Category: Events

Taking Submissions: Season’s Grievings: Holiday Travel Stories Gone Wrong

Deadline: June 6th, 2025
Payment: 1000-3000 words = $20, 3000-5000 words = $30, 5000-7000 words = $40
Theme: Horrifying holiday travel

NEW publisher ROF Publishing House is seeking ooky and spooky, thrilling and chilling holiday travel nightmares for a themed short story collection:

SEASON’S GRIEVINGS: Holiday Travel Stories Gone Wrong

Missing your flight is scary. So is sleeping in your childhood bedroom with cousins you can’t remember. Are your old band posters talking to you, or is that the ghost of Chanukah’s past?

Please send us your horror, thriller, and suspense stories (1,000-7,000 words) about holiday travel. We are interested in publishing stories set around a variety of cultural holidays and traditions.

Take us into the mind of a sinister flight attendant on Christmas Eve. Show us the monsters who stalked ancient Winter Solstice festivalgoers. Place us in the middle of a serial killer’s game while on a seniors-only cruise. Give us psychological terror while frying latkes in Grandma’s kitchen. Dazzle us with bonfires and fireworks and arson on New Year’s Eve.

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Taking Submissions: Smitten Land Issue 3

Deadline for pitches: June 1st, 2025
Deadline for accepted pieces: July 1st, 2025
Payment: $10 + Contributor Copy
Theme: Televangelism Horror

Themes: Religious horror surrounding gospel of prosperity and televangelism

Smitten Land is a queer religious horror literary magazine. Issue 3 revolves around themes of televangelism and gospel of prosperity. We are accepting pitches for fiction, poetry, and book reviews for books revolving around our theme. We are also accepting journalistic / nonfiction pitches from voices who have had experiences with real life churches who preached prosperity gospel.
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Taking Submissions: Dracula Beyond Stoker Issue 8

Submission Window: November 1st – December 31st, 2025
Payment: 5 cents per word and contributor’s copies
Theme: Van Helsing

Issue 8: Van Helsing(To Be Published May, 2026)

The one everybody has been waiting for. What adventures did he have before the novel? Where did he go after? Are more monster battles in store? Tell us your tale of the world’s most famous vampire hunter.

Submissions open November 1, 2025-December 31, 2025. Submissions received earlier will be read and considered but will not be responded to until the window opens

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Taking Submissions: parABnormal Magazine 2025 – Second Call

Submission Window: June 1st – July 31st, 2025
Payment: Fiction: $25.00 for original stories, $7.00 for reprints, $6.00 for each poem, $20.00 for original articles, $6.00 for reprints. $7.00 for reviews and interviews.
Theme: Paranormal – this includes ghosts, spectres, haunts, various whisperers, and so forth. It also includes shapeshifters and creatures from various folklores.

Submissions are accepted Feb 1 – Mar 31, Jun 1 – Jul 31, Oct 1 – Nov 30.

Anything submitted outside those periods will be deleted unread.

We no longer accept simultaneous or multiple submissions.


No matter how far we move forward as humans, we are still bound by the instincts and ancestral memories of our animalistic past. None of these are so strong as the fight or flight response. However, there are times when we seem to be perfectly safe, completely at ease and comfortable, when that urge to run from something sneaks up on us. What causes these sensations? Is there something lurking in the darkness? Why is that man giving you the creeps, he’s not even looking at you? And yet, there is something odd. Something instinctual, something you know without fully understanding. We may have moved on, we may have forgotten and left behind those old stories and legends of beasts, voracious monsters, and dark spirits… But they have not forgotten or left us…

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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.

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Taking Submissions: Cosmic Roots And Eldritch Shores June 2025 Window

Submission Window: June 1st – 2nd, 2025
Payment: 8 cents per word for original, 2 cents for reprints, For artwork: $10 for the non-exclusive right to use each image, for as long as the site is online.  If we publish a print collection we will pay a pro-rata share for each image used.
Theme: Well written original work in science fiction, fantasy, myth, legend, fairy tales, and eldritch, in written, podcast, video, and/or graphic story form, and from around the world.
Note: Reprints welcome

 

 

Submissions Schedule

The first and second day of every month, 12 am of the 1st to 12 am of the 3rd, E.S.T.

For reading impaired individuals, our submissions manager and ‘forget password’ have a captcha compatible with screen readers.

We pay 8¢ per word for new fiction, 2¢ per word for fiction reprints, 2 – 8¢ per word for new fact-based work, 1- 4¢ per word for reprinted fact articles.
For new poetry, we pay $1 per line, and for reprints we pay 50¢ a line  We’re looking for poems up to 40 lines. We’ll consider longer poems but that would be a hard sell, and words over 40 lines would be paid at 8¢ per word.

We sponsor The Kepler Award to recognize and encourage writers of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories that creatively extrapolate on known science in constructive and exciting ways. You can learn aboutThe Kepler Award here.

You can read a copy of our standard contract here.   It can be varied as needed to include the rights of translators, voice actors, etc.

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Taking Submissions: Short Story Substack June 2025 Window

Submission Window: June 1st – 30th, 2025
Payment: $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue
Theme: Any genre, short story

Mission = Revive the art of the short story, support artists, and produce something wonderful.

Payout = Base Pay of $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue to be sent by Paypal, Zelle, or check.

Wait, you mean if this substack gets thousands of subscribers, the winner would get thousands of dollars?

Yes! The New Yorker pays roughly $7,500 per story and I sincerely hope to go way past that.

What does the timeline look like?

Submit stories by the end of the month, winner to be announced on the 15th. There is ONE story that wins and receives the full payout.

Where do I send submissions?
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Taking Submissions: The Cafe Irreal Summer 2025 Issue

Deadline: July 1st, 2025
Payment: One cent U.S. per word ($2 minimum)
Theme: Fantastic Fiction You really NEED to read the description below.

The Cafe Irreal is a quarterly webzine that presents a kind of fantastic fiction infrequently published in English. This fiction, which we would describe as irreal, resembles the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. As a type of fiction it rejects the tendency to portray people and places realistically and the need for a full resolution to the story; instead, it shows us a reality constantly being undermined. Therefore, we’re interested in stories by writers who write about what they don’t know, take us places we couldn’t possibly go, and don’t try to make us care about the characters. We would also suggest you take a look at the current issue, archives, and theory (especially the essay, “What is irrealism?”) pages on this web site.

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