Category: Semipro

Semi-Pro Rates

Taking Submissions: Cursed Cooking: A Horror Community Cookbook and Food Horror Anthology

Deadline: April 30th, 2024 and May 10th for writers of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and other underrepresented groups
Payment: 5 cents per word for original fiction works and 1 cent per word for reprints. Accepted recipe submissions will receive $5
Theme: Real-world recipes and food horror fiction
Note: Not looking for cannibalism stories
Note: Reprints Welcome

Cursed Cooking: A Horror Community Cookbook and Food Horror Anthology

Open call submission window: March 15 – April 30, 2024.

Extended submission window exclusively for writers of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and other underrepresented groups: May 1 -May 10, 2024

Cursed Cooking is a horror community cookbook and food horror anthology, featuring both real-world recipes and food horror fiction. This hybrid publication aims to feed not only your body with frighteningly good food, but also your imagination with cleverly crafted horror stories.

So, send us your tales of haunted hamburgers, killer chocolate chip cookies, monstrous manicotti, world-ending wontons, and everything in between. Cook up a story filled with genetically modified grossness, fast-food freakiness, or homemade horrors. Get creative. Get hungry. Think outside the pizza box. But also, send us the recipes that you love, recipes that make your mouth water and have people screaming for seconds (and thirds and fourths). We want it all!

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Taking Submissions: Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 9

Deadline: May 15th, 2024
Payment: 1 cent per word and 5 contributors copies
Theme: Horror stories based in Texas by Texas-based authors

DEADLINE: MAY 15, 2024
Starkweather Imprints is pleased to announce plans for the 2024 edition of Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 9.
Road Kill co-creator Bret McCormick will edit Vol. 9 of the series, which has featured the works of Joe R. Lansdale, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Graham Jones, Robert E. Howard, O. Henry, Russell C. Conner, Madison Estes, Patrick C. Harrison, E. R. Bills and others. McCormick is looking for original horror stories 1,500-10,000 words in length.
The stories must be written and submitted by Texas authors and must be set (based) here – hence the title. One cent per word and contributing writers will receive five free copies. Writer stipends will look something like this: 10,000 words – $100, 7,500 words – $75, 5,000 words – $50, 2,500 words – $25, 1,500 words – $15.
All payments will be made after official acceptance, and when acceptance is communicated, each author will need to send a short bio.
Starkweather Imprints will be requesting one-year non-exclusive rights. This means we will use your story in this anthology and we can print excerpts of it online and otherwise (for promotional purposes, etc), but one year down the road you can do with it what you like.
The Submission Period begins on February 5, 2024. The deadline to turn in stories is May 15, 2024, and our intent is to have the book printed and available by October 1, 2024, in plenty of time for Halloween. Please send submissions to: [email protected]

Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #37

Deadline: August 1st, 2024
Payment: $10 for poetry, $25 for artwork, 1 cent per word for fiction
Theme: False Memories
Note: Reprints Welcome

NonBinary Review is currently open for submissions on the theme of FALSE MEMORIES.

False memories first came to public consciousness in the 1980s when a group of pre-schoolers at a California preschool were coached by well-meaning social workers and police investigators into “remembering” Satanic abuse that never happened. The fallout from that episode wasn’t just the persecution of an innocent family, but a nationwide mass delusion now known as “the Satanic Panic,” where authorities were warning the public about supposed widespread satanic cults committing heinous acts of abuse. Not a single one of these warnings were founded in fact, and it is now known that a large number of them were propaganda.

But false memories aren’t always bad. There is a common phenomenon wherein people hear stories of their early childhoods so often that those stories turn into “memories.” It is common in dreams to have “memories” of things that happened to the dream self, but not to the real self. Or a person might believe that they took their regular medication, brought in the garbage bins, or picked up the mail when they haven’t.

We’re looking for weird and wonderful stories of not just the memories themselves, but of their production, their repercussions, their wider meanings. We’re looking for false memories that might have changed history, that led to remarkable discoveries, that impacted lives.

We’re NOT looking stories of recovered memories. Recovered memories are memories of real events that have been suppressed because they’re traumatic, and are a widely disputed phenomenon. We would also like to avoid stories centering abuse, trauma, and violence.

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Taking Submissions: The Lost Poetry Club: The Four Humours

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: £0.015 per word.
Theme: Speculative fiction that deals with The Four Humours (Details on that below.)

A brand new audible zine centering the bizarre, the horrifying, and the what-ifs. New Episodes bi-monthly with an exciting new theme every time. Imagine attending an open mic story-telling night in the cellar of that haunted house on the hill or the canteen of a starship that traverses time and dark dimensions. What stories would you hear? Would they inspire awe or disgust? Hope in the future or existential dread?

