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Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: 15GBP Theme: World Horror (Vol 109) WORLD HORROR, 1st May 2025 We want to cast a shadow over the entire globe. Bring us tales of the Shakchunni from Bangladesh, the Djinn from the Middle East, the Yokai from Japan. There’s a whole world of horror and fantasy out there and we want to showcase it all. If you think you’ve got what it takes to terrify, scar and haunt our audience of 10,000 daily listeners, then we want your stories! If accepted, we'll get our fantastic narration team to lend their voices, our editor will sprinkle some magic pixie dust on the track, and you could have your story heard by thousands of listeners each week. *** WHEN WILL I HEAR IF MY STORY HAS BEEN ACCEPTED OR NOT? We carefully review every single submission that comes through our door. If you’ve submitted a story to us, please be patient. We WILL let you know if your submission has or hasn’t been successful. Having said that, if you haven’t heard anything up to twelve weeks after the deadline has passed, feel free to ping us an email to check in on it. Submission Guidelines • Stories must be 2,000 (10% tolerance +/-) • Save stories in a Word document - Times New Roman font, size 12 • Include a 1-2 sentence log line for your story at the end of the document • Ensure that your name and an email address are somewhere on the document • Stories must fit an upcoming theme • By submitting your story to us, you are confirming that you are the original creator of the story • We will consider entrants whose work has been entered and published elsewhere, however please ensure you state where and when your story...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: 1 cent per word for fiction, $10 flat fee for poetry, $25 for visual art ($50 for cover art.) Theme: Epiphany Note: Reprints Welcome NonBinary Review is currently open for submissions on the theme of EPIPHANY. It's a flash of inspiration. It's a slow realization of something that was in front of you the whole time. It's seeing something familiar from an entirely unexpected angle. We have these sudden flashes of inspiration all the time - some as subtle as discovering you like tea with honey, others as momentous as realizing that your idea for a new invention could change the world. We're looking for speculative takes on epiphany, from the realization that television is all real and true, to the discovery that the life you live in your dreams is your real life, and this one is the dream. We want to be just as surprised as your narrators by the things they discover and where those discoveries lead them. We're NOT looking for "I realized I hated my spouse so I left and my life got better" stories, sexual coming of age stories, or anything else that doesn't fit the speculative genre. IMPORTANT NOTICE Zoetic Press does not accept AI generated content. If our editors judge that your content is AI-generated, it will be declined. Fiction: All submissions must have a clear relationship to our theme, and be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or they will be rejected. NonBinary Review  pays 1¢ per word for prose with a limit of 3000 words. Poetry: All submissions must have a clear relationship to our theme and be submitted in 12pt Times New Roman, or they will be rejected. Submitters may include up to THREE poems per submission, but each must be a separate file. NonBinary Review pays a...

Deadline: March 1st - May 1st, 2025 Payment: $50 Theme: Writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. Schedule We publish two issues a year, September 1 and March 1. We accept general submissions for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction between two reading periods, and the first 300 submissions to each are free. We also run a collaborative writing contest in August. We also accept visual art all year. General Submissions: March 1 – May 1 General Submissions: October 1 – December 1 Collaboration Contest: July 15 –  August 31 Payment We are thrilled to finally be able to say that, starting with issue 17, we will be able to offer our contributors a small payment of $50 upon publication. A Note on Our Aesthetic We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color. We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished. Practical Matters We are grateful to be a part of a literary community that is taking action against systemic racism. We will also be donating submission fees...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $25.00 - $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 - $10.00 for poetry Theme: Story must begin with: No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury. We love that writers around the world are inspired by our first lines, and we know that not every story will be sent to us. However, we ask that you do not submit stories starting with our first lines to other journals (or post them online on public sites) until we've notified you as to our decision (usually four weeks after the deadline). When the entire premise of the publication revolves around one sentence, we don't want it to look as if we stole that sentence from another writer. If you have questions, feel free to drop us a line. Also, we understand that writers may add our first line to a story they are currently working on or have already completed, and that's cool. But please do not add our first line to a previously published story and submit it to us. We do not accept previously published stories, even if they have been repurposed for our first lines. And, just to be clear, we do not accept simultaneous submissions. One more thing while I've got you here: Writers compete against one another for magazine space, so, technically, every literary magazine is running a contest. There are, however, literary magazines that run traditional contests, where they charge entry fees and rank the winners. We do not - nor will we ever - charge a submission fee, nor do we rank our stories in order of importance. Occasionally, we run contests to help come up with new first lines, or we run fun, gimmicky competitions for free stuff,...