CLOSED: Urban Fantasy Magazine

**ON HIATUS**

Payment: 6 cents a word

Fiction Guidelines

Urban Fantasy Magazine publishes two short stories every month. We are looking for urban fantasy fiction of up to 6000 words (but we strongly prefer 4000 words). We like to read stories set in the world where we all live, albeit with fantastical elements. We’d like for our readers to imagine that our stories are taking place in the city next door. We do accept stories about vampires, werewolves, and zombies, but keep in mind that you’ll be facing strong competition from other writers, including established writers whom we solicit directly.

Our readership is adult, so children’s stories are unlikely to be accepted unless they are relevant to adults as well. On the other hand, we are not impressed by gratuitous sex and violence, or pointlessly foul language; edgy content should be necessary and appropriate to the plot and characters.

It ought to go without saying that any story submitted to Urban Fantasy must be your own unpublished, original creation. If you publish a story on a blog, even your own personal blog, or any website accessible to the general public (i.e., if the story can be found and read online without a password or friend status or other limitation), it is considered published and therefore inappropriate for our market.

Since we do not have the time or resources to manage copyright permissions, please do not send us works with quoted song lyrics. You may use song titles and the names of composers, lyricists, and/or performers, and you may paraphrase or refer to the song lyrics, but we are unable to publish stories with directly quoted song lyrics unless they are in the public domain (written before 1920).

We will not publish stories which feature living public figures as characters, although referencing them (e.g., in terms of a concert/event/sighting) is acceptable. Historical/deceased public figures are acceptable as characters. We do not publish fan fiction and will not publish stories which feature non-original characters, although referencing them (e.g., in a film, as a toy, etc.) is fine, and historical/cultural/legendary characters which are clearly not the property of a single creator (e.g., Santa Claus, King Arthur) are also permissible.

We buy First Electronic rights and First Audio rights, exclusive for a period of six months from date of publication.

What is Urban Fantasy?

First of all, we at Urban Fantasy Magazine don’t believe that UF stories need to be in an “urban” setting, per se. We welcome rural fantasy, and especially stories set in unusual and under-represented locations—as long as they are here on Earth. This Earth. Stories can be set in any historical time period except medieval Europe. Let’s just leave that one for high fantasy, shall we?

All stories must contain a fantastical element. Magic, mysticism, paranormal creatures, monsters, ghosts, time travel . . . and so on and so on. For us, the key here is that the speculative elements have their roots in something non-rational, non-science. If your characters are turned invisible by some kind of device, you’ve got yourself a science fiction story. If they’re invisible because of a witch’s curse or something, send it along.

Your fantastical elements can exist alongside science fictional elements, and they can be slight—we welcome slipstream and magical realism. One thing they absolutely cannot be is “all a dream;” make sure the weird stuff that’s driving your story is really happening.

Submission Process

All stories must be submitted through our online form — we cannot accept stories via email or snail mail. The submission system will then send you an automated response email confirming that your submission has been received.

Multiple Submissions & Simultaneous Submissions
Multiple submissions are not allowed; you may have only one story in our submission process at any one time. We also ask that you wait ten days after receiving a rejection before submitting another story.

Unfortunately, simultaneous submissions are not possible for now. If we find ourselves with ample choice in terms of which stories to use we may revise this rule in the future. For now, if we want to use your story, we expect for it to be available to print.

Compensation

Urban Fantasy Magazine is a professional market and thus pays 6 cents a word, up to our maximum word count of 6000 words. Publication also includes an opportunity to promote your writing beyond Urban Fantasy. We will gladly provide a link to your blog or website, and if you have a book on Amazon, we can link to that as well.

Terms and Agreements

We ask for First Rights and specifically First Internet Publication, with an option on Non-Exclusive Anthology Rights for 18 months. After publication, your story will remain in our searchable archives unless you ask us to remove it.

F.A.Q.

  • Why do we use a webform for submissions?

We do so for a variety of reasons. File uploads can be the source of viruses or hacking attempts, and there are an infinite number of different file formats we’d have to support. Because we use form-based submissions, we can allow you to edit your story while it’s still in the submission queue (so long as we haven’t already looked at it), and it allows us to automate the publishing process to a certain extent. Instead of juggling files, our copyeditor can log in using the same system and fix typos right on the site.

TL;DR

Length: up to 6000 words (prefer 4000)
Pay: 6 cents a word
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Multiple submissions: no (wait 10 days after a rejection before submitting a new story.)
Simultaneous submissions: no
Formatting: Use italics, not underlines. Don’t worry about indents–we’ll add them back in or remove them depending on where we’re publishing your story (the site or ePub for instance).

Via: Urban Fantasy Magazine.

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