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Deadline: June 30th, 2017 Payment: $5 per 1,000 words up front, royalties, and a contributor's copy Franklin/Kerr Press is looking for exceptional sci-fi short stories with a focus on new worlds and civilizations for our upcoming sci-fi anthology Into the Unknown. Stories can cover a wide variety of sci-fi sub-genres as long as they utilize new worlds and civilizations in some context. We will not accept works with erotic or extreme sexually explicit elements. We will choose eight to ten stories to include in the anthology from author submissions to be published in both print and e-book formats. All stories should be edited and as error free as possible prior to submission. Each story can range from 2,000 to 8,000 words, however, longer stories will be considered. Rights Accepted works will grant Franklin/Kerr Press first exclusive English-language rights for one year and non-exclusive English-language rights for the life of the anthology in digital and print formats. The author of each short story will retain the copyright to their respective work. Payment per Story $5 per 1,000 words Each author will also receive one copy of the published anthology in print and be entitled to an author discount on additional copies. Royalties Once the anthology recoups all up-front cost to produce and distribute, authors will receive a percentage of royalties paid from net sales for one year. Royalties will be disbursed quarterly. Simultaneous & Multiple Submissions No simultaneous submissions will be accepted. Multiple submissions from the same author will be considered but please note that only one story per author will be accepted to allow for greater variety and diversity. Previously unpublished stories only, no reprints unless requested. Submission Deadline July 30, 2017 or until all slots have been filled. How to Submit Send your full manuscript along with a query...

Deadline: June 30th, 2017 Payment: $50 and a contributor's copy Note: Sorry about the short time on this, hit my inbox today! As I sit in the hospital and watch my mother attached to a machine with a constant drip of chemicals, I’m enthralled (and terrified) by the paradox that medical professionals are dumping poisons into her body…in an attempt to save her life. There’s a fine line between hurting and healing. Between medicine and poison. And that line plays out in fascinating ways. Like the toxic juice flowing inside the sterile hospital room, literature and folklore, as well as history and the present, are brimming with poisons and toxins, potent plants and venomous animals, used for both good and evil. Snow White’s poisonous apple, fed to her out of envy. Hamlet’s family rivalry escalating to poisonous drinks and blades. Socrates’ punishment of death by Hemlock. Wartime experimentation with tainted food, bullets, and gasses. Cleopatra’s collection of venomous animals and plants to gauge their effects on humans. Modern-day witch doctors selling albino body parts as potions for success. Martian and Moon dust with enough toxins and metallic substance to end a human life. Both real and fictional, intentional and naturally occurring, poisons will always be used for the darkest of purposes. But the opposite is also true. Australian citizens are paid to collect funnel-web spiders, their venom used to create antidotes for bite victims. For centuries, midwives have used herbs, potions, amulets, toadstools, and charms for healing. Sherlock Holmes occasionally dabbles in cocaine to sharpen his mind. Penicillin mold saves lives from infectious diseases. The Princess Bride’s charming  Westley spends years building up immunity to iocane powder, practicing mithridatism, named for King Mithridates who poisoned himself daily to become resistant to poison-related assassination attempts. Poisons have their advantages, too. Whether it’s battling space...

Deadline: June 30th, 2017 Payment: $25.00 About 730 AD, an Arab named Abdul Al-Hazred wrote the Al-Azif, a grimoire and memorial to the Old Ones. For this crime, he was driven insane and eventually devoured by a vengeful god in full view of horrified onlookers. What drove him to write this loathsome tome? What terrible visions haunted him so badly he felt he had to risk his soul to put them down on paper? Reveal the visions of Abdul Al-Hazred to us. Explain why the Al-Azif had to be written and why its translation, the Necronomicon, has circulated in secret societies ever since. Expose the secrets Al-Hazred uncovered in his ten years alone in the Roba El Kaliyeh, the Empty Space of the Ancients. Tell us what you know about the occult dealings he witnessed that drove him to spend those last years in Damascus as a hermit dedicated only to finishing his cursed volume. We recognize that horror requires a certain amount of leeway on some things, but be warned. We look down on overuse of specific issues. These include: • Sexual content not inherent to the storyline. No adult content. Keep your tentacles to yourself. • Explicit description of torture or sacrifice, human or otherwise. As a plot device, there is a way to present this without resorting to splatter. • Violence or abuse against a minor, infant to teenager. • Overuse of profane language. People curse. But not every sentence. • Hate language against a race, creed, or gender. Against monstrous races and gods, that’s okay. • Quoting previously published material not in the public domain. This is a legal issue and will not be tolerated at all. HOW TO SUBMIT Please be advised, any stories that do not meet these guidelines will be deleted unread. If...

Deadline: June 30th, 2017 Payment: 8 cents per word With Ride the Star Wind in the editing phase, we are now open to submissions for our next anthology: Welcome to Miskatonic University, an anthology of modern-day weird tales set in good ol' MU. Miskatonic University is still going strong in the Arkham Valley (and in various satellite campuses and research stations around the world). Resilient and forward thinking, few institutions can weather the times and adapt like good ol' MU. It's a strange brew of conservatively reaching into the past while progressively marching forward. And it's a hotbed for the weird and the wonderful! So what might a modern MU look like? What might student life be like today? These tales combine college life and the cosmic weird. Of course, there's beer, sex, and parties; study groups and all-night cramming; campus activism and impassioned discourse; vital research and faculty struggling for tenure. But also, you know, gruesome and psychedelic cosmic weirdness. What avenues of study has the university sanctioned either publicly or privately? Where are they getting so much funding? The university's been around the block and are at the bleeding edge of certain realms of research. Occult studies have seeped, seemingly innocuously, into various branches of nearly all academic departments and inform everything from quantum physics to computer science, sociology to modern American literature. Library studies is hands down the best, most advanced in the world, likely one of the most well funded of sectors at the institution with ever-evolving safeguards and best practices. But there's bound to be lingering effects from all the occult activity, like "sensitive" people and locations with breaches to the "other side." People disappear all the time; sometimes they even come back. Entire wings are off limits to humans indefinitely. As a whole, this anthology is...