Anthology Markets

If you've just wandered in off the internet, hi and welcome. :) I do these posts every month, so if this post isn't dated in the same month you're in, click here to make sure you're seeing the most recent one.

Markets with specific deadlines are listed first, "Until Filled" markets (if any) are at the bottom. There are usually more details on the original site; always click through and read the full guidelines before submitting. Note that some publishers list multiple guidelines on one page, so after you click through you might have to scroll a bit.

NOTE: Problem Daughters has been cancelled.

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31 March 2017 -- This Side of the Divide -- Baobab Press

Baobab Press and the University of Nevada, Reno MFA Program in Creative Writing are partnering to publish This Side of the Divide, an anthology of short fiction by emerging and established authors exploring the United States West.

This exciting project will speak to the West’s newness, vastness, sense of territoriality and transience, spanning from untouched wilderness to hyper-urban settings. We’re seeking fresh, original views of the western U.S. Our aim is to capture this region’s unique essence in all of its cultural and geographic diversity.

All submissions will be reviewed, and accepted works will be edited by a committee of readers from Baobab Press and the UNR MFA Program in Creative Writing. Selected writers will receive a complimentary copy of the book and a payment of $100. Submitted stories should be around 3,000 to 5,000 words, and will need to be submitted for review no later than March 31st, 2017. Please send your story and a brief cover letter to divide@baobabpress.com.

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31 March 2017 -- A Fool for You -- Less Than Three Press

A Fool for You — LGBTQIA — Clowns. Pick pockets. Magicians. Jesters. Witches. Demons. Even gods. Tales of Tricksters abound in every culture, sometimes as fools, sometimes as sly schemers too smart for anyone’s good. They are often known as shape shifters and gender fluid—and they are always up to something. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, sometimes simply to see what happens…

Less Than Three Press invites you to submit stories of tricksters and all the mischief they can manage—and what happens when they meet their match.

THE DETAILS:
== Put SUBMISSIONS: A FOOL FOR YOU in the subject line.
== Stories should be at least 10,000 words and should not exceed approx 20,000 words in length.
== Stories must revolve around the theme of tricksters.
== Stories must have a happily ever after (HEA) or happy for now (HFN) end.
== Any sub-genre is gladly accepted: sci-fi, mystery, contemporary, steampunk, etc.
== All usual LT3 submission guidelines apply.

A Fool For You is a general release anthology, which means authors will receive a flat payment of $200.00 once LT3 has a signed contract. Authors will receive one copy each of the ebook formats LT3 produces and two copies of the paperback compilation.
Stories should be complete before submitting, and as edited as possible — do not submit a first draft. They can be submitted in any format (doc, docx, rtf, odt, etc) preferably single spaced in an easy to read font (Times, Calibri, Arial) with no special formatting (no elaborate section separation, special fonts, etc). Additional formatting guidelines can be found here.

Questions should be directed to the Editor in Chief, Samantha M. Derr, at derrs@lessthanthreepress.com (or you can ping her on twitter @rykaine). Submissions should be sent to submissions@lessthanthreepress.com.

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31 March 2017 -- Utter Fabrication -- Mad Scientist Journal

We will be creating an anthology titled Utter Fabrication: Historical Accounts of Unusual Buildings and Structures. It will be a collection of fictional stories about haunted houses and other weird places. For this anthology, our pay will be 2¢/word.

We are particularly looking for stories from authors who are underrepresented in fiction: people of color, LGBTQ, non-Western religions and cultures.

Each story is written from the perspective of someone who has encountered this strange location. Like our regular magazine, this narrator will also have a bio. Be certain that your story meets these requirements:

== 1st person
== 500-8000 words in length
== Focuses on a strange building or place
== Not a reprint

Here are some ideas that we pitched when we made our Kickstarter, but this is meant to be inspirational and not definitive.

