Submission Window: July 1st – 17th, 2021
Payment: $0.02/word or $25/story, whichever is greater.
Theme: Horror (unthemed)

Heads up, Horror Fans! Crone Girls Press will be opening soon for submissions for our third (and last!) volume of Stories We Tell After Midnight. The submission window will be July 1 – 17, 2021. (Please do not send any submissions until the window opens or we will regretfully delete them without response.) Here is what we’ll be looking for:

Name: Stories We Tell After Midnight, Volume 3
Genre: Horror (unthemed)
Deadline: Submissions open July 1 and close midnight, EDT, July 17, 2021.
Release Date: October 7, 2021
Word Counts:
* Flash Fiction (500-1,500 words)
* Short Stories (3,000-6,000 words)
* Novella (12,000-25,000 words)
Pay: $0.02/word or $25/story, whichever is greater.
Editor: Rachel A. Brune, she/her
Send submissions to: [email protected]; Subject line: SWTAM3 “Title”
Wanted: Send me your chilling horror, your stories that are set firmly in the genre, tagging the tropes and atmospherics of things that will cause you to have nightmares and not be able to escape the dark, even when you pull the covers over your head and sleep with the light on.

Scroll down for the full list of submission guidelines.

General Submission Guidelines

• Submit a .doc, .docx, or .rtf that adheres to Shunn manuscript format. No other formats, please.
• Follow submission guidelines and use the Crone Girls Press Style Guide if you have any additional formatting or style questions.
• If you have any questions, a good place to get a feel for who we are is the Crone Girls Press Facebook Group. Come on in. We won’t bite. Most of us won’t, anyway.
• Cover letters should include: a logline, story title, and word count. For Midnight Bites, include the theme or potential theme. We publish debut and established authors, so I prefer not to see any listings of previous publications; however, if you have any bona fides in the genre, such as membership in HWA, or any specific background that is relevant to the story you’re submitting, feel free to include those as well.
• If you don’t know what a logline is, don’t tell me that in your query letter. Instead, read this article and write one, then put it in your query letter.
• Author Bios: Please include a 50- to 100-word author bio at the end of your submission (in the actual manuscript) along with your social media and website information.
• Reprints (only for the full-length anthologies), simultaneous, and multiple submissions are absolutely welcome! If it is a reprint, please let us know in the cover letter where it was previously published. If it is accepted elsewhere, congrats! But please, send us an email to let us know and withdraw your submission. We typically only accept one story per author per anthology, but if you have more than one that might fit, we’ll be happy to take a look at what you’ve got ONE AT A TIME. *Note: Please send one submission per email.
• Each full-length anthology will be anchored by one novella, with a mix of short stories and flash fiction. If you would like your novella to simultaneously be considered for inclusion in a Midnight Bites volume, please indicate so in your cover letter, along with a possible theme.
• For full-length anthologies, we would like exclusive electronic and print publication rights for six months from the date of publication, and non-exclusive rights after that. We prefer worldwide, but are willing to discuss if an author sells, for example, in a foreign-language literary magazine. Once accepted, we ask our authors not to publish their work before the date of publication. Our end goal is to produce a collection of new horror fiction that will have minimal competition for six months; with that end in mind, we are open to any conversations about rights negotiation that an author may wish to have.
• One note about diverse protagonists (and characters in general): I find as a writer, sometimes it helps for publisher to explicitly indicate their inclusive status. That is what I am doing here. I particularly enjoy stories with protagonists, characters, and settings that come from a diverse array of identities and abilities–but in which those identities and abilities are not the focus of the story itself, but one more facet of the character and how they encounter the conflict of the story.
• The determining factors in acceptance or rejection will always be quality of writing, adherence to genre, and general fit with the other stories selected for publication.
• One final note. Our submission guidelines request that you submit in manuscript format. This means that when I preview your submission in the Gmail reader, I should immediately know who wrote the piece and the word count. Failure to follow submission guidelines will not increase your chances of acceptance with our publications.
• Hard Sells:
  • Rape
  • Metastories about writers, horror writers, being in a horror movies, anything that references self-aware characters
  • Reprints (I’ll read them, and we’ve accepted them, but our preference is for new material.)
  • Stories that rely heavily on one character telling the story to another character
  • Any stories that open like this: https://www.janefriedman.com/5-story-openings-to-avoid/
  • Query letters that spell the editor’s name wrong
  • Stories that are only tangentially situated in the horror genre
• Thank you for making it to the end of our submissions page. I look forward to reading your work!

Via: Crone Girls Press.