Events

Deadline: June 1, 2014 Payment: US$.05/word, payable upon publication. Plus, one copy of the edition in which the work appears Submissions will open for, Diabolic Tales IV - The Psychology of Death starting on November 1, 2013 and will close on June 1, 2014. We want the most deranged scary stories you have ever written about death. We are looking for original stories only in which some facet of death derived by the mind of the killer is the main focus, it needs to be physical, sociological, psychological. All stories must be strong and realistic, with believable characters. No brutality or overt blood and gore. We want to be afraid, really afraid. sent via email on or before September 15, 2013.     All stories must be in doc., docx., or .rtf format. All stories must be a minimum of 2500 words but not more than 5000 words. Please use 12 point font, Times New Roman and double space your text. 1 inch margins on all sides. In the body of your submission in the left hand top corner, include your contact information (Real Name or official pen name, not your online name), the word count of the work you are submitting and contact information, please include a cover letter with a brief biography and any publishing history you feel we might want to know about. Make certain to use an email address that you have access to at all times as correspondences from us come through email only! You will receive an email if your story has been accepted or rejected as soon as a decision has been made. NO MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS, NO REPRINTS! WE ONLY ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS THROUGH SUBMITTABLE. When you are ready, please submit your material here: http://diabolicpublications.submittable.com/submit PAY: Is made through Paypal only, if you don't have a...

Deadline: June 1st 2014 Payment: US$.05/word, payable upon publication. Plus, one copy of the edition in which the work appears. Open call for submissions for the anthology ”Tales from the Night of the Dead” starting on November 1, 2013 and will close on June 1, 2014. We want scary stories based on and set on Halloween night. No requirements for type of story, i.e. ghost, vampire and so forth. All stories must be strong and realistic, with believable characters. When people read your story we want them to get chills, be afraid to turn the lights off, terrified to answer the door on Halloween night! Give trick-or-treat a new definition. All stories must be in doc., docx., or .rtf format. All stories must be a minimum of 1500 words but not more than 4500 words. Please use 12 point font, Times New Roman and double space your text. 1 inch margins on all sides. Do not add spaces between paragraphs. In the body of your submission in the left hand top corner, include your contact information (Real Name or official pen name, not your online name), the word count of the work you are submitting, please include a cover letter with a brief biography and any publishing history or organization memberships you feel we might want to know about. Make certain to use an email address that you have access to at all times, correspondences from us come through email only! You will receive an email if your story has been accepted or rejected as soon as a decision has been made. NO MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS, NO REPRINTS!  PAY: Is made through Paypal only, if you don't have a paypal account please get one. We require a written and signed agreement which will be sent with an offer email. Fiction: US$.05/word, payable upon publication. Plus, one copy...

Deadline: June 1st, 2014 Payment: Split royalties, paid quarterly Rituals have always been a powerful part of human life, from the ancient Aztec nation’s human sacrifice to the supposed transubstantiation of the Communion elements during Catholic Mass. They impart a sense of history, comfort, community, common ground—but also power, mystery and horror. Since this isn’t Clam Chowder for the Coddled Child, I’m interested in the latter attributes. I want to see dark ritual in all the various forms you can imagine—from the ancient and ceremonial to the simple and home-grown. The rituals in your stories can be grounded in painstaking research or your own twisted creations. They can have real power or simply exist in the minds of your characters. They can produce the desired effect or something else entirely. Stories predicated upon the standard voodoo doll or zombie need to be particularly mind-blowing, as such topics are expected given the theme—the same goes for Cthulhu Mythos. If you’ve read CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY? you’ll know that I’m especially interested in the kind of stories that play with people’s preconceived notions and turn tropes on their ears. I’m anticipating a modern setting for most pieces, though I’m open to historical stories told with today’s sensibilities. Cross-genre stories will likely be a hard sell. No Science Fiction. Urban Fantasy might work. Gore and sex need to support an actual story, rather than be the end in and of themselves. Payment will be split royalties, paid quarterly. Word count is 3-5,000. Reading period is from 1 January 2014 to 1 June 2014. Publication is tentatively scheduled for October 2014, by Angelic Knight Press. Send your stories in standard manuscript format to [email protected]. Editor’s Note: That email address won’t even be active until 1 January, so if you’re the sort that doesn’t cotton much to guidelines when preparing submissions–well, your MS...