== Haunted houses, obviously.
== Space stations poised at the edge of an anomaly.
== Towns missing people for no clear reason.
== Espresso stands that travel through time.
== Malls that function as dimensional crossroads.
== A cursed painting in an otherwise empty field.
== Unusual sculptures that seem to come from out of this world.
== Structures or ruins left behind by indigenous peoples. (But please don’t stoop to "Indian burial ground" or similar tropes. Seriously, don’t be that person.)

DO NOT send us poetry or screenplays.

Submissions should be in Standard Manuscript Format and sent via Submittable between March 1 and March 31. As with our regular submissions, we are asking for exclusive first worldwide electronic and print rights for one year. Multiple submissions are okay, simultaneous submissions are not.

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1 April 2017 -- Would But Time Await -- ed. S.J. Bagley; Orford Parish Books

[NOTE: The guidelines say "until April," without giving an actual date. I'm listing this as 1 April, but be aware this is a guess on my part. Also, note that these folks want a query first and won't read manuscripts unless they get a query ahead of time. So query first, and while you're asking, find out when they actually want the story by.]

In 2017, Orford Parish Books will be releasing WOULD BUT TIME AWAIT: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW ENGLAND FOLK HORROR (edited by s.j. bagley, editor [and interrogator] of THINKING HORROR: A JOURNAL OF HORROR PHILOSOPHY.)

Please read and the guidelines before submitting a query and direct all queries to heksenhaus@gmail.com with the subject header ‘FOLK HORROR QUERY.’

(All stories sent without a prior query will be deleted, unread.) [Bolding mine.]

WHAT WE DEFINE AS FOLK HORROR AND WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR.

For the purposes of this project, we are defining folk horror as horror literature in which the present (which can be a year/decade of the author’s choosing) collides with the history, folklore, traditions, and psychogeography of a region and where that collision has a significant impact on the present (as defined in the work.)

We are looking for work that uses the physical, historical, and social landscapes of New England as a focal point (rather than a story that could be set anywhere else but just happens to be set in New England.)

There is a long and rich history of horrific and strange folklore in New England but that doesn’t mean a writer needs to restrict themselves to it and writers are perfectly welcome to invent their own folklore, traditions, and fictional New England locations.

We should also stress that, while Folk Horror has largely been a rural construct, we by no means consider a rural location to be necessary to any working definition of the term.

A few examples of what we consider Folk Horror in literature:

[Click through for an extensive list of examples.]

WHO CAN SUBMIT.

We are open to submissions from writers from every global region and every walk of life and, while each story needs to focus (in some manner) on the geographic region of New England (which consists of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) we certainly don’t require that every author needs to be from that region.

We expect and encourage diversity in regard to the voices involved in this project.

DEADLINES AND SCHEDULE.

Submissions will be open until April 2017, at which point we will no longer be accepting submissions or queries.

Publication date is summer 2017 (with a more firm date to come.)

PAYMENT.

We will be paying a flat rate of $75USD upon acceptance for first rights in print and digital.

STORY CRITERIA.

Length: 2,000-10,000 words.

Each story MUST either be set in New England or contain elements of New England folklore and history.

Each story MUST be folk horror (which we fully and happily acknowledge as being a broad and diverse term but we are defining as stated above.)

No reprints.

No simultaneous submissions.

SOME THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND BEFORE SUBMITTING:

New England is an ethnically diverse region of the United States with a long (and often sordid) history so please keep the contemporary effects of that history in mind when submitting and avoid work that portrays the indigenous people and tribes of New England in a racist, bigoted, or stereotypical sense and please avoid stereotypes of the poor, and economically disenfranchised, all races, genders, sexes, sexualities, (dis)abilities, faiths, and anything that targets marginalized people.

In general, we are looking to avoid depictions of sexual violence (unless written with extreme care, an actual point beyond the simple violence of it, and, above all, empathy toward victims of sexual violence.)

