Fiction Submission Guidelines

Last minor update: 24 July 2010

Fiction editors:

  • Karen Meisner
  • Susan Marie Groppi
  • Jed Hartman

This page contains the following sections:

Please read this whole page before you submit.

What We Want and What We Don't Want

We want good speculative fiction. If your story doesn't have a clear fantasy or science fiction element, or at least strong speculative-fiction sensibilities, it's probably not for us.

We'd like to help make the field of speculative fiction more inclusive, more welcoming to both authors and readers from traditionally underrepresented groups, so we're interested in seeing stories from diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

We want stories that have some literary depth but aren't boring; styles that are unusual yet readable; structures that balance inventiveness with traditional narrative. We like characters we can care about. We like settings and cultures that we don't see all the time in speculative fiction.

We like stories that address political issues in complex and nuanced ways. However, we don't like heavy-handed or preachy or simplistic approaches.

We like the idea of hypertext stories, but we have not yet published any. If you want to send us a hypertext story, query us to discuss how to submit it.

As with any magazine, the best way to get a sense of the kinds of things we like is to read some of the fiction we publish. Since our magazine is free, the only cost to you is your time. Visit our fiction archives to see what we've published.

We're not generally interested in:

  • horror (especially stories in which the main goal is to evoke feelings of fear or revulsion in the reader)
  • stories that explain or describe a scientific or technological phenomenon in great detail
  • stories we see too often
  • stories with twist endings

Any sex or violence in the story should be artistically justified; no excessive gore.

Profanity in stories is fine. Use whatever words are appropriate for your story.

We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world, and British spellings are fine.

Except as noted above, we welcome all subgenres and forms of speculative fiction. Please don't query to ask if we're interested in some particular subgenre; you can assume that if it's not listed above, it's okay.

Sorry, no simultaneous submissions. If you've sent your story to another venue, wait to hear back from them before submitting to us. (And then wait to hear back from us before submitting elsewhere.)

Also, no unsolicited reprints of stories that have previously appeared in English. (If your story has been published only in another language, you may submit an English version to us.) Like most magazines, we consider material that has appeared (in English) on publicly-accessible websites to be published, and therefore cannot consider it.

If you want to submit nonfiction or poetry, don't send it to the fiction department; submit it to the appropriate department.

Pay Rates and Lengths

We strongly prefer stories under 5,000 words long. We will consider stories up to 9,000 words, but the longer the story, the less likely we are to be interested. Our wordcount limit is not absolutely inflexible, but we can't consider stories much over the limit, not even as serials. For example, we can't consider novels.

We also can't consider partial or incomplete stories. Please don't send us part of a story and ask us to request the rest of it if we're interested.

We have no minimum wordcount requirement; we will consider short-short stories. Note, however, that we generally aren't interested in stories with twist endings.

We pay 5¢(US)/word, with a minimum payment of $50. SFWA officially considers us a professional market. (We have to pay our full rate for all original stories, so please don't offer to sell us your story for a lower rate.) We pay by check or by PayPal; you choose which after we accept your story.

We buy first-printing world exclusive English-language rights for two months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope (but do not require) that you'll allow us to post the story in our archives indefinitely after it's rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time.

How to Submit

To submit a story to us, upload a file in Rich Text Format using our submission form. To submit a story, you have to follow that link; you can't just email the RTF file to us.

Don't worry about how your story is formatted, in terms of font, font size, line spacing, indentation, and so on. Our system automatically reformats submissions the way we like them. However, you should probably format your stories in Standard Manuscript Format anyway if you expect to ever submit them to any other venue.

We can't consider submissions sent by papermail or as email attachments.

To keep our response time down, we can't consider more than one story by a given author at a time. Therefore, please wait until we accept or reject each story before sending us another story, even if your stories are very short.

If you're having trouble submitting, drop us a note (with a subject line beginning with QUERY:) and let us know what the problem is. Please don't assume that you can ignore any guideline that you have trouble following.

If your story conforms to our guidelines, don't query about whether you can submit it; just submit it. If you're not sure whether it conforms to our guidelines, feel free to query, but don't provide a plot synopsis in your query.

Don't send us your story until you have thoroughly proofread it. Accepted submissions may be edited for clarity or to correct minor errors, but submissions that do not meet minimum standards for correct spelling and grammar will be rejected, except in cases of obvious artistic license. Spellcheckers can be useful, but in many cases they merely compound spelling errors. If you're uncertain about your spelling or grammar, then ask a human to proofread your story before you submit.

Response Time and Response Status

Our average response time is a little over a month, but that's an average; sometimes we take longer.

We always respond in less than 70 days; that's the maximum. After you receive an autoresponse, please wait 70 days to query. After 70 days, if you haven't heard from us, please query immediately; please don't wait more than 70 days before querying. (Sometimes email goes astray.)

We send an autoresponder message in response to every submission we receive, to let you know that we received it. If you haven't received an autoresponse within 24 hours after submitting, please query immediately. Please don't wait longer than 24 hours to query about a missing autoresponse.

After you submit, please keep an eye on our response status page, and/or on your story's individual status page (a link to which appears in the autoresponse email).

If you're curious about what happens to your story between the time you send it and the time we respond to it, see our page on the editorial process.

News, Info, and Status Updates

Occasional posts containing news, status updates, and general information for writers appear on the Strange Horizons fiction department info blog.

How to Contact Us

Before you contact us, please read the guidelines on this page.

If you believe that your story should be treated as an exception to our guidelines, please query rather than submitting it.

To contact us for any reason, write to fiction@strangehorizons.com with the word QUERY: at the beginning of your subject line. Add a few words to the subject line to indicate what you're querying about.

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