Deadline: June 1, 2014. Payment: Golden Severed Head award and sales you earn during Welcome, writing warriors from around the world. The gods of blood and victory formally invite you to test your skills in a battle to the death. Many will raise their steel and walk onto the bloody arena floor, but only one will claim the 2014 GOLDEN SEVERED HEAD. Wartooth Arena offers writers of all stripes, new and old, the opportunity to compete, show off their writing skills, and be judged as worthy of the coveted Golden Severed Head award. Your ability to impress the judges, the public, and master these tools will determine how successful you will be in an online author tournament to the death. Can your virtual avatar stand against all comers by the strength of your story? Wartooth Arena 2: Revenge of the F*cking Bad Ass, opens to all writers and spectators on January 1, 2014. This bloody round of competition focuses on the socially shocking, moral roller-coaster of the exploitation movies of the 1970's. Each story submitted should clearly draw upon the classic exploitation and grindhouse genres of Biker Films, Blaxploitation, Cannibal Films, Canuxploitation, Carsploitation, Chambara Films, Giallo Films, Mockblusters, Mondo Films, Monster Movies, Nazisploitation, Nudist Films, Ozsploitation, Rape and Revenge Films, Sexsploitation, Shocksploitation, Slasher Films, Splatter Films, Spaghetti Westerns, Women In Prison Films, Britsploitation, Bruceploitation, Chopsocky, Category III Films, Gothsploitation, Hippie Exploitation, Hixploitation, Jewsploitation, Martial Arts Films, Mexploitation, Ninja Films, Nunsploitation, Pinku eiga, Stoner Films, Teensploitation, and Vigilante Films to offer a uniquely disturbing and entertaining world. Entries must be previously unpublished as stand alone works. They may, however, have appeared in previously published anthologies. Any genre is acceptable as long as aspects of exploitation films are prominently featured. The maximum word count for stories is 40K, and deadline for entries...

Deadline: June 1st 2014 Payment: 5,000-10,000 words = $50 and a contributor’s copy (paperback), 3,500-4,999 words = $35 and a contributor’s copy (paperback), Under 3,500 words = '$20 and electronic copy' OR paperback copy. Subs Open February 1st and Close June 1st! What we want: Surreal stories. That’s it. There are no rules. I don’t want “bizarro,” I don’t want “horror,” and I don’t want “science fiction.” I don’t want a genre story. I want a surreal story. Which means… We want a surreal story (and that also means tropes can be included). We want beautiful prose. We want experimental prose. Sometimes, I want to have no idea what I’m reading, but if I ask you about it, you could explain why you wrote what you wrote (not that I would). We don’t want a bunch of random things happening. Talking animals have been done to death. So have stories about video games, and virtual reality, and stories that talk about penises over and over and over again. Can you do something different? The first rule of this anthology… THERE ARE NO RULES. Your story can have extremes, and your story can take place inside of a mailbox. (and yes, similes are okay. writers use them) What we’re paying:   5,000-10,000 words ·       $50 and a contributor’s copy (paperback) 3,500-4,999 words ·       $35 and a contributor’s copy (paperback) Under 3,500 words ·       $20 and electronic copy ·       OR paperback copy. (Outside of U.S. pays shipping. Payment via Paypal) Your response: WOW! That’s quite a range of payment options, and the drop-off is significant. Our response: Sure. I encourage you to submit a longer piece. If you don’t want to submit a longer piece, you can still get paid something. Does word count factor into acceptance? Nope. Does my name factor into acceptance? Nope. What if my...

