Category: Online

Flash / Flat Amount / Ongoing Submissions / Online

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Ongoing Submissions: Nanoism

Payment: $1.50 for stories and a flat $5 for serials.

Nanoism is a twitterzine, an online publication focused on nanofiction, which in this case refers to stories that clock in at a maximum of 140 characters (conforming to the inherent limitations of the Twitter service).

@Nanoism accepts all genres. However, we are most interested in literary fiction—stories that move us with their writing. We are looking for staying power: pieces that leave an impression disproportionate to their length. Make us think.

Please submit only one story per week: we want your very best! However, we are willing to accept previously published “tweets”—just provide us with a link. We’re interested more in quality than exclusivity. If it’s already available online (even your personal Twitter account), we consider it published.

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Submit: Send entries of up to 140 characters by email to [email protected]. Include your name, third-person bio (up to 134 characters), and subject line: “Nanoism Submission”

We don’t need titles, as we won’t be including them during publication.

Rights: You own your story and can do with it whatever you wish after publication. We do retain the right to keep the story in our archive and to include it in future anthologies, electronic and/or print. By submitting you agree to give Nanoism these rights if published.

Response Times: We do our very best to respond within 0-7 days. If you don’t hear back within a month three months, then it was probably lost en route—send it again (via email, editor [at] nanoism [dot] net) and let us know what happened.

Report your response times at Duotrope's Digest

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Serials: Nanoism is currently accepting unsolicited submissions for serialized stories. Serials can be between 3-7 segments/episodes/tweets long and can (but do not need to) include a title. Each segment must stand alone as well as form part of the larger narrative. Due to this challenging constraint, we publish very few serials.

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Payment: We believe in the importance of being paid—even a token amount—for your work. We pay $1.50 for stories and a flat $5 for serials. We also include a short bio with your story, and we’ll gladly link to your personal site and/or twitter account (just fit it in the bio). If you plan to submit more stories in the future, we can hold payments until the amount is larger. Additionally, you can donate your commission to Nanoism (we appreciate it!) to help us pay for future stories. If so, we’ll be sure to send you a complimentary copy of an e-book if it spontaneously creates itself. This is a labor of love; we have no resources.

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Support: If you’d like to support Nanoism, you can do so somewhat effortlessly by clicking this link before shopping at Amazon.com. We will earn a small commission on the books and finery you purchase, and nothing happens to you (except for the good feeling inside from supporting a fine digital literary venue).

Via: Nanoism.

Flat Amount / Magazine / Ongoing Submissions / Online

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Ongoing Submissions: The Future Fire

Payment: $20 for each original story over 1000 words accepted, or $10 per flash piece (up to 1000 words)

The Future Fire welcomes submissions of speculative fiction with progressive, inclusive and socially aware disposition. We are particularly interested in feminist, queer, postcolonial and ecological themes, and we actively seek out submissions by under-represented voices, including but not limited to women, people of color, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and writers from outside the English-speaking world.

If you are thinking of submitting a piece of writing for consideration by The Future Fire, please read some recent issues to get a feel for the sorts of speculative fiction we are looking for. When submitting, read the following guidelines carefully:

