Taking Submissions: Family, Fae, Fiend, Friend, and Foe
Submission Window: June 1st – July 31st, 2025
Payment: $10 or a contributors copy
Theme: Speculative stories featuring a family with at least one type of supernatural family member
THREE COUSINS PUBLISHING, an imprint of WEST MESA PRESS, will be accepting submissions for its fourth annual anthology with the working title, Family, Fae, Fiend, Friend, and Foe from June 1, 2025 until midnight July 31, 2025. Stories submitted before or after the submission period will not be considered.
This is a themed anthology and stories that don’t fit the theme will be rejected. Submissions must be speculative and feature a family with some type of supernatural family member or members. Vampires and fairies, gnomes and zombies, leprechauns, bigfeet, ghouls, and poltergeists are all welcome. Horror, humor, fantasy, science fiction, or even an entertaining, but bizarre mashup of genres that we haven’t considered. Your characters may be young or old and the time frame may be from the dawn of mankind to the far future. Here’s the short list of guidelines. Pay attention, please. These are important.
1, Stories should be submitted in standard format. Here’s a link: https://www.writersdigest.com/
2. Double spaced, no tabs, use the indent function in ‘paragraph,’ no extra spaces between paragraphs, and Times New Roman 12 point font.
3. Signal scene breaks by ###. Scene breaks are welcome, but chapters aren’t.
4 If you want italics, use them.
5. Stories must be between 4,000 and 5,000 words. No slack. Rewrite and edit to fit before submitting. Longer or shorter submissions will be deleted unread.
6. No reprints, but simultaneous submissions are fine, as they always should be, but let us know if your story is accepted elsewhere.
7. Put your contact information on the first page and your 150 word bio and bibliography in your cover letter. Do not include links of any kind in your bio/ bibliography. Submissions must be in the form of an attachment, doc, docx, or rtf.
8. Email the submission to [email protected]. Put “Submission Family, your story title, and your name in the subject line, otherwise the gremlins might send your story to purgatory where it will languish unread and unloved until the end of time.
PAYMENT: A $10.00 US payment through Amazon and will be made prior to publication. Or in the alternative authors may choose to receive a paperback of the collection.
WHAT WE’RE BUYING: The anthology will be published in four formats, hardcover, paperback, audio and electronic. We’re buying first worldwide publication rights for those formats and the NON-EXCLUSIVE RIGHT to keep the book available in those formats as long as we choose to do so. The writer agrees not to publish the story elsewhere until 90 days after the anthology is released.
THINGS TO AVOID: No fan fiction. Don’t hurt or abuse any pets. Rape is unacceptable. Profanity is fine, even by children. Kids curse, just not in front of adults, at least, not the clever ones. Check your politics and religion at the door. No extreme erotica or violence.
We generally receive about 100 submissions and we typically publish 20 stories in our anthologies, so that gives us a pretty high acceptance rate. The most frequent causes for rejection are:
1. The story doesn’t fit the submission call.
2. The story is improperly formatted.
3. The story hasn’t been spellchecked or even given a cursory edit. We’re not your English teacher. Double check your work.
4. The submission isn’t a story. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.
We’re looking forward to reading your stories.
