Category: Pro

Pro Rates

Anthology / Events / Pro / Royalties

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Taking Submissions: Skull X Bones

Deadline: June 30th, 2025
Payment: 0.08 USD / word and royalties
Theme: Science Fiction or Fantasy pirate stories

Avast, ye scurvy dogs! It’s time to plunder! Pirates have enchanted and haunted readers for generations, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to the ill-fated Firefly. Whether it’s Blackbeard, Mal, or Han Solo, we love our swashbucklers, our One-Eyed Willies, and our scruffy-looking nerfherders. In SKULL X BONES, we want writers to give us their best science fiction or fantasy pirates, whether they be on the sailing ships of the deep wide ocean or the spaceships of the black void!

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Poetry / Pro / Reprints Allowed

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Taking Submissions: Solar Punk Magazine April 2025 Window

Submission Window: April 1st – 14th, 2025
Payment: Fiction: 1500-7500 words ($.08 per word, $100 minimum), Poetry: One poem of up to three pages ($40 per poem), Nonfiction: 1000-2000 words ($75 per essay or article), Cover Art: $100 for reprints, $200 for original unpublished, Interior Art: $50 for reprints, $100 for original unpublished
Theme: Fantasy and Science Fiction that falls into the category of Solarpunk that ideally include themes of defiance, change, and achievement.

Note: Our nonfiction is no longer always open for submissions. It will now open and close on the same schedule as our other submission portals.

All submissions to Solarpunk Magazine are done via Moksha. Any submissions received via email will be deleted without a response. Please don’t email us to describe your story and ask if it’s something we’d be interested in before submitting. We appreciate the consideration, but its easier if you just submit the story through Moksha.

In 2024, we are particularly looking for stories between 1,500 and 3,000 words. While our word limit remains 7,500, stories that fall between 1,500 and 3,000 will have a better chance of being selected for at least the first few submission periods in 2024.

Please read the full submission guidelines on down below or on our Moksha page before submitting your work. All submission periods end at 11:59 pm PST on the 14th of their given month.

2025 Submission Window Schedule:

January 1-14
April 1-14
July 1-14
October 1-14

2025 Issue Release Schedule:

Issue #19 – January 14
Issue #20 – March 11
Issue #21 – May 13
Issue #22 – July 8 (Colorful Roots)*
Issue #23 – September 9
Issue #24 – November 11

The Basics:

If your work is accepted, please wait two full submission windows before submitting again. For example, if a story you receive word in April that your story is accepted, please do not submit during the May and July open windows, but feel free to do so once the September window opens.

Simultaneous submissions: Yes, but please let us know immediately if your submission gets accepted elsewhere before you hear from us.

Unsolicited reprints: No

Translations: Yes

Multiple Submissions: No, not within each category. But you can enter one submission per category per submission period. For example, you can submit one short story, poetry, and a nonfiction article all in the same submission window using each individual submission portal.

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Events / Flash / Magazine / Pro / Reprints Allowed

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Taking Submissions: Story Unlikely Magazine 2025 Window

Deadline: September 29th, 2025
Payment: 8 cents per word, 2 cents per word for reprints
Theme: Action/adventure, general, fiction/narrative nonfiction, humor/comedy/satire, speculate (fantasy, sci fi, horror, magic realism, cyberpunk), memoir, western, romance, alternate history, suspense/thriller, mystery/crime, literary, and any cross/hybrid genres.
Note: Reprints Welcome

Submissions to our magazine run annually from February 2nd through September 29th

Why submit to us?
– WE PAY WRITERS FAIRLY. It’s hard work writing good stories, and you deserve to get paid. Or maybe you don’t and you’re just duping us? Regardless, we pay 8 cents a word (with a $500 cap), and 2 cents a word for reprints.
– NO SUBMISSION FEES. Nobody’s getting rich off $3 per submission, but paying money just for the privilege of receiving a form letter rejection is the worst. (Costs of running an E-zine aside) We’re going to go ahead and coin a phrase right here and now – ‘Write privilege’, get it? Of course, you do.
– GET YOUR WORK IN FRONT OF A LARGE AND GROWING AUDIENCE. Our aim is fixed on telling good stories, period, and because of that we have built a massive readership from all over the globe. Want to get your stories out to more than just dear old nana? Then you’ve come to the right place.
– REASONABLE TURN-AROUND TIME. If you haven’t heard from us within 90 days, then your story was rejected. Rejections stink – we get it – but its better than forever waiting and wondering.

– WORKABILITY. Is that the right term? Well, we’re going with it. Unlike large publishers who view authors as just a number, we actually work with you to help present the story in its best possible light. We do, however, expect reciprocity; Story Unlikely is comprised of volunteers who are by nature team players. If you’re an inflexible my way or the highway type – or even worse, an unbearable ideologue – then consider this a premature breakup. No really, it’s us, not you.
– GET ILLUSTRATED. We illustrate ALL stories we publish, and we think we’re doing a pretty bang-up job with that. You can learn more about our artists at Design Unlikely.
– GET REVIEWED. Although we’re not genre specific, since we’re a professional paying magazine, Tangent Online reviews any SF&F (loosely defined) stories we publish. Your story might even make their Annual Recommended Reading List.
– Still NOT CONVINCED? Then listen to a word from our CFO – who The Office fans may recognize – to our editor-in-chief on every writer’s bane: rejection. Yes, that’s a watchable video below, and you’ll find more of them (with other cheeky celebrities) littered throughout our site.