Deadline: June 1st 2014 Payment: 5 cents per word Pain comes in a variety of guises. Physical. Mental. Emotional. Individual. Global. Psychosomatic. We want to read stories where the protagonist challenges pain--and either supersedes it, or collapses as a result of it. Do you write stories of solitary anguish? Or do you write stories of galactic healing? Regardless of which you prefer, make sure that your pain story confronts the concept of pain in a speculative fiction manner. CALL BEGINS APRIL 1, 2014 (no, really. it's not a joke) CALL ENDS JUNE 1, 2014 Penumbra is looking for original, unpublished stories of 3500 words or less. We prefer that writers use Standard Manuscript Format for submissions. (You can read this article by Chuck Rothman on the SFWA site on preparing a manuscript for submission if you are unfamiliar with SMF.) Please send your stories as file attachments in .rtf or .doc formats only. Please include a cover letter in the body of your email, with the manuscript title, you pen name if applicable, the exact word count of the story not including title and byline, and a publication history if applicable. Penumbra is a professional rates paying publisher, paying 5 cents per word. We will evaluate poetry submissions for each issue. We will also consider previously published stories with rights reverted to the author. Penumbra has multiple issue calls open at the same time, therefore it is imperative that you include the issue theme in the subject line of your email. Submissions that do not include this information risk getting lost in our queue and not read before the deadline. Penumbra uses Musa Publishing’s house style guide, which relies upon the Chicago Manual of Style. All accepted stories will be edited to reflect Musa house style. If you have never been published...

Deadline: June 15th, 2014 Payment: $25.00, payable upon acceptance, and 1 trade paperback and electronic copy of the book provided upon publication. The late 19th century saw the invention of film, and almost immediately after, the Horror genre. The earliest examples were depictions of paper or cloth ghosts and haunted locales, but it was only a short time before titles likeDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein made their first appearances. The 20’s gave us Nosferatu and the first Universal Monsters, The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s were dominated by Universal, but Hammer Film Productions jumped in toward the end to help carry the torch for monster films another couple of decades. It was a golden era for the genre and there is not a writer among us that doesn’t count at least a few of these films as major influences and inspirations. RECONSTRUCTING THE MONSTER pays homage to these classic films. We are looking for stories inspired by any Horror film released before 1974. If the work the movie was based upon exists in public domain, give us a continuation of the story, a side story or a reboot. Tell us a story of Dracula living in a modern Manhattan penthouse with Frankenstein’s Monster living in the tunnels beneath the city, or maybe the other way around. Just don’t mention any neck-bolts. Do your homework! If the work is still under copyright, give us a re-imagining of the tale and theme. Instead of discovering a Gill-man in the Amazon, discover a large, ultra-aggressive and poisonous species of jellyfish or Octopus on a scientific expedition in Melanesia. Or tell us a completely original story for which a movie served as inspiration. Each submission should begin with a short paragraph...

Deadline: June 15th, 2014 Payment: 1cent/word What are we looking for? Flash fiction, pure and simple. No genre or content restrictions. 1000 words or less. Possible themed submission windows in the future. Good flash fiction is like a freeze frame—a snapshot of a real story about real characters. The word count is low, so many of the details are left to the reader to fill in, but they’re there. Flash fiction is not the same as a vignette, or a scene; it hints at much more. Give us something real (though not necessarily realistic), unique, and interesting. What is our submission and publication schedule? Open for submissions for Q1. We will publish online quarterly. Schedule subject to change. SUBMISSIONS PUBLICATION Q1: 1 April–15 June 1 July Q2: 1 July–15 September 1 October Q3: 1 October–15 December 1 January Q4: 1 January–15 March 1 April How do you submit? During submission window, please email submissions (as .pdf, .rtf, .doc, or .docx attachments) to [email protected] with the subject “Flash fiction submission”. Please include contact information in the email itself, and withhold it from the manuscript. All submissions must be double-spaced and in a legible font and font size. Feel free to follow Standard Manuscript Format, apart from contact information. Emails should be formatted as follows: Author’s name: Submission title: Simultaneous submission: (y/n) Cover letter / bio: not required, but welcome Will we pay you? Yes, 1 cent/word. How will your work be published? Initially, online, free to read. Future plans exist for an ebook version of an annual anthology of select pieces. How and when should you query? Expected response time will be updated on an on-going basis. As publication occurs three months after submission windows open, we don’t expect this to be a big issue. Please feel free to email [email protected]...

