How to Write Submission Guidelines for Your Anthology

by Deborah Sheldon

Let’s get my bona fides out of the way first. I’ve curated three horror anthologies. Midnight Echo 14 (AHWA 2019) won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Edited Work’ Award, and one of its stories was nominated for the Australian Shadows ‘Best Long Fiction’ Award. The anthology I conceived and edited, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies (IFWG 2021), was critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning, and multi-award-nominated. My latest anthology – that I also conceived and edited – is Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite (IFWG, 2023), released this month.

Here are my suggestions on how to write a submission callout that will (a) get you the kind of stories you want in order to (b) create a knockout anthology. These tips apply whether your anthology is open call – meaning unsolicited submissions – or by invitation only.

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Quick Tips on Writing a Novelette

by

Deborah Sheldon

The novelette is often labelled, erroneously, as a “long short story” or a “short novella”. In fact, the novelette is a category in its own right. By strict definition, it’s a stand-alone work of fiction that’s between 7,500 and 17,500 words in length. Famous examples in the horror genre are Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 

The novelette offers the satisfaction of writing a complex long-form piece requiring a similar kind of devotion to plot and character as the novella or novel, but in a more manageable size. I’ve written and had published a few novelettes. My latest is The Again-Walkers (Demain Publishing), a supernatural-Viking-noir-horror tale of about 13,500 words.

Fancy trying your hand at a novelette? Or, if you’re writing a piece that’s already hit the 5,000-word mark, do you want to dig a little deeper into the narrative and develop your short story into a novelette? Here are my tips.

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