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: Approximately: 10,000 words – $100, 7,500 words – $75, 5,000 words – $50, 2,500 words – $25, 1,500 words – $20 Theme: Horror set in Texas written by Texas authors HellBound Books is pleased to announce the 2025 edition of Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers. Author E. R. Bills will edit Vol. 10 of the series, which has featured works from Joe R. Lansdale, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Graham Jones, Robert E. Howard, Madison Estes, Jeremy Hepler, Bret McCormick, Josh Rountree, Patrice Sarath, Mario E. Martinez, James H. Longmore, William Jensen and others. RK10 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 two free copies and a discounted wholesale price on any copies of the book that he or she purchases to carry and sell on their own. 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 – $20. All payments will be made after official acceptance, and when acceptance is communicated, each author will need to send a short bio. HellBound will be requesting two-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 two years down the road you can do with it what you like.   The Submission Period begins FEBRUARY 1, 2025. The deadline to turn in stories is MAY 1, 2025, and our intent is to have the book printed and available by October 1, 2025, in plenty of time for Halloween. Please...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $10 Theme: poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, & anything else Note: Reprints welcome we are currently open for submissions. through may 1st or until we reach contributor cap. what to submit send up to five pieces of poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, & anything else. if you wrote it, submit it! we welcome both unpublished & published work, but please give credit in your document to where the work appeared first. please include all work in one document (pdf or doc). i don't have a preference over font & font size, nor line spacing. what not to submit we are not considering work made or inspired by ai, nor plagiarized, unoriginal, or stolen pieces. please do not include photos in your work, unless the specific format calls for that. i have a hard time getting through super lengthy work, so i will generally pass on those. also, do not send me any work that encourages racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. what happens after i submit? you'll have a decision in your inbox hopefully in a week or two. worse case scenario, it will be no longer than a month. you'll be notified even if it's rejected, i won't leave you hanging! please note: i sometimes don't read emails or submissions on weekends, so any inquiries over those days will be promptly answered on monday! if you are declined during this reading period, please wait until the following period to submit again! what happens to contributors? my contributors will receive payment of $10 per piece within a month of publication. payments can only be dispersed through cashapp, paypal, or chime, & i do not have any alternative methods i can work out. i am not offering contributor copies at this time, but your issue will always be available for purchase. how to submit...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $1,200.00 for all accepted submissions (unclear if this is split between the authors or for each piece.) Theme: Soilpunk (sci-fi involving soil) with the theme of 'The Garden' Your fiction, our future. Tractor Beam is a new quarterly speculative and science fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical visions of hopeful futures built from the ground up. Our editorial mandate is to explore audacious and provocative ideas around farming, food, earth science, and beyond, reimagining how humans can live more harmoniously with nature. For our second issue, themed “The Garden”, we’re seeking original written and graphic works set on a future Earth transformed by new approaches to soil. Literal or abstract, near term or on distant horizons: worlds can take inspiration from innovations or alternative practices in earth and material science, regenerative agriculture, food, microbiology, and more. Each story should be a visionary proposal woven into a spectacular plot. We prefer submissions under 6000 words for writing or 16 panels for graphic novellas. Pitches and pencils are welcome. Please send all submissions to [email protected]. Deadline to submit for Issue 2 is May 1st. Tractor Beam pays $1,200.00 for all accepted submissions. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify us immediately if your piece was accepted elsewhere so we can withdraw it and congratulate you! Let’s bring sci-fi down to earth–literally–and sow the seeds of a better tomorrow, today. Via: Tractor Beam.

