Guest Blogger: Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press

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If you are into speculative fiction, today’s post is for you. I’m pleased to introduce my friend Jeff Gerke, here to tell us about his new publishing company, Marcher Lord Press.

What is Marcher Lord Press?

Marcher Lord Press is the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction.
Whether it’s fantasy you love, or science fiction, time travel, chillers, supernatural thrillers, alternate history, spiritual warfare, superhero, vampire, or technothriller—if it’s speculative and it comes from the Christian worldview, Marcher Lord Press is your publisher.

Marcher Lord Press is a small, independent press that bypasses the traditional Christian publishing industry to get Christian speculative fiction directly into the hands of the fans who devour it.

The Marcher Lord Press Story

Marcher Lord Press grew out of a frustration and a dream.

The frustration arose in Marcher Lord Press founder Jeff Gerke’s mind during the years when he was editing fiction at traditional Christian publishing companies.

Jeff loved the “weird” kind of fiction—fantasy, science fiction, time travel, supernatural thrillers, and the like. He’d even written some near-future technothrillers (under the pen name Jefferson Scott ). But the companies he worked for—indeed, the entire Christian publishing industry—was not interested in weird.

These companies reached a particular demographic with its fiction—white, conservative, Evangelical American women of child-raising to empty nest years—and this demographic is typically not into weird. They tend to like prairie romances, female-oriented mysteries, and women’s fiction.

And yet Jeff knew there were many other kinds of exquisite Christian fiction than what could fit into that box. He personally knew many of the novelists writing that alternative kind of fiction, having met them through the years at writer’s conferences or the acquisitions process.

Yet there appeared to be little opportunity for these brilliant writers and their stories to have their chance to shine. Publishers who would take the occasional chance on a speculative fiction title would end up selling very few of them, thus reinforcing the conviction that no one in the industry wanted this kind of book.

This frustrating state of affairs caused Jeff to begin dreaming of ways to bypass the entire Christian publishing and bookstore industry. If that way was a dead end, surely there must be another way around. Because he was confident that there were thousands of readers out there who would enjoy Christian speculative fiction if only it was there and they could find out about it.

The frustration led to the dream, and the dream finally began to coalesce into an idea for an entirely new model of publishing. And thus the plans for Marcher Lord Press were born.