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15 April 2017 -- Cat's Breakfast -- Third Flatiron

Science fiction/satire. Now at the 10th anniversary of his death, Wikipedia says Kurt Vonnegut was famous for his "gallows humor." E.E. King put it another way, citing his "sideways, humorous, skeptical view." We want this anthology to pay tribute to the imagination and inspiration of the ineffable Mr. Vonnegut.

Third Flatiron Publishing is based in Boulder, Colorado, and Ayr, Scotland. We are looking for submissions to our quarterly themed anthologies. Our focus is on science fiction and fantasy and anthropological fiction. We want tightly plotted tales in out-of-the-ordinary scenarios. Light horror is acceptable, provided it fits the theme.

Please send us short stories that revolve around age-old questions and have something illuminating to tell us as human beings. Fantastical situations and creatures, exciting dialog, irony, mild horror, and wry humor are all welcome. Stories should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words. Inquire if longer.

Role models for the type of fiction we want include Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, Vernor Vinge, and Ken Kesey. We want to showcase some of the best new shorts available today.

For each anthology, we will also accept a few very short humor pieces on the order of the "Shouts and Murmurs" feature in The New Yorker Magazine (600 words or so). These can be written from a first-person perspective or can be mini-essays that tell people what they ought to do, how to do something better, or explain why something is like it is, humorously. An SF/Fantasy bent is preferred.

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30 April 2017 -- SNAFU Judgement Day -- ed. Amanda J Spedding and Geoff Brown; Cohesion Press

Post-apocalyptic military horror.

The end of the world as we know it.

What we want: Invading space aliens, demonic invasion as in Doom, DNA-grafted dinosaurs taking over the planet, manmade viral infections that nearly wipe out humanity, or artificial intelligence like in Terminator… anything you can think of that would bring about the end of the world. And SOLDIERS!

Tell us about what happens during the worst of the fall of humanity or afterwards.

No zombies. That’s already taken care of.

Full action. Nothing less.

Hoo-rah!

Payment: AUD4c/word and one contributor copy in each format released.

Wordcount range: 2,000 – 10,000 words (query for shorter or longer)

No selections will be made until after the period closes.

Projected publication date: Late 2017

We will have some solicited authors alongside the open call, with the first being Jonathan Maberry.

Please follow these guidelines when submitting to us:

== Please put your full contact details on the first page of the manuscript top left, with word count top right.
== Standard submission format, with minimal document formatting.
== Courier or Times New Roman set at 12pt. Italics as they will appear. No underlining.
== Double spaced.
== Please don’t use TAB or space bar to indent lines. Use ‘styles’ only. If unsure or using a program that has no styles, DO NOT indent at all. That’s still cool.
== NO SPACE between paragraphs unless a line-break is required. ONE SPACE after full stops.
== Please put full contact details on the first page of the manuscript (yes, I said this twice… it’s important).
== Send your submission to Geoff Brown at submissions@cohesionpress.com as an attachment (.doc/.rtf only)
== In the subject line of your email, please put JudgementDay: [STORY TITLE] (Replace [STORY TITLE] with your actual story title. Yes, unfortunately I do need to state this)

NO MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS

NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS

NO REPRINTS

Please include a brief ‘hello, this is who I am’ in your email body as a cover letter.

Blank emails with attachments will be deleted.

For a guide to standard submission format, see: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html

The only variations to this format are that italics MUST appear as they will be used – no underlining – and again, only one space after a full stop.
Anyone that fails to follow these guidelines will likely see their story shredded by zombie mutant creatures.

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30 April 2017 -- Unidentified Funny Objects 6 -- ed. Alex Shvartsman

Unidentified Funny Objects is an annual anthology of humorous SF/F. Past headliners include George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Esther Friesner, David Gerrold, Laura Resnick, Mike Resnick, Piers Anthony, Kevin J. Anderson, etc.

For UFO6 we’re seeking all style and sub-genres of speculative humor.