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $5 usd Theme: Splatter Friendly Horror How the Sausage is Made! Submissions: We want solid entertaining writing. That has to be clearly stated because we are open to gore, extreme horror, splatterpunk, and horror with sexual elements to it. Sounds great? Like anything too good to be true, there is a catch. We have some hard “Nos.” Before you go off about the freedom of expression, remember, this is a web ‘zine, not a government. We donate our time to it and if we’re not getting joy from reading your story we’re not going to publish it. This website runs on our love of horror. We offer a token payment of $5 USD to support your drug habit, paid upon publication. However, you keep your rights –we don't want them. The Stuff We Don’t Want to Read: NO sex with children, NO sexualization of children, and NO child rape. If you’re writing a story about a child predator who gets what’s coming to him –great. But we don’t want to read about that predator coming on his victims. We won’t publish anything supporting a racist, transphobic, or homophobic agenda, so don’t try it. Sex and sensuality are fine, but we publish horror. We won’t publish a story that’s 90 percent lesbian vampires having explicit sex and 10 percent them ripping their victims to pieces. Go 50/50 on that and you've got our attention. High-quality gory smut is fine. Like gore, sex has to serve a purpose. If you want to write a piece about a cowboy who discovers one of the prostitutes at the local brothel has a vagina that opens to another dimension filled with blood clot monsters and he can fit his entire body into it… Sure, that’s great. If you want to...

Submission Window: May 1st-2nd, 2025 Payment: 8 cents per word for original, 2 cents for reprints, For artwork: $10 for the non-exclusive right to use each image, for as long as the site is online.  If we publish a print collection we will pay a pro-rata share for each image used. Theme: Well written original work in science fiction, fantasy, myth, legend, fairy tales, and eldritch, in written, podcast, video, and/or graphic story form, and from around the world. Note: Reprints welcome     Submissions Schedule The first and second day of every month, 12 am of the 1st to 12 am of the 3rd, E.S.T. For reading impaired individuals, our submissions manager and ‘forget password’ have a captcha compatible with screen readers. We pay 8¢ per word for new fiction, 2¢ per word for fiction reprints, 2 – 8¢ per word for new fact-based work, 1- 4¢ per word for reprinted fact articles. For new poetry, we pay $1 per line, and for reprints we pay 50¢ a line  We’re looking for poems up to 40 lines. We’ll consider longer poems but that would be a hard sell, and words over 40 lines would be paid at 8¢ per word. We sponsor The Kepler Award to recognize and encourage writers of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories that creatively extrapolate on known science in constructive and exciting ways. You can learn aboutThe Kepler Award here. You can read a copy of our standard contract here.   It can be varied as needed to include the rights of translators, voice actors, etc. Writers Guidelines We accept new work as well as reprints, prose and poetry, from a minimum of 1000 words on up.   All else being equal, shorter pieces will be favored, and we have yet to find a story over about 9-10,000 words we have even...

Deadline: May 5th, 2025 Payment: $25 and a contributors copy Theme: short comedic fiction Eggplant Emoji, the comedy literary journal is currently seeking previously-unpublished comedic short fiction submissions for its fifth volume. Eggplant Emoji Volume 5 will be a print and eBook collection of hilarious short stories that are character-driven and culturally striking. We are not looking for essays; we want scenes with dialogue, and stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. For a better sense of what we’re looking for, check out previous Volumes of Eggplant Emoji, available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Submissions should be 1,000 – 8,000 word prose, with a comedic tempo of at least one witty line or funny moment per page, but ideally more than one. The intended audience will be 17+ and we encourage adult or sexual themes. Submission Guidelines: We use a blind submission process. That means your name, email address, or any other identifying information should be absent from the pages of your .doc/.docx piece. Please title your work and reference it in the body of your email. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please immediately advise us if your piece is accepted elsewhere. A maximum of 2 pieces will be accepted per person for consideration. Contributors will receive a $25 one-time payment and author copy per accepted piece. Please send submissions to [email protected] Deadline: Monday, May 5, 2025. Decisions will be rendered by Thursday, July 30, 2025. Projected release date: September 2, 2025. Read “Advice on Writing for Eggplant Emoji, and Biggest Mistakes Made by Submitters“ on Eggplant Emoji’s Substack. Via: Eggplant Emoji.