01
BookTok Engine
In-house creator network of 1,200+ romance-niche creators. We brief, seed, and amplify every release into a ten-week social campaign before the print run lands.
A modern romance publisher
Romance,
rewritten for the algorithm age.
Tendermill Press partners with romance authors to turn manuscripts into category bestsellers. Social-first marketing. Data-driven editorial. A royalty model designed to actually pay.
2.4B
BookTok views, monthly
47%
Of all U.S. fiction sales
$3.6B
Romance market, 2026
12×
Faster from manuscript to shelf
“The biggest houses in publishing still send manuscripts to print buyers in New York. We send them to seventeen-year-olds on TikTok. One of these approaches sells books in 2026.”
The Tendermill thesis
01 · The Model
How we win the shelf.
Four engines, fully integrated. No agencies, no outsourcing, no waiting six months for a print buyer to return your call.
02
Trend Intelligence
Proprietary tracking across TikTok, Instagram, Goodreads, and Reddit. We see tropes spike weeks before competitors do, and we acquire and edit toward them.
03
Data-Driven Editorial
AI-assisted editorial tooling for pacing, dialogue density, trope-fit, and chapter-end retention. Our editors decide. The data argues.
04
Real Royalties
Net 35% to authors on print and digital. Net 50% on audio. No reserve withholding, no opaque accounting, no recoupment games.
03 · Why Now
The biggest genre in publishing is being run by the slowest people in publishing.
Romance is 47% of all U.S. fiction sales and the fastest-growing category in publishing. BookTok drives 68% of that growth. And almost none of it is happening at the houses that were built to publish romance.
The Big Five route their romance imprints through the same machinery that takes eighteen months to ship a literary debut. They market with print ads and trade reviews. They take 85% of audio royalties. They miss every TikTok trend by a season.
We were built differently. From the first day.
Tendermill was founded by a team of editors, growth marketers, and ML engineers who believe the smartest, sexiest, fastest-moving romance writers in the world deserve a publisher that ships at their speed.
04 · Who We Sign
The authors we want to be in business with.
You do not need a million followers. You need a voice, a book, and the ambition to do this for real. Here is who we are reading for.
The breakout-in-waiting
One self-published title with a small, fierce audience. Tight craft, sharp voice, and three more books in the drawer.
The genre crossover
You write fantasy, thriller, or contemporary. Your readers keep telling you the romance is the best part. Lean in. We will catch you.
The category powerhouse
Three books a year, every year, in your subgenre. You are tired of being managed by people who have never read it.
The debut with a voice
First manuscript. No platform. But every page reads like the author has been doing this for years. Send it.
The trope inventor
You did not write a fated mates book. You wrote the book that the next ten fated mates books will copy. We want to publish the original.
The audiobook native
You think about narration before you think about cover copy. Your sentences are built to be heard. We have a studio waiting.
Partner with us
Send us the book.
Tell us about your project. A senior editor will read every submission. We respond inside ten business days. Always.