Genres: Sci-fi, Slipstream, Weird Fiction, Near-Future, Retellings, Folk-Tales, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Speculative…

Formats: Mainly Short Stories, Poetry, Flash Fiction, Short Plays/Extracts, (but open to) Personal Stories, Dreams/Nightmares, Songs, Soundscapes, Fictional or Real Mini-Docs, Interviews, and whatever else you can dream up…

THEME 1.02: The Four Humours

When our nature is out of balance; tempers, like fevers, run high. Step into the bewitching world of the Four Humours, where ancient alchemy meets the intricate tapestry of the human psyche. Dividing our episode into four sections: Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.


Does your tale weave characters with raw intensity and larger-than-life personalities?  Are they charismatic, ambitious, deep thinkers, or cool-headed under pressure?  Or,  instead, impulsive, domineering, pessimistic,  or lazy?

Think tales of disease, of body or mind, potions and magic, chaos and order, material change, and personal transformation. Treat us to characters whose flaws are their undoing, whose struggles mirror our own, and whose stories resonate with the raw intensity of big emotions and larger-than-life personalities.

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Taking Submissions: Mythaxis April 2024 Submission Period (Early Listing)

Submission Window: April 23rd-30th, 2024
Payment: €0.01 per word, with a €20 minimum.
Theme: Diverse sci-fi and fantasy fiction.

We are open to submissions within the following periods:

  • January 23rd-30th
  • April 23rd-30th
  • July 23rd-30th
  • October 23rd-30th

Submissions received outside of these dates will unfortunately be lost and therefore not responded to. When open, we seek and offer the following:

  • Length: 1,000-5,000 words. These are firm limits. Shorter or longer works will be considered, but the further a story goes outside these bounds the more it will need to impress.
  • Compensation: €0.01 per word, with a €20 minimum. Please be aware that payment is via PayPal only.

If you do not receive an acknowledgment within 24 hours of submission, please get in touch. We aim to accept or reject within 14 days of acknowledgment, but rl (real life) and rl (reading load) can get in the way. If you do not hear from us after 30 days, feel free to query.

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Taking Submissions: Untitled “Cold” Anthology

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: 4 cents per word
Theme: cold/winter horror short stories.

Death’s Head Press is putting together an anthology of cold/winter horror short stories.

Winter is a setting that lends itself to various horror tales, from survival tales to hauntings to slashers with buckets of blood in the snow. Humans long ago mastered survival in the cold, but what happens when one of the necessities (heat, shelter, food) is taken away? What if that lovely cabin in the woods comes with a helping of the supernatural or otherworldly? The stories can and should cover the wide spectrum of coldness. We aim to explore the what if of the cold.

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Ongoing Submissions: Flash Digest

Payment: Original Stories: 1 cent a word, Cover art: $15.00, Interior art: $5.00
Theme: Original stories that are entertaining and/or have a serious point to them. We prefer to see stories with plot, tension, suspense, conflict, and character development.

Flash Digest is published quarterly, in January, April, July, and October, in print and as an ePub and PDF. It presents original science fiction, fantasy, and spooky horror stories of flash fiction length, which we regard as less than 1500 words. The lead editor is Terrie Leigh Relf.

Flash Digest wants non-AI original stories that are entertaining and/or have a serious point to them. We prefer to see stories with plot, tension, suspense, conflict, and character development. Remember, if readers do not care what happens to your main character[s], they won’t read the story. The narrative should maintain a sense of wondering what’s going to happen next; of what’s lurking just around the corner. Showing is better than telling. Frex, instead of telling the reader that it’s cold, show your character shivering, stomping feet, or having ice form on beard or hair. The inner thoughts and emotions of your character[s] are just as important.

As we will publish no more than six to eight stories per issue, we will be very picky with what we select. Just sayin’.

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Taking Submissions: Boreal: an anthology of Taiga Horror

Submission Window: March 15th-April 1st, 2024
Payment: 1 cent per word
Theme: Stories set in the taiga or boreal forest biome (details below)

A conservationist stumbles into a part of the forest untouched by humans for centuries. A hiker encounters a bear and her cubs on a lonely section of a trail. Two lovers abandon their tents when they hear screams calling across a Northern Light-filled sky. A dilapidated, forgotten cabin becomes temporary refuge for a documentary film crew in the midst of a violent snow storm.

The taiga or boreal forest biome is one of the largest land biomes in the world. Norway, Scandinavia, Iceland, Canada, Russia, and even Japan have locations where these wild, dark woods and the creatures that inhabit them roam.

Strange Wilds Press is looking for stories cemented in the taiga biome for its first anthology. I love stories that are character-driven, gothic, gloomy, and full of grief or existential horror. The idea of the lost and the unknown nestled in those deep, dark woods is something I get really excited about.

Some other things I like include: eco-horror, supernatural, creature, cult, ghost, and cosmic horror.

Hard sells are extreme, splatterpunk and slasher.

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