Two years ago, The Geeky Press released Bad Jobs & Bullshit: It’s Unlikely That We’ll Be Missed. We loved the experience (and the writing) so much that we decided to continue the series.

We’re pleased to announce a call seeking nonfiction and narrative essays, poetry, fiction, and short scripts for an anthology collection titled Bad Jobs & Bullshit: Summer Jobs.

As you can surmise, this collection is about the sometimes sweaty, sometimes sentimental, and always entertaining hours we’ve spent at the shittiest summer jobs imaginable. Whether it’s staffing third shift at a rural gas station or hunching under the soul-sucking fluorescent lights of a corporate desk farm, everyone has a story of that job. And the bullshit that went along with it.

DEADLINE

• Open Call: January 1 – June 30

General Submission Guidelines

LENGTH

• Essays and Creative Nonfiction: Submit completed work no more than 5,000 words
• Fiction + Short Stories: Submit completed work between 1,000 and 5,000 words
• Scripts: no more than 15 pages
• Poetry: Submit completed work; no more than 5 pages. You must submit each poem individually!
• Photo Essay: No more than 5 black-and-white pictures and 100 words per picture

STYLE AND SUBJECT

We publish fiction, nonfiction (creative nonfiction, essays), screenplays, scripts, black-and-white photography, and poetry. There are standards. We can’t articulate them.

COVER LETTER

Please keep yours brief, though we do like to hear from people who like the magazine. We’re not concerned about writing degrees or past publications, so don’t be daunted if you don’t have an MFA or much in the way of previously published work.

FORMATTING

Please don’t use colors or weird fonts. (We strip both out before we start the design process.) Visual poetry is not accepted.

SCRIPT FORMATTING

• Must be a Word doc or docx, 2010 or newer
• Easily readable 12 pt. font, no columns

Please follow one of these style guides for formatting. Any of these are acceptable formats. If you do not submit your script in one of these formats, we may ask you to resubmit.

Samuel French Play Formatting
Gordon State College Play Formatting
Story Sense Screenplay Formatting

AUTHOR BIOS

Please include a 150-200 word bio with your submission. We will use that on our contributor page. What you send is what we will publish, unless it’s too long. Then you’re leaving your bio fate in our hands.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WORK

Nope. Nope.

What about simultaneous submissions? If you submit to other places, drop us a note. And then don’t be a jerk. Let us know as soon as you know.

COPYRIGHT

Bad Jobs & Bullshit: Summer Jobs will be published using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license, and each author will retain the rights to his or her work.

YOU GET PAID

Contributing authors receive a direct and equal division of the royalties. If we publish ten contributors, each person receives ten percent of every sale. Payments are handled directly through Lulu.

WHAT WE’LL PUBLISH

The combination of all accepted work will be published as a paperback book and an eBook by The Geeky Press. Bad Jobs & Bullshit: Summer Jobs will be distributed at major retail outlets including Amazon Barnes & Noble, Apple, and all library catalogs through Lulu, an on-demand publishing clearinghouse.

Contributing authors will receive an equal division of the royalties. The book will be published using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons license, and each author will retain the rights to his or her work. Authors can remove their work from the book at any time because the book will be published using on-demand technology.