  1. We are reasonably flexible with regard to format and length, but are extremely unlikely to publish any story over 10 000 words. (We have in the past occasionally taken longer stories, up to 20 000 words, to be serialised; this will probably be less likely in the future, and obviously would require a story to be of better than excellent quality and value. We must in any case have the whole story before we make any decision.)
  2. All submissions are read anonymously and judged on their merits and fit to TFF‘s goals. We actively encourage the submission of stories by women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, differently abled/neuroatypical, and other groups under-represented in genre fiction.
  3. Please send your story to the fiction editor ( [ ] ) as an attachment. We prefer .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt files (query first for any other format). Please use a common, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman/Palatino and use no other formatting than italics. Do not include your name anywhere in the document. We read and make all decisions based upon anonymised submissions.
  4. Use the email subject line: TFF submission: Surname, ‘Title’ (word count). Give your prefered name or pen name/byline in full in the accompanying email. Please do not send us your full address or other contact details.
  5. No multiple submissions: please only submit one story at a time. No simultaneous submissions: please do not send work that is under consideration elsewhere. If you need to withdraw a story for whatever reason, please do so as early as possible.
  6. We prefer to publish original material. Previously published stories are not out of the question, but you must let us know if a story has appeared elsewhere when you submit. This includes stories posted to blogs, open access writing groups or other public fora, even if they are no longer available there. We are more likely to reprint a story if its previous appearance was in a venue not readily accessible to our main audience, either because of medium, date, genre, or other factors.
  7. A decision is usually made within one month but sometimes life gets in the way of efficiency, for which we apologise. Important: emails sometimes go astray, so please do query if you feel we are taking an unreasonable time to get back to you.
  8. The Future Fire is offering payment of $20 for each original story over 1000 words accepted, or $10 per flash piece (up to 1000 words) (to be paid via Paypal on publication).
  9. Upon acceptance of a story, we shall ask authors to agree to this electronic contract: “You [LEGAL NAME*] of [ADDRESS] grant us, The Future Fire, the non-exclusive right to publish your work [TITLE] by [PEN NAME BYLINE OR PSEUDONYM] on the pages of our website and in the downloadable e-book versions; all other rights to this work belong to you. We shall upon publication make payment of [$20/$10] ([twenty/ten] US dollars) by Paypal to the account [EMAIL ADDRESS]. If we have not published your story within one calendar year of this contract, all rights shall revert to you. You guarantee that this work is your own and that you have the right to grant us the use of it, and that the work contains nothing that breaks copyright or other laws. Any actions breaking such laws will be your sole responsibility. We will print a copyright notice in your name, but we will not register the work with any copyright office on your behalf. You may reprint or adapt the work anywhere in the world, but we would ask as a courtesy that you wait three months after publication and credit us for first appearance.” (*For the contract we shall need a legal name and mailing address, even if you wish your work to be published under a pseudonym. If for safety or other reasons you have a name you are commonly known by that can be used to identify you in official contexts, please feel free to give us this rather than a “dead” name or other sensitive information. We will in any case never ever share this information with anyone else.)

It is the intention of The Future Fire to keep an indefinite archive of stories published in HTML; if an author has a pressing (e.g. legal) need to have a story removed, however, we shall of course help them to comply. We may not be able to remove the story from the copy of the PDF issue that is deposited with national libraries, archived by the Internet Archive, and other places outside of our control (just as a paper periodical archived in a national library would remain available permanently).

Via: The Future Fire.

Flash / Flat Amount / Ongoing Submissions / Online

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Ongoing Submissions: Craft Literary

Payment: $100 for original flash and $200 for original short fiction and creative nonfiction

CRAFT explores the art of prose, celebrating both emerging and established writers. We focus on the craft of writing and how the elements of craft make a good story or essay shine. We feature new and republished fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as critical pieces on craft, interviews, book annotations, and much more.

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Artwork / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Ongoing Submissions / Online / Poetry

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Ongoing Submissions: Twenty-two Twenty-eight

Payment: $30

Twenty-two Twenty-eight accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction essays, visual art, music, and videos. Response times are usually one to three months. All submissions must be in English and must be previously unpublished except for videos and music. We accept simultaneous submissions; however, we ask that you promptly notify us if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We suggest to all who submit that they read the most recent posts of a few of our categories to acquaint themselves with the material of Twenty-two Twenty-eight. Below are the submission guidelines for each specific category, formatting instructions, payment information, and other submission details.

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Flat Amount / Ongoing Submissions / Online / Reprints Allowed

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Ongoing Submissions: Mirror Dance

Payment: $5.00
Note: Reprints Allowed
Note: Check the main page for the current theme which rotates

What We Publish
Mirror Dance is a quarterly online magazine of fantasy fiction and poetry. We are open to all sub-genres of fantasy, including magic realism, urban or contemporary fantasy, sword and sorcery, fantasy-of-manners, and stories with mythological or folkloric themes. As a member of the Outer Alliance, we actively seek fiction with LGBTQA themes and characters who challenge traditional concepts of gender, as well as stories from diverse ethnic, religious, and social perspectives.

We are open dark fantasy, science fantasy, and historical fiction with fantasy elements. We do not publish science fiction or non-supernatural horror.

Fiction of any length will be considered, though we generally find stories under 6,000 words more suitable for online reading. We value unique voices and beautiful but readable prose styles. We prefer stories with dynamic, fully-developed characters and richly detailed settings over stories driven by a particular twist or plot device.

