Category: Anthology

Anthology / Events / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Scary Stories to Tell in October

Submission Window: April 1st – 15th, 2025
Extended Window (Disabled, Neurodiverse, BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+, and other underrepresented voices): April 16th – 30th, 2025
Payment: $13
Theme: Halloween

Death by TBR Books is a woman/disability owned indie online bookshop and indie press. We will be opening submissions for our upcoming Halloween horror anthology set to be released in August 2026!

If you don’t know the owner of Death by TBR Books then you may not be aware of her obsession for all things fall and Halloween. THIS anthology will be all about Halloween. This could be a nostalgic memory from your childhood or a more recent Halloween experience.

We strongly encourage lovers of Halloween to apply even if you don’t have prior publishing experience. From folk horror and vampires to psychological and werewolves and beyond. Think of nostalgic media that you watch every year. We want those who miss Halloween and October every year to have a way to stop and savor it every day of the month.

Submissions

Scary Stories to Tell in October
A Halloween Horror Anthology

Open call submission window: April 1st – April 15th
Extended submission window: April 16th – April 30th
(Exclusively for Disabled, Neurodiverse, BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+, and other underrepresented voices.)
We are looking for 31 flash fiction/short stories so people can spend every day of October reading a very short story.

Payment
Royalties are $13 for the story and one electronic copy of the anthology.

Word Count
Between 2,000 and 4,000 words.

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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Ghost to Ghost to Ghost

Submission Window: April 2nd – 16th, 2025
Payment: $15.00 CAD and a contributors copy
Theme: Ghosts in Canada
Note: Canadian authors only

Submissions open April 02 – 16

Canadians! We want your strange, unsettling, spooky tales featuring a ghost of one kind or another  – open to your interpretation.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific and anywhere in between…from our southern border up to the Arctic Ocean – from coast, to coast to coast, bring us your ghosts.

 

Original stories only – written by you, not previously published.

Set in Canada, written by Canadian authors.

500 – 1500 words.

(The submission portal will show 2 categories: flash fiction 500-1000 words, and short stories 1000-1500 words)

 

Please only submit one story

Simultaneous submissions are fine, please withdraw your story if accepted elsewhere.

 

 

NO AI: we do not want to publish work written in whole, in part, or assisted by artificial intelligence.

We want to publish your words, not machine-genterated words, which, by the way, are taken from other authors’ work – that is how these ‘programs’ are trained. So no, no thank you.

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Anthology / Artwork / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: Promised Protagonists Anthology

Deadline: April 30th, 2025
Payment: Contributor’s copy
Theme: The YA stories you wish you had as a kid with someone like you as the protagonist
Note: This anthology is looking for diverse characters. All genres are welcome, though I suspect Fantasy and SciFi will be an easier sell than horror or anything dark

Submissions open March 15 for the first Promised Protagonists anthology!

This collection of diverse fiction, poetry, and art will be published in print (paperback and potentially hardcover), as well as in ebook format, in the second half of 2025.

Submissions will be open from March 15 to April 30. The Google Form for submissions will appear below once the window opens.

Unlike our usual submission periods, we will NOT be offering detailed feedback on all anthology submissions due to the expected volume! Particularly for submissions that reach the final rounds of consideration, we may give a few lines of feedback; if you aren’t interested, let us know in the form’s comment box.

Overall Guidelines

We want the stories you wish you had as a kid! Send us your quirky short fiction, your thoughtful fantasy, or anything that shows that you—yes, you!—can be the protagonist in your own story.

We want diverse characters and diverse stories, the perspectives that are too often left out of the general narrative, and pieces that remind young readers that they deserve to take up space and have their own adventures.

To get a better sense of the sort of work we’ve published in the past, check out Promised Protagonists Issue 1, Issue 2, and Issue 3 (linked here).

Don’t self-reject—if in doubt, submit! We want to see your work, and it won’t get published if it never leaves your computer.

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Anthology / Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Reprints Allowed / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Home Constellations

Deadline: September 30th, 2025
Payment: Prose and poetry: 5$ + 1c/word over 500 (up to 5k) words + .2c/word over 5k words, Graphic Narrative Fiction: 5$/page, Reprints of any category: Half of above, Cover Illustration: $100
Theme: Stories about the future which feature non-traditional families

Submissions are open for Home Constellations: A sci-fi anthology of unconventional bonds (working title) from Manawaker Studio, edited by CB Droege.

Home Constellations is an anthology focused on stories about the future which feature non-traditional families. This volume will contain stories and poetry.