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry / Pro

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Taking Submissions: It Was Paradise

Deadline: June 22nd, 2025
Payment: 15 cents per word for fiction and $75 per page for poetry and artwork.
Theme: In a world devastated by catastrophes, we need stories that confront these horrors.
Note: Prioritizing work by people with lived experience of war and conflict.

It’s time to announce the call for submissions to It Was Paradise*, a special issue of Reckoning edited by Sonia Sulaiman and with cover art by Moníca Robles Corzo. In a world devastated by catastrophes, we need stories that confront these horrors. This is all out war on the planet, on life itself. War and conflict are the themes for this volume of Reckoning. Probe into the heart of extinction, genocide, and climate crisis. Expose the exploitation of the earth. Show us how the world could be on the other side. Send us your stories of environmental justice, of violence, imperialism, fascism, and resistance, of destruction, survival, and of triumph.

It Was Paradise is open for submissions now through the summer solstice, June 22, 2025, with tentative release scheduled for October. Payment rate will be 15 cents (US) per word for prose, $75 per page for poetry and art. As always, we’re seeking submissions from Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, imprisoned, impoverished, and otherwise marginalized human beings from everywhere, but in particular for this issue, we will be prioritizing work by people with lived experience of war and conflict. We’ll continue to accept submissions to our communication-themed regular issue, Reckoning X, throughout. Also, during this submission window only, we’re relaxing our usual rule about multiple submissions to allow folks to submit to both calls simultaneously.
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Events / Flash / Magazine / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Planet Scumm Fall 2025 Issue

Deadline: May 7th, 2025
Payment: 8 cents per word and a contributor’s copy
Theme: Speculative Fiction, ideally with sci-fi elements if not sci-fi itself

People of the World!
Planet Scumm accepts submissions from writers across the world. Our pages have hosted the imaginative work of authors from every contintent but Antartica. We want to hear from writers with as various experiences, identities, and points of view as possible.

Please do not busy our big-hearted slush readers with AI-generated tripe. Stories generated in part or whole by AI are in violation of our author contract.

Specs

WHAT TO SUBMIT

  • Hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi, sci-fi that melts in your mouth-brain not your hand-brain

  • Speculative fiction, weird fiction, slipstream

  • Basically anything that pleases Scummy, our megaphone-toting slime buddy, will be considered for entry to the interstellar archive aboard Scummy’s saucer

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Anthology / Events / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Other: The 2025 fantasy short story anthology

Art by Anwen O’Driscoll

Deadline: August 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.08 CAD per word
Theme: Fantasy short stories

OTHER: the 2025 fantasy short story anthology (Book 2 of the Other Anthology series)

We are seeking short stories by international writers. The story can be visually evocative or character/narrative focused as long as it leaves the reader thinking about the story long after closing the book. We don’t want a lesson, we want an experience that makes us come alive.

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Anthology / Events / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Wrath Month

Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.08 /word
Theme: Fantasy, science-fiction, and horror short stories that embrace punk and queer rage.

edited by
C.L. McCartney, Trip Galey & Robert Berg

We’re seeking fantasy, science-fiction, and horror short stories that embrace punk and queer rage.

There’s a glass ceiling in SFF representation, and we want you to throw a brick through it. Bring us the coven that burned Salem and your roaring bear-serkers. We want gangs of acid-wash werewolves, furious bipyromancers, flesh-eating femmes, and vengeant celestial bois—a cast of the downtrodden who make ruins of their oppressors.

Wrath lies at the heart of queer liberation—it can be a spur to action and the only righteous response to a world that would prefer we didn’t exist. So crash mainframes, collapse empires, and break normativity.

Pride month is over. It’s time for—

Wrath Month

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Women of the Weird West (April 2025 Window)

Submission Window: April 1st – 30th, 2025
Payment: Stories: 10¢ per word, Poems: $50, Drabbles: $50
Theme: Weird westerns that are pulpy, unexpected, character-driven stories written by women

Women of the Weird West
Publisher: Brigids Gate Press
Editor: KC Grifant
Release Date: Planned for June 16 th , 2026

What We Are Seeking
Traditionally, women authors have been vastly underrepresented in westerns and weird westerns, so this anthology will highlight diverse women-identifying authors and non-binary authors and their speculative western short stories.

We are looking for original Weird West stories. These should be generally set in what approximates the “Old West” location and timeframe (North America circa late 1800s) and should have a strong speculative element, such as horror, fantasy and/or sci-fi.

We are most interested in pulpy, unexpected, character-driven stories and are open to some weird westerns set outside the typical historical time period and setting (e.g., space westerns) as long as there are strong Old West aesthetics and inspiration.

The goal of this anthology is to showcase a diverse group of Old West stories beyond the typical archetypes. We strongly encourage women, women-identifying and nonbinary writers of all backgrounds to submit regardless of writing experience. We are interested in showcasing emerging writers as well as established writers for this anthology.
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