Poetry of all lengths will be considered, from haiku to epic narratives. We value strong imagery, precise word choice and a tight, specific focus. Poems must have an identifiable fantasy or mythic element. Please do not send more than three (3) poems in one submission.

Mirror Dance pays $5.00 upon acceptance for each work of fiction or poetry. We can make payments through PayPal, check, or an online donation to the project or charity of your choice.

Skull detail from the Crystal Globe (Waterhouse)

How to Submit 
Please send your work in a .doc, .docx, or .rtf document, or pasted in the body of an e-mail, to mirrordancefantasy at gmail dot com. In your cover e-mail, include your name and contact information, the title of your submission, and its word count.

Please use the subject line “Mirror Dance Fiction Submission – [Title].” Replace [title] with the title of your submission, and change “fiction” to “flash fiction,” “poetry,” etc. as appropriate. For all other communications, include “Mirror Dance” in your subject line.

Skull detail from the Crystal Globe (Waterhouse)

Other Considerations
No simultaneous submissions. Please do not send us work that is currently under consideration elsewhere. If your story becomes unavailable after you’ve submitted it to Mirror Dance, please notify us immediately.

Please respect language. Atrocious spelling, grammar, and punctuation in your e-mail or your submission itself are grounds for a rejection. A few small typos are acceptable; carelessness is not.

We are happy to consider reprints. Please include previous publication details in your e-mail. We have a slight preference for stories that aren’t currently available in a free-to-read online venue, such as your blog, another e-zine, or a critique site that is not password-protected.

In the case of original fiction, we are asking for first English-language digital rights exclusive for three months. All work published in Mirror Dance will be archived unless the author requests otherwise. The author may request that the work be immediately removed from the website at any time after the first three months of the story’s publication.

Mirror Dance aims to respond to all submissions within two months. If you are concerned about the length of a response time, please feel free to query the editor at the e-mail address above.

Thank you for your interest in Mirror Dance! I look forward to reading your submission.

Via: Mirror Dance.

Closed Markets / Flat Amount / Online

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Closed Market: With Candlelight

UPDATE: This is now a closed market.
Payment: $15.00 each story. $30.00 for stories that are featured on the Front Page.
Note: Audio and print rights also wanted so be sure to check that out.

Welcome to With Candlelight, a literary magazine created for and by authors. We aim to deliver creative and worthwhile content that both our writers and readers crave. Really, what we want to do is create a community where those who crave a good story, and those who strive to produce one, can come together-hopefully in a state of wonder.

Don’t worry about the genre, we’re all inclusive. We want your lit-fiction, your horror and science fiction, your LGBT story, your creative non-fiction, and we love flash fiction too. Do you have a story that doesn’t fall into these categories? Send it anyway. We will read every story sent our way. If it’s good enough, and we want great pieces, we will publish it on the site. There are also no word limits or expectations. If it’s great, we want it. 

We pay $15.00 each story. $30.00 for stories that are featured on the Front Page. We ask for the publishing rights of your story, as well as electronic rights, which include: PDF, HTML, plain text, print and MP3 (audio) formats. Stories are distributed through this website and some may appear in audio form, via podcast, etc. The payment also includes the right to publish the story as a non-exclusive, one-time right to include your stories in an anthology.

If you’re unsure of our rights policy, but want to publicize your work, you can submit to us anyway. This will be without pay but we will be able to promote your work and hopefully bring more attention to it. Just inform us in the email that your story is attached in that you do NOT want to sell the rights to your story. You can also send us links to your website, twitter, or Amazon page to go along with your story.

Send submissions to [email protected].

Via: With Candlelight.

Ongoing Submissions / Online / Pro

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Ongoing Submissions: Strange Horizons

Payment: 8¢/word

To make sure that the volume of submissions doesn’t get out of hand while we’re still getting up to speed with our new submissions system, we’re trying out a weekly schedule:

  • We’ll always reopen every Monday when the new issue is published.
  • When we’re open, there will be no daily cap.
  • During the week, if and when the queue begins to significantly outstrip the reading, we’ll close for the week to give ourselves room to catch up.
  • This page will always clearly indicate whether we’re closed and if so, when we’ll be reopening.

