Taking Submissions: Something Old, Something New

Submission Window: June 1st – 30th, 2025
Payment: Stories under 5,000 words will receive $10. Stories up to 10,000 words will be serialized over 2 months and will receive $20
Theme: Speculative Fiction that fits the vibe of unreality, suggest reading previous work from the publisher before submitting
Note: Reprints are acceptable if the story is not freely available online

Our Ko-fi minizine for subscribers

Submissions for this call will be OPENING for the month of June 2025.

The Pink Hydra is starting a Ko-fi minizine!

This is a way to build a subscriber base and steady income without sacrificing our commitment to accessible fiction. Starting July, every ‘off’ month when we’re not publishing The Pink Hydra, we will post a new, exclusive short story on our Ko-fi, paired with a piece of classical artwork, and accompanied by short reviews of stories or books The Pink Hydra loves. For this eclectic mix of classic and new elements, the minizine will be known as Something Old, Something New.

Length: Your story must be a minimum of 1,500 words long. We will read stories of up to 10,000 words, with the possibility of serializing them. However, we will give preference to stories which fit in one issue and are less than 5,000 words long.

Simultaneous submissions: Allowed and welcome. Let us know at the submissions email if you need to withdraw a story.

Multiple submissions: Only send one story at a time, and please send only one story per open submission period. We aim to get back to you within a month of receipt.

Reprints: For this project, we will prefer originals, but reprints are acceptable if the story is not freely available online.

Rights: If accepted, we require exclusive digital-only rights to the story for a month after publication. For original stories, we ask for First World Rights, which means you can’t publish the story elsewhere until we’ve published it. For reprints, we will purchase rights as appropriate. Payment for originals and reprints is the same.

Payment: Stories under 5,000 words will receive $10. Stories up to 10,000 words will be serialized over 2 months and will receive $20. We prefer Paypal for all payments, but alternative arrangements can be made if necessary.

Genre-wise, we are looking for anything that fits our chosen vibe of unreality. That includes—but is not limited to—all stripes of speculative fiction. It also includes tales where no magic happens. Stories need to have a fantasy-feel, to transport the reader to some different world. This can include literary, romance, or even nonfiction memoir.

As ever, it’s a good idea to check out the work we’ve published before. For this submission call, we are hoping to publish a variety of voices and genres. Because the number of stories we can feature is very limited, we may reject a good story simply because we have received too many submissions of a similar style or subject matter—or we feel that the story won’t serialize well. We won’t be providing personal feedback for these rejections, but you are very welcome to submit any rejected story from this call to our magazine submission calls in July and October.

Formatting: Email all submissions to [email protected]. Use the subject line ‘Kofi Submission,’ and keep your cover letter short and simple. Attach the full manuscript of your story as a document that can be opened and edited in MS Word (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .odt). Do not mark it read-only. No PDFs, no links to your Google Drive, and please do NOT paste the text of your submission into the body of the email. Use whatever font or formatting appeals to you, and please indicate your byline (a.k.a. the name you want to publish under).

Submission Confirmation: You should receive an auto-reply from us within 72 hours confirming that we have received and queued your submission. If you haven’t received it, send your submission again. If it’s still not arriving, please urgently contact our Chief Editor at her personal email: emmyktz (at) gmail.com. Do not use this address for submissions; offenders will be demolished, hung, drawn and quartered, sent in pieces to each of the twelve tribes, and ignored.

Fic recs: As mentioned above, the minizine will include short reviews and recommendations from me, Emmylou Kotzé aka the Editor of the Pink Hydra, for short stories and novels I’ve read and loved. If you’ve got a book or short story you’d really like me to read, feel free to send me a message about it — but bear in mind that I won’t neccessarily feature it. All recs will be for work that’s been published in the 2020s, so please don’t suggest anything older. You can’t pay to have something featured — to advertise with us, please see this page.

Via: The Pink Hydra.