Bookstore Partnership Program

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Bookstore Partnership Program ◈

Fortuna Major is dedicated to changing

who and what belongs

within the publishing landscape.

Become A Partner

Our Model

Investing In Each Other

Independent authors are often asked to carry the weight alone: printing costs, promotion, unsold inventory, and financial uncertainty. We’re imagining something different. Fortuna Major Bookstore uses a partnership model. Instead of asking writers to absorb all of the financial risk in exchange for visibility, we’ll purchase a small number of copies outright at wholesale price.

Making Room

We know that many writers are building their work alongside day jobs, caregiving, survival, and countless unseen forms of labor. Access to literary space should not belong only to those with the resources to absorb loss. By purchasing copies upfront, we hope to lower at least one barrier and make a little more room for emerging voices and experimental work.

Cultivating Care

We see bookstores as part of a larger creative constellation, one given shape by reciprocity, trust, and collective imagination. This model reflects our belief that independent publishing communities grow stronger when risk, support, and opportunity are shared more intentionally.

We center authors whose lived experiences align with LGBTQ2S+, BIPOC, and Disabled, Mad, or Neurodivergent communities, with a special focus on those rooted in the Northeast of Turtle Island.

What We’re Looking For

Rooted in Lived Experience

Fortuna Major intentionally prioritizes work by LGBTQ2S+, BIPOC, Disabled, Mad, and Neurodivergent authors, especially those building outside of traditional literary and academic institutions. We are also especially interested in supporting writers local to the Northeast region, though this is not a strict limitation. We are drawn toward work carrying curiosity, friction, intimacy, and a sense of relation to something larger than itself.

Beyond the Mainstream

We are open to a wide range of genres, especially work resisting neat categorization. Fortuna Major tends to gravitate toward poetry, memoir, literary fiction, hybrid work, small press experimentation, and books that blur the lines between scholarship, art, spirituality, and lived experience. We often find ourselves drawn toward themes of collective care, disability, queerness, ancestry, healing, folklore, political imagination, sexuality, grief, mythology, ecology, ritual, and transformation — though these are not requirements so much as recurring threads within the work we love most.

A Beginning, Not a Guarantee

Every submission is reviewed with care, curiosity, and attention to how it may weave into the larger constellation of stories, projects, and community relationships already unfolding through Fortuna Major. Your submission is a beginning, not a guarantee. We encourage prospective partners to spend time with our guiding values before submitting, so you can get a feel for the creative ecosystems we are cultivating.

No generative AI, no synthetic storytelling. Fortuna Major is only interested in work created through human imagination, labor, and lived experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • We are a bookstore that centers the work of marginalized creatives. We welcome the work of self-published authors and small presses, as well as those creating zines and chapbooks.

  • Hardcover, paperback, magazines, zines/chapbooks. Others on a case-by-case basis.

  • While there is some room for case-by-case flexibility, you will generally need:

    • For standard books: an ISBN

    • For magazines: an ISSN

    • For zines and chapbooks: neither

    If you have questions about what your work may or may not need, please email fortunamajorcreativeco@gmail.com.

  • Yes, you may, with some stipulations.

    • You must fill out the partnership form separately for each issue you’d like to have considered

    • You should submit no more than 3 titles at a time (regardless of format) and wait 4 months before submitting again

  • Yes. However, our partnership program requires wholesale pricing availability. Terms are negotiable.

  • This program operates under a direct purchase model, meaning we pay you the wholesale cost for your title up front. You will ship or drop off your titles after we make our purchase. Payment methods are negotiable.

  • Generally speaking, wholesale rates in the publishing industry vary between 40-55% off the listed retail price.

    That said, we are open to negotiation to make this program accessible to all. If accepted to the partnership program, you will have the opportunity to share what would work best for you, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

  • A goal of our bookstore is to highlight many creatives rather than just a few. As a result, we will likely rotate what we stock. That said, we are likely to re-purchase books that sell well.

  • Upon acceptance to the partnership program, a private address will be provided to you for shipping via email (and stipulated in our partnership contract).

  • We build our store on relationships and work we believe in. Your titles will be promoted at markets and pop-up events. They may also be promoted on social media and our newsletter as capacity allows.

Become A Partner

Shaping Narratives.

Invoking Power.