Ongoing Submissions: Aggregate

Payment: 1 cent per word

Short Story Submissions

We are always looking for quality fiction. If you’ve got a story that you think might fit, please read on.

Aggregate is an upcoming fiction anthology, and we’re looking for solid, creative short stories. We tend toward science fiction and horror, but prefer to think of genre as a loose categorization at best. Experimental fiction is welcomed, and even strongly encouraged. Strong consideration will be given to stories that explore the sociological and psychological. We’re not particularly concerned about the location or time in which the story takes place, or the use of supernatural or non-supernatural elements.

Not sure if your story fits? That’s okay! Feel free to submit, even if you’re not sure. However, to help give you an idea of what we’re looking for, here is a partial list of movies and books that get us excited.

• Movies: Get Out, The Babadook, Children of Men, 28 Days Later, The VVitch
• Books: The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson), The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), House of Leaves (Danielewski), The Library of Babel (Borges), The Road (McCarthy)

How to submit

All submissions should be sent by e-mail. Please ensure that you follow the formatting guidelines below. Submissions that are not correctly formatted, include stories as attachments, or are otherwise inappropriate, may be politely turned away without review.

We accept stories in plain text pasted into the body of an email, sent to the address [email protected]. Please don’t attach your story as a Word document, PDF file, or any other marked-up format. If you’re sending an HTML formatted file, note that the story will be read as plain text, and that formatting will not be preserved. If you’re not sure what any of that means, don’t worry about it! Just copy and paste the story into the email message, and we’ll let you know if we can’t find your story.

Please be sure to include the word “Submission” AND the title of the story in the subject line of the message.

In the body of the message, we need to see the following:

Your real name.
Your pseudonym, optionally, if you would like to credit the story differently.
A brief cover letter giving us your biography and publication credits.
The word count of the story.
The title of the story.
The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ or *asterisks* (or whatever) for emphasis.

We prefer to see stories that are between 2,000 and 10,000 words in length. Please note that we do not consider novel excerpts.

There’s no deadline; when we’ve finished work on each short story anthology, we move straight on to the next. Just send us your work when you feel it’s ready.

Although we’re based in Canada, we accept English submissions from authors all over the world and pay in United States dollars.

It’s fine to send us more than one story at a time. However, please send them all separately, and not together in one email.

We understand if you want to submit to more than one venue at a time, and that’s alright. Please let us know if you’ve had the story accepted somewhere else.

And finally, thank you for considering us! We’ll do our best to respect your work, whether or not it ends up being a good fit for us. If we’re not meeting your expectations, please let us know, and we’ll try to do better. Authors are the reason that publishers exist. We won’t forget that.

Rights

We ask for first serial rights on any story we publish. This means that the story should not have appeared anywhere else, either in print or online. This includes publication on an author’s own website.

Payment

We pay at a rate of one US cent per word for stories we publish. Contributors receive a complimentary DRM-free copy of the anthology for personal use.

Response times

We aim to reply to all submissions within two weeks. If it’s been longer, and you’d like to double check that we received your submission, please email us at [email protected] with your name and story title.

Via: Writerfield.