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Deadline: April 30th, 2025 Payment: $10 and a contributors copy Theme: Stories about superheroes performing daring feats in the face of true evil Oddity Prodigy Productions is proud to announce that we are open for submissions on our latest anthology: Where Legends Walk! These superhero stories will be an exciting tribute to extraordinary feats in the day-to-day. There is a planned Kickstarter to cover publishing costs. Publishing date and distribution is as yet undecided. The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2025. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Look to the skies! Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave the bonds of earth and soar through the clouds? Do you have a tale of glory, justice and honor waiting to be unleashed? In our follow up to the Utopian world of Bright Mirror, Oddity Prodigy is proud to announce our newest project, Where Legends Walk, An Anthology of Superhero Stories. We are looking for your best stories featuring heroic feats of derring-do in the face of immeasurable evil. So channel your inner hero, lace up your boots, and join us in the fight for justice. If you need direction or inspiration, we recommend delving into the world of comics of all genres. We will be looking at the full range of stories, from Golden Age of mystery men such as the Justice Society of America, Silver Age of heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Bronze Age wonders like the New Gods, the grime and grit of the Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, all the way through to the Modern Age. WHAT WE ARE NOT LOOKING FOR We aren’t looking for fan fiction, stories using existing properties, extreme violence, brutality, or parody. Some sexual content is ok, but nothing too graphic or excessive. We will NOT consider...

Submission Window: April 1st - 30th, 2025 Payment: $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue Theme: Any genre, short story Mission = Revive the art of the short story, support artists, and produce something wonderful. Payout = Base Pay of $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue to be sent by Paypal, Zelle, or check. Wait, you mean if this substack gets thousands of subscribers, the winner would get thousands of dollars? Yes! The New Yorker pays roughly $7,500 per story and I sincerely hope to go way past that. What does the timeline look like? Submit stories by the end of the month, winner to be announced on the 15th. There is ONE story that wins and receives the full payout. Where do I send submissions? [email protected] What are the rules for submitting? 1. No Fees 2. Send in Microsoft Word or Google Doc form 3. Any genre 4. 6- 10,000 words. Yes, just 6 words, like Hemingway's famous 6-word story "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." 5. Reprints are ok so long as you still have the rights to distribute. 6. Acknowledge Distribution Rights on this Substack - You can still sell your story elsewhere but we need to be able to save and publish it here. The goal is to create a library for subscribers. 7. Only the winner will be published and rights will only transfer for the winning story. What do I get for subscribing? One beautiful story every month. The complete library. The joy of supporting artists and doing something interesting. What if I can’t pay right now? That’s ok! If you publish a blurb about this site on your website, blog, or social media, I will send you one full story of your choosing. Best of all, it is...

Deadline: April 30th, 2025 Payment: Contributor's copy Theme: The YA stories you wish you had as a kid with someone like you as the protagonist Note: This anthology is looking for diverse characters. All genres are welcome, though I suspect Fantasy and SciFi will be an easier sell than horror or anything dark Submissions open March 15 for the first Promised Protagonists anthology! This collection of diverse fiction, poetry, and art will be published in print (paperback and potentially hardcover), as well as in ebook format, in the second half of 2025. Submissions will be open from March 15 to April 30. The Google Form for submissions will appear below once the window opens. Unlike our usual submission periods, we will NOT be offering detailed feedback on all anthology submissions due to the expected volume! Particularly for submissions that reach the final rounds of consideration, we may give a few lines of feedback; if you aren’t interested, let us know in the form’s comment box. Overall Guidelines We want the stories you wish you had as a kid! Send us your quirky short fiction, your thoughtful fantasy, or anything that shows that you—yes, you!—can be the protagonist in your own story. We want diverse characters and diverse stories, the perspectives that are too often left out of the general narrative, and pieces that remind young readers that they deserve to take up space and have their own adventures. To get a better sense of the sort of work we’ve published in the past, check out Promised Protagonists Issue 1, Issue 2, and Issue 3 (linked here). Don’t self-reject—if in doubt, submit! We want to see your work, and it won’t get published if it never leaves your computer. Although these guidelines mostly refer to writing or stories, we have the same tastes...

