Adventure Book Publishers: Where to Submit

Adventure book publishers look for stories built on movement: a departure, a route, an obstacle that cannot be talked away. The marks are a journey with a stated goal, a setting that fights back, and a hero whose skills are tested rather than announced.

The main strands are sea stories, survival and wilderness narratives, treasure quests, exploration and lost-world tales, and historical adventure on trade routes and battlefields. Each changes what the hero can rely on: a crew, a map, a season, or nothing at all.

What is the difference between an adventure novel and a thriller?

A thriller runs on threat closing in: the bomb, the assassin, the clock. An adventure novel runs on distance and terrain, and the danger is often the world itself, a storm, a desert, a river. The two overlap in the survival subgenre, but shelving usually follows the engine: pursuit puts a book with thrillers, a journey puts it here.

What are the subgenres of adventure fiction?

Sea stories, survival and wilderness narratives, treasure quests, exploration and lost-world tales, and historical adventure set on trade routes or battlefields. Mountaineering fiction and castaway stories sit inside survival. Publishers often separate the historical strand from the contemporary one, since the research load differs.

Who are some of the best adventure book writers?

Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne are the landmarks most readers still start from, one for the sea and the double-cross, the other for the voyage into unmapped country. Their heirs write the same two shapes today: the expedition that goes wrong, and the hunt for something buried. Read them to see how much of a chapter can pass without dialogue.

Where do adventure novels sit next to historical and SF & Fantasy?

Historical adventure keeps the period accurate and the journey plausible, so the research carries the plot. SF and fantasy adventure keeps the journey but changes the rules of the world, which moves it to that shelf. Espionage takes the travel and adds an institution; adventure keeps the traveller alone.

An action and adventure editor reads for momentum and for cost. The chase has to be plotted before it is written: if the hero can leave the room whenever he likes, the scene has no engine. What separates a submission that works here from one that works at a crime or thriller house is the price of the journey. 

Treasure, a summit, a lost city, a passage home: the object must be worth the damage done getting to it, and the damage must be shown. Survival craft, weather, navigation, a wound that stays a wound for 200 pages. Readers of adventure fiction forgive a lot, but they do not forgive a rescue that arrives because the plot needs one.

Give the supporting cast their own reasons to be on the road, and let the landscape change the plan at least twice. That is the shape readers come back for.