If you write stories that sit comfortably in high fantasy or hard science fiction, you usually know exactly where your book belongs in a store. You know your tropes, you know your audience, and your world-building probably involves a detailed map or a complex system of magic.

But here at Crimson Crow Press, we look for something a little different. Our submission guidelines specifically ask for speculative fiction, magical realism, and character-driven genre fiction.

We get a lot of emails from writers asking us to define that line. They worry their book is “too weird” for literary fiction, but “not nerdy enough” for traditional sci-fi. If that sounds like your writing, you are likely writing character-driven speculative fiction.

Here is exactly what that means to our editorial team—and how to make sure your query hits the mark.

The Core Difference: Microscope vs. Telescope

Traditional genre fiction often uses a telescope. It looks outward at massive worlds, sprawling political empires, galactic wars, or continent-spanning quests. The setting itself is often the main attraction.

Character-driven speculative fiction uses a microscope. We still want the strange, the surreal, and the impossible, but we want to view those elements through the narrow lens of human emotion. The speculative element exists to expose or amplify a character’s internal struggle, not just to look cool on the page.

• Traditional Genre: A story about a secondary world where people can trade memories as currency, focusing on a heist to steal the king’s vault.
• Character-Driven Speculative: A story about a grieving daughter who sells her own memories of her mother just to afford her rent, exploring the psychological toll of erasing her own past.

Both stories use the exact same magical premise. But the second one prioritizes human messiness over plot mechanics. That is the Crimson Crow sweet spot.

Tropes are Tools, Not Blueprints

We love ghosts, time travel, altered realities, and strange folklore. However, we lose interest when a manuscript treats these elements like a checklist.

If your main character travels through time, we care less about the physics of the paradox and far more about the isolation of leaving everyone they love behind. If your story features a haunted house, the ghost should be a manifestation of the protagonist’s unaddressed trauma or guilt, rather than just a monster jumping out of a closet.

When you are pitching to us, don’t spend three paragraphs of your query explaining the history of your fictional world. Tell us what your characters are losing, what they are fighting for, and how the strange rules of their world force them to change.

How to Frame This in Your Query

When you write your pitch for Crimson Crow Press, let us see the emotional heart of the book first. You can ground your speculative elements easily by using your query’s logline to link the “weird” mechanic to the character’s internal stakes.

• Instead of: “In a world where shadows can talk, Marcus must navigate a dangerous underground society.”
• Try: “Haunted by his brother’s recent death, a reclusive archivist cuts a deal with his own shadow to uncover the secrets of the afterlife, risking his remaining sanity in the process.”

We want to publish books that linger in a reader’s mind because of how they made them feel, using the speculative elements as the catalyst for that emotion. If you have a manuscript that scratches that specific itch, our inbox is waiting.