
We're writers and friends pooling our skills and resources to publish awesome book.
Basically, we're the Avengers. Just without superpowers and more em dashes.
A Writer-Owned Publishing Collective
Skullgate Media is a member-owned publishing collective. Our goal is to publish exciting and innovative fiction across a wide range of genres with a focus on speculative fiction, weird fiction, and sci-fi fantasy. We value friendly collaboration, wild imagination, and shared worlds, with the general belief that the best way for authors to succeed is to help one another. Instead of working in isolation, the members of Skullgate media have come together to pool our experience and various skill sets in order to complete the entire publishing process in-house: from drafting and beta-reading, to layout and copy-editing, to website design and marketing.
While we pride ourselves in creating professional quality work, we are NOT a professional market at this time. This is a labor of love for all involved—the owner-members and the writers we work with. We do pay what the industry defines as "token payments" to our authors and our goal is to eventually be able to pay semi-pro or even professional rates. In the meantime, we are working to put in place profit-sharing to ensure anyone we work with receives a fair percentage of any profits we make. While we are technically a "publishing company," what we are is a collective, a passion project run by friends wanting to make great books.
The Skullgate Origin Story
Skullgate Media was born during the creation of the first volume of Tales From the Year Between. An impulsive tweet by Chris Vandyke was meant to start a fly-by-night, casual literary anthology, but quickly became a serious, professional level publication. Some of the contributors realized that while they loved writing for the book, they loved working together on the project on its own. It soon became clear that they had ambitions and ideas that a single anthology could not contain.
What We've Done
In August of 2020, we published the first volume of Tales From the Year Between: Achten Tan: Land of Dust & Bone. It debuted at #38 in Fantasy Anthologies in the UK and #83 in the US, and was listed as a "Hot New Release" on Amazon.com.
Since then we've published four more anthologies (Under New Suns, In the Wake of the Kraken, Loathsome Voyages, and
Winter Wonders) as well as novels (Each Little Universe,
Speechless in Achten Tan, and Michael D. Nadeau's Lythinall fantasy trilogy). We are always looking for new, exciting, and off-beat projects to pursue.
A Note on Diversity
Skullgate Media values diversity, inclusion, and the entire range of human experience and identity. We will not associate with anyone who promotes ideas that we deem to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fat-phobic, abelist, anti-immigrant or (insert long list of other offensive world-views here). We put pronouns in our bios. Basically if you don't like "liberal, PC snowflakes" we won't get along. Everyone else is cool.