Fiction Editors

  • Vajra Chandrasekera
  • Lila Garrott
  • Catherine Krahe
  • An Owomoyela

Guidelines at a Glance

We want:

  • Speculative fiction, broadly defined.
  • Up to 10,000 words (under 5000 preferred).
  • Previously unpublished in English—we buy first English rights, including audio.
  • Submitted through our Moksha submission gateway—no email or postal submissions.
  • No simultaneous or multiple submissions; no re-submissions.
  • Please send only RTF, DOC or DOCX files and try to stick to standard manuscript format as much as possible.

We offer:

  • Payment of 8¢/word USD, within 60 days of contract.

If you have any questions, write to [email protected] with the word QUERY: at the beginning of your subject line.

Everything else on this page is intended to clarify, explain, or provide insight into the above guidelines. If you’ve submitted to us before or feel confident that your story meets our guidelines, feel free to skip the rest of this page. If you’re uncertain on any point, you’ll find more detailed discussion below.

What We Want and What We Don’t Want

We want good speculative fiction. If your story doesn’t have a speculative element, or strong speculative-fiction sensibilities, it’s probably not for us.

Some particular things we love, or are interested in:

  • Fiction from or about diverse perspectives and traditionally under-represented groups, settings, and cultures, written from a non-exoticizing and well-researched position.
  • Unusual yet readable styles and inventive structures and narratives.
  • Stories that address political issues in complex and nuanced ways, resisting oversimplification.
  • Hypertext fiction. If you have a work of hyperfiction you think might be a good fit for Strange Horizons, please query us to discuss how to submit it.

Things which are fine:

  • Profanity is fine. Use whatever words are appropriate for your story.
  • Sex or violence in a story should be artistically justified; no excessive gore.
  • We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world, and British spellings are fine.
  • We will consider stories which have previously appeared in another language, but have never been published in English.
  • We welcome all subgenres and forms of speculative fiction.

Things we won’t consider:

  • Stories above 10,000 words, including serialized novels or novellas.
  • Partial or incomplete stories. Please don’t send us part of a story and ask us to request the rest of it if we’re interested.
  • Unsolicited reprints of works previously published in English.
  • Stories previously submitted to Strange Horizons, even if they have been revised.
  • Multiple stories at once from the same author.
  • Submissions sent to us and another venue simultaneously.
  • Poetry or nonfiction; we’re the wrong department for those.

Pay Rates and Lengths

We prefer stories under 5,000 words, but we consider stories up to 10,000 words. Note, however, that the longer the story is, the less likely we are to be interested. Our wordcount limit is not absolutely inflexible, but we can’t consider stories much over the limit, not even as serials. However, we have no minimum wordcount requirement; we consider short-short stories. We determine story length by taking the word-processor wordcount and rounding up to the next highest 100 words.

We pay 8¢/word (USD), with a minimum payment of $60. SFWA officially considers us a professional market. We pay by check or PayPal, according to the author’s preference.

We buy first-printing world exclusive English-language rights (including audio rights) for six (6) months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope you’ll allow us to leave the story in our archives indefinitely after it’s rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time after one (1) year.

How to Submit

Check the top of this page to see if we’re open to submissions, and if we’re open, upload a file using our submission gateway. In order to track stories correctly, we can only consider stories submitted through that form—no email or paper mail submissions.

Your cover letter can be minimal: generally, these should be short and list just a few of your most recent or most relevant publications or workshops. If you’ve got life experience relevant to your story (e.g. your story takes place on a submarine, and you served on a submarine), please do mention that. Cover letters shouldn’t include plot synopses or pitches. If you are still concerned, please take a look at our sample cover letters page.

Don’t worry about how your story is formatted, in terms of font, font size, line spacing or indentation. Our system automatically reformats submissions the way we like them.

If you’re having trouble submitting, or have any other questions, please send an e-mail with a subject line of “QUERY: Your Question Topic” to [email protected].

Response Time and Response Status

We usually respond within a few weeks, but if you haven’t heard from us within 40 days, please query immediately. You won’t be rushing us along—most likely, we have responded, but the email’s gone astray.

We send an autoresponder message in response to every submission we receive. If you haven’t received an autoresponse within 24 hours after submitting, please query immediately. Missing an autoresponse usually means we have an incorrect email address for you, and won’t be able to contact you when we make a decision on your fiction.

