Category: Pro

Taking Submissions: Book Worms Horror Zine Issue #5

Deadline: April 30th, 2024
Payment: 8 cents per word and a contributors copy
Theme: “fun”, “80s style” horror that involve Rock n Roll
Note: Only accepts Mail-In Submissions so don’t wait until the last moment!

Seeking short fiction for our Rock n Roll Issue! From hair-raising riffs to head-banging oblivion, horror and rock n roll are a match made in Hell! Book Worms Horror zine is a limited-edition print only publication sold on Etsy and selective bookstores.

Frequently Asked Question: What kind of stories are you looking for?

We generally enjoy “fun”, “80s style” horror reminiscent of the zine’s old-school vibe, but we’ve also been blown away by fresh voices that take the genre in a new direction. That being said, the best chance for your story being accepted by Book Worms is to follow the submission guidelines. Make sure your story is of the horror genre (you’d be surprised how many we receive that aren’t), mail in your submission versus email, meet the deadline, and don’t exceed the word count limit. And if your story doesn’t make it, please keep trying. We’ve had to turn down many excellent stories due to space constraints alone.

It might be helpful to explain what we don’t want.
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Taking Submissions: Moving Across the Landscape in Search of an Idea (Early)

Submission Window: February 1st, 2024 – March 31st, 2024
Payment: 8 cents per word
Theme: Stories that explore “Moving Across the Landscape in Search of an Idea”

We are seeking stories for an anthology to be titled Moving Across the Landscape in Search of an Idea.

We are looking for stories with long titles (minimum 250 words, maximum 600 words), concise narratives (minimum 250 words, maximum 600 words) and copious footnotes, endnotes, marginalia, indices and glossaries (minimum 250 words, maximum 600 words).

Authors are welcome to shift word counts between these three parts of their submission, but they must stay within a range of 1500 words for the total submission (ex. a 500 word title, a 600 word narrative, and 400 words of footnotes.). Stories are welcome to be submitted in any genre. If you have questions we encourage you to email us or DM us on Twitter or Mastodon.

Authors may explore any genre with their stories (yes poetry too!) and we encourage a wide variety of ideas and interpretations.

Submission Dates
Submissions open: February 1st, 2024
Submissions close: March 31st, 2024
Reading/Review begins: April 1, 2024
Reading/Review ends: May 31st, 2024
All authors will be contacted by: June 15, 2024

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Taking Submissions: Fear of Clowns: A Horror Anthology

Deadline: April 1st, 2024
Payment: $.08 per word
Theme: Clowns

Kangas Kahn Publishing is seeking unpublished horror short stories for an upcoming anthology titled Fear of Clowns: A Horror Anthology to be published in September of 2024. We’ve brought back editor extraordinaire Kenneth W. Cain who did such a great job on our first hit anthology October Screams.

As usual, we’re less concerned with theme than we are with entertaining stories. We’re not necessarily looking for a clown-murdering-people story–if that’s your story, it better bring something new to the table. Ask yourself, does this story belong in a book called Fear of Clowns? If the answer is yes, send it!
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Ongoing Submissions: Plotopolis

Payment: 8 cents per word
Theme: Interactive fiction that can be read/played in half an hour
Note: This is VERY different from our standard market but seemed quite interesting and I suspect that we’ll have 1-2 people who are interested!

Plotopolis publishes interactive fiction. Please read one of our pieces before submitting.

We consider all genres, but submissions should demonstrate strong writing craft. Additionally, pieces should work well within our publishing venues (currently Slack, Telegram, and a chat-interface on the web) and be created for Plotopolis.

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Taking Submissions: Winter in the City: A Collection of Dark Urban Stories

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: 10 cents per word
Theme: Dark stories that take place in a city during the winter season

Thank you for your interest in submitting your work to this anthology. We look forward to reading your short story. Please read the following information to help you to become familiar with the anthology and the submission guidelines.

THE CITY

Noisy, crowded, ever in motion, the City can be more than a setting—it can be a character, as nuanced and as fickle as a human being, with as many traits and quirks as the best mapped out characters. The City can be the ever-present and constant companion (or foe) to the protagonist and antagonist alike.

Winter in the City: A Collection of Dark Urban Stories is an anthology that takes place in different cities around the world during the bleak—sometimes harsh—season of winter. Your story submission must conform to the guidelines listed below and feature the City—in fact, the title of each story will be the City of which you write.

We are not looking for vampire/werewolf love trysts. We are looking for fantastical elements within the City itself.

Because we all know—deep in our hearts—that nightmares and fairies, monsters and ghosts, and terrors of the real and imagined call the City their home.
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Taking Submissions: The Map of Lost Places (Early)

Submission Window: December 1st – 31st, 2023
Payment: 8 cents per word and a contributors copy
Theme: Stories about places where weird things happen

Editors Sheree Renée Thomas and Lesley Conner are looking for stories about places where weird things happen. Places that have strange histories, their own traditions and customs, their own dangers. These can be based off real folk tales or old wives tales – think the Mothman in Point Pleasant, WV – or ones that you come up with all on your own. But your story should tell of someone going to one of these places – either intentionally or they just stumble across it – and what happens when they encounter the frightening/strange thing that is in or occurs in that location.

Depending on the Map of Lost Places Kickstarter funding level, we expect to fill the anthology with eight to twelve original stories selected from an open reading period. The Kickstarter will launch on October 10 – click here to be notified as soon as it happens!

In order to avoid duplicates in the open submission call, locations already chosen by the featured authors are listed below. This list will be updated as the authors make their decisions, so be sure to check back!
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Ongoing Submissions: The Cosmic Background

Payment: 8 cents per word, 3 cents per word for reprints
Theme: Slipstream fiction

We want the single best piece of flash fiction you have that comes from the places in-between. We are primarily a slipstream publication — that means we like your stories that don’t make a ton of sense. We want your giant talking frogs. We want your people with unexplained, never commented-upon eyes in their fingertips. We enjoy character-focused writing, with an emphasis on voice. We love Kelly Link, George Saunders, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sarah Pinsker, Shingai Njeri-Kagunda, Christopher Rowe, and Kate Folk. 

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Taking Submissions: Reckoning 8

Deadline: September 22nd, 2023
Payment: 10 cents/word, 2 cents/word reprints, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork.
Theme: All of the current social issues that are happening

We’re very excited to announce, for the forthcoming Reckoning 8, editors Knar Gavin and Waverly SM! Read on for their issue-specific submission call.

Reckoning is a journal of creative writing on environmental justice; we’re looking for fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, poetry and art.

For Reckoning 8, we want thinking, writing and art about … this. All of this, right now. We want to hear about active resistance to the patriarchofascist, corporate-captured extractive state. Show us what it means that in order to build Cop City*, a massive facility intended to train a new generation of lethal enforcers into an institution directly descended from slave patrols, the state of Georgia and its actors must first level a forest and label protestors “domestic terrorists” as a precursor to murdering them. Help us understand how strategies of repression and control all over the world concentrate agency in the hands of the few at the expense of all other life. We are looking for work in opposition to a broad, insidious fascism that treats water, trees, and bodies as exploitable, expendable resources rather than sacred, essential components of our global, infinitely interconnected and interdependent web of life.

As always, we’re seeking work from people of all genders or none, all sexualities or none, of all neurotypes, all levels of physical ability, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, in all parts of the world. We’d love to add all languages to that, though we publish in English and are currently limited to reading submissions for potential translation in Spanish, French and Swedish.

Payment is 10 cents/word, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork. We don’t charge submission fees.

We’re always open to submissions. Deadline for Reckoning 8 is the solar equinox, September 22, 2023.

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