Deadline: June 15, 2014 Payment: $30 and a contributor copy   Motorcycle Themed Anthology: Elektrik Milk Bath Press is seeking stories for a new motorcycle-themed anthology.  What we are looking for: 1. We are looking for unusual, original stories that, in some way, shape, or form involve motorcycles and/or their riders, surroundings, etc.  Perhaps the entire story revolves around a particular motorcycle and/or its rider.  Maybe a motorcycle is important to the setting or the background, maybe it’s just passing through...  While motorcycles or their elements must figure into the piece, the actual degree of involvement in the story… well, we’ll leave that up to you.  If you want an idea of what we like, check out one of our favorite motorcycle-themed stories, Julio Cortazar’s “The Night Face Up.”  2.  The above mentioned stories are just ideas.  We want to see what you come up with, so show us your creative best.  Stories can be dark fantasy, horror, magic realism, literary, etc.  Humor is okay, too.  What we want, more than anything, is a good, solid story—stores that touch us, as readers, in some way.  We love stories that are written from an unusual perspective, contain unusual but believable characters, or show us something we’ve never seen before.   We don’t mind sex or blood—not even a bit—but we are not huge fans of excessive gore.   If it is necessary to the story, no problem at all—we get that.  Gore for gore’s sake... not so much. 3.  A word about word count:  We are accepting stories from 1000—5000 words, with the majority of stories probably falling in 2000-5000 word range.  We are pretty flexible with word count as long as it’s a great story.  Impress us and even if you are a little over or a little under, we...

Deadline: June 30th 2014 Payment: $5 and a Digital copy Submissions Dates: 3/1/14 - 6/30/14   Publication Date: Late 2014 (November-December)   Rejected Overview     We, at Harren Press, are hosting a REJECTED anthology! Any short story that you have written, submitted, and been rejected with; we are interested in seeing it and the rejection letter. We are accepting any genre, so feel free to submit anything you have.     What we ARE looking for: Stories that have been polished by the writer, but for one reason or another were not accepted by the intended publisher.     What we are NOT looking for: Stories that have obvious reasons for rejection. We do not want stories that are filled with several grammatical and spelling errors. We do not want stories that have no ending, have no plot, and have no character building. Your story should be a complete short story.     Within this anthology, there will be a forward that discusses the various reasons that stories, even perfectly written stories, can sometimes hit the rejection pile at different presses, small and large. The foward will be written by Brian Woods. Stories will be selected by Brian Woods, Jesse Duckworth, and the Harren Press staff.   Rights   We purchase First Electronic, First Print, and Anthology Rights. Please remember that you can only sell your various “First” rights once. You will only be able to market your accepted story as a reprint, once we have published it, which may limit where you can submit it to in the future, and how much you may be paid for it. Only you can make this business decision for yourself.   Submission Requirements 1. We are looking for short stories between 2,500-5,500 words.   2. We pay $5 for your story and a...

Deadline: $0.01 a word and an ebook Payment: June 30th, 2014 We want unique, strange, and compelling horror fiction. The writing style should be unusual but mesmerizing. The characters should be believable. Awe us, make us cry, make us laugh, make us sigh. The ideal story should stay with us for a long time after reading. Expectations: We will not accept reprints, multiple submissions, or simultaneous submissions. To clarify, this means that we will not accept a story that has already been published, you can only submit one story, and you cannot have the story you submit to us also submitted to other publications. Response time: We will back to you as soon as possible, but many things factor into our response time. The goal is to have it back to you within four to six weeks from submission date. Length: The best stories are those written in the right amount of words. There is no word minimum, but the ideal maximum is 10,000 words. The preferred range is 2,500–7,500. Compensation: You will be paid $0.01 a word and an ebook for original work and first-printing, world exclusive rights (text and audio) for 12 (twelve) months after the anthology is released. About Us: Volume 1 released Halloween, 2013. It featured thirteen stories that crossed the genres of surreal horror, dark fantasy, and heart pounding dread. The debut horror anthology lived up to the guarantee to twist the reader's perception, and we can't wait to do that again. From the common, comfortable tropes, to the more taboo, the tales should have a literary aspect designed to expand the readers understanding of what true horror can be. If you would like to get an idea of what we are looking for, please check out the wonderful thirteen stories that made it through...