Withdrawal policy

After you submit a story, we strongly prefer you don’t withdraw it. If you withdraw a story, we won’t consider any version of that story in the future. However, if you do need to withdraw a story, please send an e-mail telling us that you need to withdraw, and let us know why.

How to Contact Us

To contact us for any reason, write to [email protected] with the word QUERY: at the beginning of your subject line. Add a few words to the subject line to indicate what you’re querying about.

Strange and Interesting Miscellany

None of this is required reading, but if you’re curious about how we do things, you may find the following links interesting:

  • Stories we see too often: This list was made by the previous editing team, and has since been reposted and referenced by various people who’ve found it useful. Though there is some good advice here, we offer it as a curio rather than as a prescription.
  • Why we don’t want authors to withdraw stories: This is a post by previous senior fiction editor, Jed Hartman. We agree with his reasoning.

Via: Strange Horizons.

Ongoing Submissions / Online / Pro

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Ongoing Submissions: Daily Science Fiction

dsf-daily-science-fiction

Payment: 8 cents per word
Note: Will print dark fiction but not pure horror

ALERT: Please don’t submit stories longer than 1,500 words. Daily Science Fiction (DSF) is a market accepting speculative fiction stories from 100 to 1,500 words in length. By this we mean science fiction, fantasy, slipstream, etc. We will consider flash series–three or more flash tales built around a common theme. If you are submitting a flash series, please note that it is a series in your cover letter and at the top of the submitted text in the submission box. Each story does need to stand on its own.

We do not accept reprints. Unfortunately, if you have placed a story on your website, where it is open and available to the multiple billion people who have access to the internet, that constitutes publication. We’re sorry. No, we don’t accept self-published works.

Please don’t submit the same story to us and any other venue at the same time. Please don’t send us more than one story. Don’t send us another until we send you a response.

We pay 8 cents per word for first worldwide rights and for nonexclusive reprint rights. Additionally, we reserve the right to pay you more money for additional reprinting in themed Daily Science Fiction anthologies.

First publication sounds simple, but in today’s fractured fiction market it is anything but. Here’s what we mean by first worldwide rights: Your story will be distributed by email to our (free) subscription list, it will then be available on the website, via RSS, eventually through kindle and iphone/ipad (the “issue” consisting of all stories published during its calendar month), and as archived on the DailyScienceFiction.com website. The nonexclusive reprint rights are anticipated to apply to the omnibus volume of DSF’s stories for one year. Themed anthologies are anticipated to consist of 50-100% material originally published on DailyScienceFiction.com, plus additional materials as contracted. For these anthologies, payment will be determined if and when they occur.

Not So Helpful Hints

  • We need short short fiction, especially flash fiction. Among our featured stories, a shorter tale will get an extra nudge on the scale when weighed against a longer one. This is both for financial reasons and because it matches the preferences of a plurality of our readership. Not fair? Perhaps. Consider yourself forewarned.
  • Of course, we want your stories to ooze originality, but a well-written story is a must. We are fond of character-driven fiction, though readers point out that not every story we publish fits that rubric. Our goal is to publish the best stories we can that will be interesting, worthwhile reads. Some stories, especially in the short short fiction, will succeed despite lack of plot, character, punctuation, what-have-you.
  • We may purchase dark fantasy, but try not to publish pure horror. We don’t mind feeling the flush of arousal, but will not publish erotica. Guns a-blazing might make our day, but we don’t suspect most military SF will win us over. Humor? We take it, It often works especially for short short fiction, but do keep in mind that one alien’s funny bone is located near another species’ sac of indifference. We’re likely not your best market for longer funny tales.
  • We don’t accept multiple or simultaneous submissions, but we promise to be as prompt as possible with our responses. Query if you haven’t heard back in four weeks. Or better yet, check your story’s status on this website. There is now a “check status” option on the sidebar.
  • PS We’d like to emphasize that guidelines aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on (which in this case is no paper at all). Splurge for a free email subscription, or if you can’t afford free, browse the archives here on the website. Read, and get a feel for what Daily Science Fiction publishes. We always want new and different work, of course, but you can get a real tactile sense of this or any other publication only by reading it.

Via: Daily Science Fiction.