THEME

Submitted works should be of any genre, as long as the work depicts a world that is noticeably in the future. Hard and Soft Sci-fi, (Post-)apocalyptic, Solarpunk, Slipstream, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Alternate (future) History, Supernatural, Retro-futurism etc. are all fine names for genres that often take place in the future, but your story doesn’t have to fit into one of those. In fact, if it manages to miss all of those labels, we may be even more interested to see it (unless it thus falls into what we specifically don’t want (see next paragraph)). All works must also prominently feature a relationship or family structure which might be considered unconventional. The story doesn’t have to be about the relationship. The adventure or challenge of the story can be anything, but some prominent characters should be in a chosen family. We’re particularly looking for stories with healthy polyam relationships, but want to also include other queer structures. Send us a story of a stable triad struggling to raise their son in a Martian colony dome. Show us a gay couple exploring alien ruins. Tell us about the escaped assassin-bot and the genetically engineered hypercat who find a baby on their doorstep. Whatever else the story is about, we want it to show that each person gets to decide for themselves what family means, and who gets to be part of theirs.

We are not looking for gore horror nor erotic romance. Works that contain horror elements or romantic elements are fine, but we would like the book to remain accessible to young adults and squeamish people. Works which seem particularly hateful or which discriminate against specific real-world groups will also be rejected.

We’re unlikely to accept stories that depict unconventional relationships as unworkable, or as causing problems by their nature. Not everything has to be perfect in every relationship, of course. We all have struggles, some unique to our relationship structures, but part of the goal of the book is to help normalize the depictions of such relationships, and help people who live them to see themselves represented in fiction. Showing consensual relationship structures which are inherently ‘bad’ is counter to that goal.

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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Untitled Sword & Sorcery Anthology

Deadline: August 1st, 2025
Payment: $10 and a contributors copy
Theme: Sword and sorcery stories between 2,000 and 8,000 words

What we Want: Good sword and sorcery stories between 2,000 and 8,000 words for our upcoming anthology. No science fiction or horror.
What we Don’t Want: We don’t want splatterpunk or porn. No poetry. We don’t want pure romance stories, but of course you can have romance in the story (You know what we mean). If you don’t have a clue, then just send it anyway. As long as it has magic, heroes with swords, or involves mythical adventures, we’ll read it.
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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Hellbound Highway

Deadline: August 31st, 2025
Payment: $15
Theme: Road Trip Terror

Are you brave enough to take a ride on the Hellbound Highway? HellBound Books is seeking short horror stories for an anthology on the theme of bad trips, which will be curated and edited by the double-trouble partnership of veteran horror writers Jane Nightshade and Ann O’Mara Heyward. We want road trips, sure, but also airplane journeys, ship crossings, railroad passages, heck even cattle drives–as long as it’s a trip and it’s B-A-D.

What if a family like the Griswolds from National Lampoon’s Vacation were zombies? What if a weary business traveler waits for the red-eye in an airport that is literally a portal to hell? What if the night manager of the local Greyhound bus station was a vampire who feeds off of the poor and desperate? What if a crook on the lam checks into a cheap motel and discovers that the usual cockroaches are mutants with deadly powers? What if someone stopped at a cafe in the middle of nowhere, and slowly realized that they were the special on next day’s menu?

These are the types of scenarios we are looking for, so let your creepiest imaginings run wild. Scary horror, psychological horror, or comedy horror are all welcome–it just has to be GOOD.

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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Samhain Screams!

Deadline: May 30th, 2025
Payment: $50 AUD and a contributors copy
Theme: Halloween

Edited by Greg Chapman and Cameron Trost

Halloween.

So much more than costumes and candy, it’s the time when the veil between our world and the other side is at its thinnest. The hour when dark forces come into the light in search of innocent souls. A time of blood and evil.

Australian Shadows Award-winning and multiple Bram Stoker Award-nominated author and artist Greg Chapman, and acclaimed author Cameron Trost, are seeking new original Halloween tales for this anthology, planned for release in October 2025.
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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: The Necronomicon of Sherlock Holmes

Deadline: June 15th, 2025
Payment: $125 and a contributor’s copy
Theme: Insert Sherlock Holmes into the realm of Lovecraftian Horror

Edited by Derrick Belanger & Brian Belanger

Description: Imagine Holmes investigating the disappearance of a college student in the mysterious town of Innsmouth, matching wits with a man who can reanimate the dead, or using his deductive skills to help fight creatures from beyond the realm of time and space. These are just some of the stories which could be included in the new anthology The Necronomicon of Sherlock Holmes. The anthology will feature traditional Sherlock Holmes stories blended with one or more of Lovecraft’s tales.
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