The days are shorter, but the weather is nicer. It’s fall—are you ready to submit your manuscript? Check out these three small publishers that are open to fiction and nonfiction submissions.

Ink Smith Publishing is seeking entries for its first annual contest—the 2015 ISP Book Publishing Awards—for unpublished science fiction, horror, and fantasy manuscripts written in English. The publisher will pick a first-, second-, and third-place winners for each of the three genres and give away a total of $4,000 worth of prizes, which include a three-year publishing contract and a full marketing campaign and book tour.

Are you ready to show your manuscript to the world? Readership, a crowd-sourced digital publisher, is open to submissions. It recently launched a new publishing platform that allows readers to decide which manuscripts will get published through a voting system. 

Kensington Publishing Corp. is sponsoring a writing contest and accepting submissions for its Lyrical Press imprint. If you have an unpublished romance, suspense/thriller, young adult, or new adult manuscript, get ready to submit. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that Kensington’s Lyrical Press is the publisher of my debut romance book, “In His Corner,” which will be released on April 14.

It was a Thursday like any other—eight hours in the office, dinner with the family at home, and a treadmill workout, while I watched Brad Pitt’s “Killing Them Softly” on DVD. The movie was abysmal, but Brad looked good, and I burned some calories. What happened next, however, was what made April 10, 2014, one of the best days of my life.