Deadline: April 30th, 2025 Payment: $1 Theme: Canteen Submissions for the 100 Word Project from Manawaker Studio are open January thru May and July thru November. The 100 Word Project is an ongoing project focused on 100 word stories which will be published as a monthly, themed online journal and in a yearly print anthology. Each month (except for June and December) will bring a new prompt, and on the first half of the next month nine of the submitted drabbles for that prompt will be posted in the public-facing section of the Manawaker Patreon alongside one drabble from Manawaker EiC, CB Droege. At the end of the year, the ten stories from each of the ten prompts will be assembled into the next volume of the 100 x 100 series. The project is curated and edited by CB Droege. 100 x 100 is published by Manawaker Studio as part of their regular line of anthologies. Current prompt The Prompt for April 2025  is ‘Canteen‘. The stories The only restrictions are that the stories are 100 words long (granting small leeway for different methods of counting, and not including the title (you don’t have to have a title, but we do like them)), previously unpublished, and written entirely by a person (We know it’s particularly tempting to get a generative AI to help meet the wordcount more precisely, but it’s totally against the spirit of our project.) The idea is that each contributor is writing a brand new story for each prompt as they are announced, but if you happen to have an unpublished drabble that already fits the theme, that works too. There are no genre requirements, but please keep content family friendly (No gore, no explicit sex, use profanity sparingly. General guideline: Would you feel uncomfortable reading the story to a group that includes at least one 12 year old child? If so, maybe it’s not right for us). As with...

Deadline: April 30th, 2025 Payment: 2 cents per word Theme: Spicy monster romance horror stories, Graveside Press’s next themed anthology will be MONSTERS. Open for Submissions: April 1, 2025 through April 30, 2025 Expected Publication: February 13, 2026 (Yes, it’s a little ways out, but it’s Friday the 13th and the day before Valentine’s Day. We can’t pass that up!) What Are We Looking For? Monsters! Specifically … people who love monsters. Like … a lot. Give us your spicy monster romance stories, but keep in mind this is still horror; we aren’t looking for sweet urban fantasy tales. Your submission should still have a heavy horror factor. Submissions Requirements Your story: should be approximately 2,000 – 6,000 words in length. contain some kind of monster, creature, or cryptid from folklore, mythology, or your imagination. contain some level of spice (all heat ranges accepted). any character involved in adult activities must be 18+. NO: non-consensual, rape, or other sexual assault STANDARD PAY RATES Standalone works (novels, novellas, short stories "Tiny Terrors") - 50% royalties of net earnings paid quarterly Anthology submissions - 2¢ per word to be paid 90 business days after publication Illustrations - $75 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES When submitting, please do not send your manuscript already formatted as a book with fancy chapter headers, fonts, margins, etc. We would greatly appreciate if you can follow the formatting guidelines below: file type: *.doc or *.docx Font: Any legible serif, e.g., Times New Roman, Garamond Include author information at the top of page 1 (see sample below) Use formatted indents and not tabs to begin each paragraph Use hard returns to start new paragraphs Use page breaks to begin chapters on a new page If you would like an example of what a properly formatted manuscript looks like or need help with any of the above, check here. When in doubt,...

Deadline: April 30th, 2025 Payment: £12 Theme: Any genre The Twenty-Fifth Underdog Anthology is now open for submissions until April 30th, 2025. We are aiming for publication mid to late May this year. This anthology, originally the Easter anthology, is now the ‘any genre’ one. Anything from romance to science fiction, comedy to horror, as long as it’s legal and not pornographic. Payment is, as always, £12 per story or the equivalent in copies of the book. Stories should be around 2000 words, although this is somewhat flexible. Very short stories (1000 words or less) might be offered a reduced payment. Unfortunately we cannot offer an increased payment for longer stories, although these can be accepted. The deadline on this one can be a little flexible since it’s not tied to a specific annual event. If you let us know you’re going to be a day or two late with your submission, we can accomodate it. Keep in mind though, that once editing starts we’re going to be busy so a day or two over the deadline is okay (with a prior warning!) but later than that will be too late. Since Anthology 24 was a Monster, we’re going to have to set a limit on size for this one. It was a delight to produce that monster but the size makes it a lot more expensive than the rest of the anthologies so it’s a hard one to sell. So send your best, and don’t be disheartened if your story doesn’t make it into this one. We really do have to limit the size of these books for sales reasons. Looking forward to reading your story. There are currently three of these per year and starting in 2019, there will be an omnibus edition at the end of each year....

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,...