Deadline: June 30th, 2014 Payment: Even split of net profits between Editor, Authors, and Illustrator. Paid quarterly. This will be a very small project. Many of the stories will be solicited from friends of mine, both IRL and online. That doesn't mean they aren't accomplished authors. So, there aren't many open spots. This idea was born as a reaction to an editor's complaint about the volume of cannibal submissions he received through Apex's slush pile. With large markets, themes and tropes tend to come in waves. Apparently that wave includes cannibals right now. So some of his friends, and mine, started joking about starting a cannibal-themed anthology. Well, here we are. What are we looking for? Cannibals, obviously. But we aren't looking for the same tired stories that feature inbred hillbillies capturing college spring-breakers and serving them up for lunch. You see it in film even more than fiction; The Hills Have Eyes, Dying Breed, Wrong Turn etc... Give us something fresh. Sexy cannibals. Philosophic cannibals. Lawyer cannibals. Quiltbag cannibals. Cannibal angels. Cannibal steampunk. Alt. History with cannibals. A cannibal family drama. What we are not looking for. Rapey cannibals. Hillbilly cannibals. Racist cannibals. Tribal cannibals. There's always exceptions to the rules, but if you use any of these things it better be a damned good story. Poetry - Query, you never know. Word Limit: 8,000 - Query for longer. Format: Standard Manuscript Format http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html Response Time: 2 weeks or less, depending on volume. Pay: Even split of net profits between Editor, Authors, and Illustrator. Paid quarterly. Fewer authors = more money. So I'll be favoring longer stories, though won't rule out shorter ones depending on the quality and other factors. Publisher: Self published in Kindle Format and possibly Createspace depending on interest. Please send submissions to [email protected] using "Submission" in...

Deadline: June 30th 2014 Payment: £10 on publication, copy of the paperback and profit share for two years. Darlings! The awesome team of Jen & Jan are doing a Fox Spirit anthology and we are open for submissions! Official blurb type thing - Wicked Women  Edited by Jan Edwards and Jenny Barber Regular readers of Fox Spirit books know that women are pretty bad-ass – be they evil queens, goddesses, super-villains or anti-heroes, warriors, monsters, bad girls, rebels, mavericks or quietly defiant – so with that in mind, we’re looking for stories of women who gleefully write their own rules, women who’ll bend or break the social norms, skate along the edge of the law and generally aim to misbehave. Genres: any variation of fantasy, SF, horror and/or crime. Length: 4000 – 8000 words Format: doc/docx/rtf files – see the Fox Spirit house style guide for formatting requirements Email as an attachment to: [email protected] Please put ‘Submission: Wicked Women/story title’ in the email subject line Deadline: 30th June 2014 Payment: £10 on publication, copy of the paperback and profit share for two years. Odd notes - Yes, we’re accepting stories from men too! Just make sure your lead is a woman. A leading woman can be cisgender or transgender or any person who chooses to self identify or present as a woman in the space of the story. Via: Jenny Barber

