We're Building a Roster
Midnight Carnival is looking for indie authors to bring to our events.
If you write dark, strange, or speculative fiction and you live within reach of Indianapolis or Chicago, we want to know who you are.
What this actually is
Midnight Carnival is a small independent publishing collective based in Indianapolis and Chicago. We put on author events, and every time we do, we run into the same problem: we know there are terrific indie authors twenty minutes away whose names we've never heard.
So instead of scrambling to fill a lineup every time a venue says yes, we're building a standing roster. You tell us who you are and what you write. When an event comes together that fits your work, we reach out.
That's the whole thing. It isn't an application you can fail, and there's no committee sitting in judgment of your manuscript. It's a list.
The kinds of events we want to run
Brewery and bar nights. Readings in rooms that serve drinks. Informal, loud, and a genuinely good way to sell books to people who didn't come in planning to buy one.
Vendor markets and festivals. Tables, foot traffic, and the particular alchemy of a stranger picking up your book because the cover caught them.
Panels and conversations. Craft talks, genre discussions, the business of indie publishing. If you have something to say, we'd like a room where you can say it.
Signings and launch support. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is show up in numbers for someone else's release day.
Something bigger. We're working toward bigger ideas. Being on the roster is how you hear about it first.
Who we're looking for
We lean dark. Horror, dark fantasy, gothic, weird fiction, bizarro, speculative, psychological suspense — the stuff that lives after midnight.
That said, we care more about whether the work has a pulse than which shelf it sits on. If your literary novel has teeth, tell us about it.
A few things that help:
You're within reach of Indy or Chicago. Most of our events are in-person in central Indiana, with a growing Chicago slate.
You can sell books at a table. Print copies in hand and a way to take a card. We want you to leave with money.
You're building an audience somewhere. A website, an active social account, a newsletter, a reader group. Not a follower-count contest — we're looking for authors who show up for their own work.
One rule: human-written books
We only work with authors who wrote their own books.
If generative AI drafted or wrote any part of your prose, or you are using AI to generate your book covers, you're not eligible for our events. We'd rather say that plainly on this page than have anyone find out three minutes into a form.
Using Grammarly or ProWritingAid to catch typos is a different thing, and it's fine.
What it costs, and what we take
Nothing, and nothing.
There's no fee to be on the roster and no fee to appear at our events. You keep every dollar of your own book sales. We don't take a cut, we don't ask for exclusivity, and being on our list doesn't stop you from doing anything else with anyone else.
What we ask is that if you're booked for an event, you show up, you bring books, and you tell your people about it. That last part is the whole engine. Everyone brings their readers, and everyone leaves with new ones.
There may be future large events where we may require authors to pay an entrance fee, but we aren’t there yet. For now, we are just looking to help authors sell their books.
How it works
1. Fill out the form at the link below
2. We take a look. We'll read your submission and visit your website and socials. No response required from you.
3. You go on the list. Could be next month, could be a while — it depends on what venues say yes and which lineups make sense. We'll email you with the details, and you can always say no.