Category: Semipro

Ongoing Submissions: Phano

Payment: 2 cents per word
Theme: Wondrous, thought-provoking content about the future. Speculative stories about the future, Think Sci-fi, not fantasy or horror

These are guidelines for submitting your work to Phano. We buy rights to short stories and essays at two cents per word. We pay for reviews, interviews and art as work-for-hire.

We are currently open for new submissions! Read on to find out how to submit your work.

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Taking Submissions: Spoon Knife 10

Deadline: July 31st, 2025
Payment: $30 plus 1 cent per word and a contributors copy
Theme: Genre-bending stories that feature Polarities

Autonomous Press is now accepting submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry for the 10th volume of Spoon Knife, our annual genre-bending lit anthology.

Please read this whole page carefully before submitting; some details have changed this time around!

Theme

The theme for Spoon Knife 10 will be Polarities.

Polarities: pairs of opposite forces or qualities or tendencies. Good and evil. Love and hate. Life and death. Heroism and villainy. Feminine and masculine. Night and day. Vice and virtue. Old and new. Order and chaos. The public persona and the hidden shadow self. The mundane everyday world and that which lies beyond.

What polarity lies at the heart of your story? In what ways does it manifest? What happens when the two sides of the polarity come into contact or conflict, or when one transforms into the other?

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Taking Submissions: Solar Punk Magazine October 2024 Window

Submission Window: October 1st-14th, 2024
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($40 per poem), Nonfiction: 1000-2000 words ($75 per essay or article), Cover Art: $100 for reprints, $200 for original unpublished, Interior Art: $50 for reprints, $100 for original unpublished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: Speculative fiction works that stir readers with themes of defiance, change, and achievement

Submissions are currently closed. Our next and final submission windows for 2024 will be open from October 1-14, 2024. Our 2025 submission schedule will be released by the end of summer 2024.

(Note: At the moment, our nonfiction department is always open for submissions. If the fiction, poetry, and art portals are closed and you submit those through the open nonfiction portal, your submission will be automatically rejected without being considered.)

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Taking Submissions: Solar Punk Magazine July 2024 Window

Submission Window: July 1st – 14th, 2024
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: Radically hopeful and optimistic science fiction and fantasy

(At the moment, our nonfiction department is current and always open for submissions. If the fiction portal is closed and you submit fiction through the open nonfiction portal, your submission will be rejected.)

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.

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Ongoing Submissions: Big Smoke Pulp

Payment: 1₵ CAD per word.
Theme: Fun Pulp Stories from 99 to 7500 words

What We’re Looking For

Pulp stories are one thing above all else: Fun.We are not looking for flowery prose or character pieces without a plot.We’re looking for breakneck pacing, thrilling action and relatable characters in heaps of trouble. We’re looking for something that readers can’t put down because they can’t imagine not knowing where it ends.

We’re looking for PULP.There is no limitation on genre or content. Bring us your young adult romance, hard-nosed noir or epic sci-fi.As long as it follows the guidelines laid out here, we’ll want your stories.

 

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Taking Submissions: Eat The Rich

Deadline: April 30, 2024. Submissions will be kept open for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, chronically-ill/disabled, and writers from other historically marginalized groups until May 15, 2024.
Payment: $.05 per word and a contributor’s copy
Theme: Speculative fiction about billionaires being eaten

Submissions will be open from April 1 – April 30, 2024. Submissions will be kept open for BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, chronically-ill/disabled, and writers from other historically marginalized groups until May 15, 2024.

The Rules

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Ongoing Submissions: Frontier Tales

Payment: 1 cent per word
Theme: Stories of action and conflict. Open to some mixed genres, so it can include horror, etc, if it captures the theme and time period of a Western.

Short stories up to 10,000 words in length. Finished and edited.

Our top priority stories are what we like to call “strait shooters”. These are stories of action and conflict. We want gunslingers dueling in saloons, cowboys taking on bandits, Lawmen bringing order to the chaos of the West, bounty hunters going to the ends of the continent to catch their man, a Comanche warrior making his last stand on the open plains, Settlers defending their home from raiders, etc.

While these sorts of yarns are our preference we are still open to other varieties. Romantic western tales of love triumphing or dying on the frontier, ghost stories of the lost souls doomed to wander the among western winds, or weird westerns featuring deep ancient horrors revealing themselves to unsuspecting victims.

What are we not looking for

Smut/pornographic stories

Space/science fiction with western themes

Neo-westerns taking place in a contemporary setting

Stories set outside of America, in the future we may open up this to include other locales but for now it will be exclusively stories set in the US

Serialized stories, we may open this up in the future but for the time being we strictly want stand alone tales

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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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