Deadline: June 30th, 2014 Payment: An equal percentage royalty split of 50% of sales p.o.d. and e-book. Burnt Offerings Books is planning on publishing a series of anthologies. The theme of the next anthology will be fixed-timeline time-travel. Why fixed-timeline time-travel? Because I love books and films about time travel. And I hate books and films about time travel. I love the idea of time travel but I hate paradoxes. One of the only films I know of that successfully used the concept of fixed-timeline time-travel is 12 Monkeys. With almost every other film that uses time travel as a plot device, the plot holes and paradoxes ruin them for me. The most recent time-travel film I've watched was Looper. If the premise they were using was fixed-timeline time travel, then much of the film would be completely untenable. The plot holes could have been fixed if they had taken the time to work on the screenplay, but they weren't because they didn't. It's things like that which set me to thinking. What is "fixed-timeline time travel"? I think that this infographic explains it fairly well.   What kind of stories are we looking for? A good story trumps genre classification but we are generally looking for stories about time travel. We are going to be very discriminative in our selection process. We are looking for literature.   Not just stories. If you’re going to explore a traditional genre, we expect you to do something new with it. If you send us another textbook genre story, you will receive a polite letter of refusal and suggestions for other markets that may be better suited for your work. What we’re looking for is writing that is evocative and actually effects readers emotionally. If you’re going to go for scary, we want terrifying writing...

Deadline: July 1st 2014 Payment: $10 and digital copy DailyNightmare.com is accepting submissions for its second annual anthology of 100-word prose poems based on any of the 350-plus nightmares currently posted on the site (http://dailynightmare.com/category/nightmares/). Payment will be $10.00 made via PayPal and a .pdf of the final anthology in exchange for First World Serial Rights, electronic rights, and reprint rights for posters and postcards. (After one year, rights can be reassigned to the author.) In addition to professional word-rate, this will be a cool-looking publication since we intend to exploit all the tricks of expressive digital typography. The deadline for submissions is July 1. A couple extremely specific criteria: 1) All submissions must be “inspired by” one of the nightmares posted on the site. (Hint: Want to submit a story based on one of YOUR nightmares? Then submit a non-fictional account of the nightmare along with the art or story that it inspired. We’ll assign it a Nightmare Number.) 2) Written submissions (stories or poems) must contain EXACTLY 100 words including title. Email submissions to: anthology @ dailynightmare.com and include the number of the inspirational nightmare in the SUBJECT line Include a brief bio (~ 25 – 50 words) with the submission so we don’t have to track you with our hellhounds. What are we looking for? We at the DailyNightmare groove on the idea of inhabiting each other’s dreams, even the nasty, ooky ones, and this anthology is one step toward that kind of communal nightmare-scape. 100 words aren’t many, so sharpen at least one point of the narrative pentacle: mood, character, plot, setting, theme, and try to imbue your piece with a “sense of completion.” Poetry or prose, matters not; word count does. DailyNightMare.com celebrates literate terror (or “snob horror” if you will), so heighten the language,...

Deadline: July 6, 2014 Payment: 10 contributor’s copies Our first-ever publication, Spooklights, will feature literary horror and supernatural tales by authors around the country. We’d love to feature a few additional stories by up-and-coming authors in literary genre fiction! Deadline: July 6, 2014 Payment: 10 contributor’s copies Length: 1000 – 5000 words Looking for: horror, supernatural, or generally weird original tales; well-written with a good sense of voice, atmosphere, and originality; unique settings, characters, or perspectives; creative use of horror standbys; stories that are creepy, scary, or just plain fun. Not looking for: tired tropes used in conventional ways (zombies, unless you do something new with them), straight serial killer tales, or cliche-ridden fiction . Gore, violence, sex, etc. okay if used tastefully. The point of a good literary horror story is not death, violence, and dismemberment, but a message that says something about fear, humanity, and evil. The collection will be sold as an e-book through major distributors, and as a print copy in local book stores, conventions, and artist outlets. Publication will occur in August or September. Every submission will receive a personalized response. To submit: Send an email with the story attached as a .pdf, .doc/.docx, .odt, .rtf, or pasted into the body of the email. Use a simple font, 12-point, one inch margins, with your name, phone number, and email address on the title page. Number your pages if sent as an attachment. Colored or wacky fonts will send your story to the recycle bin. In your email, state the name of the story, the basic premise, the word count, and any previous publication information (if you have any; not necessary). Tell us what the story means to you personally, and why you wrote it. Send submissions to: [email protected] Please see our Submission and Guidelines page...