SUBMISSION WINDOW: April 1 – April 30, 2017

LENGTH: 500-5000 words.

PAYMENT: $0.10 per word + contributor copy. Payment will be made upon acceptance. Our preferred method of payment is via PayPal, but you may request a check.

FORMAT: RTF or DOC. Standard Manuscript Format or something close to. (We won’t take points off if you prefer Courier over Times New Roman or some such).

SEND TO: Upload your stories via this submissions link.

Limit of 1 submission per author — even if you receive a response before the submission window closes please do not send another story unless directly invited to do so.

Please do not respond to rejections. The email address associated with submissions is not monitored. If you wish to query for any reason, please use the contact form or e-mail us: ufopublishing at gmail dot com.

RIGHTS SOUGHT: First Worldwide print and electronic English Language rights. Exclusivity for 90 days from date of release. Non-exclusive print, e-book, and audio rights afterward. Preview sample contract.

POLICIES & RESPONSE TIME: No reprints, multiple or simultaneous submissions please. Do not send any stories we already considered for a previous UFO volume or any other anthology edited by Alex Shvartsman. You may query after 30 days. Please send only one submission per author unless directly invited to send more.

WHAT WE WANT:

We’re looking for speculative stories with a strong humor element. Think Resnick and Sheckley, Fredric Brown and Douglas Adams. We welcome quality flash fiction and non-traditional narratives. Take chances, try something new, just make sure that your story is funny.

Puns and stories that are little more than vehicles for delivering a punch line at the end aren’t likely to win us over. The best way to learn what we like in general is to read a previous volume.

WHAT WE DON’T WANT:

These are the tropes we see entirely too much of in the slush pile. You will improve your odds if you steer clear of these:

* Zombies
* Vampires
* Deals with the Devil / Djinn in a bottle variants
* Stereotypical aliens probing people, abducting cattle, and doing other stereotypical alien things.

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1 May 2017 -- Blood in the Rain 4 -- ed. Cecilia DuValle and Mary Trepanier

For the vampire erotica anthology Blood in the Rain 3, available October 2017, we seek short stories of 2000–7000 words with both a vampire and an erotic element—anything from a sexy tease to hardcore porn (we lean toward porn!) We encourage stories nonstereotypically including people of color, people who are LGBTQIA, and people over 18.

Most of all, we want compelling characters having hot sex, with a story that draws us in. And a vampire. Make us horny!

We pay within 30 days of publication: $75 plus two contributor’s copies.

== Send your story as a .doc, or .docx file to submissions@bloodintherain.com, with SUBMISSION and the story title in your subject line (for example, SUBMISSION: My Sexy Vampire Story).

== Use traditional manuscript format for your story. If you don’t know what that is, see this handy guide. And for the love of the gods, proofread before sending.

== Give us a short cover note, ideally with an author bio.

== Let us know if your story’s a reprint. We might take the perfect reprint, but original work is preferred.

== Send as many submissions as you want, but we’re not likely to pick more than one story from any writer.

== We’re buying first North American serial rights, first North American audio publishing rights, first world online rights, and archival rights (that is, to potentially archive your story on our website).

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14 May 2017 -- Sword and Sorceress 32 -- ed. Elisabeth Waters

[NOTE: Do Not Submit before 24 April]

Stories should be the type generally referred to as "sword and sorcery" and must have a strong female protagonist whom the reader will care about. See past volumes of Sword and Sorceress for examples. We do not want stories with explicit sex, gratuitous violence, or profanity. We are NOT a market for poetry. We are willing to consider stories set in modern times (urban fantasy), but we don't buy more than one or two of those for the anthology. We always want something short and funny for the last story.

No reprints. No simultaneous submissions.

With regard to multiple submissions, do not submit more than one story at a time. If we've rejected your first one, you may send one more, as long as it's before the deadline. We have occasionally bought someone's second submission. We have never bought a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth submission. If you send us two stories, and we don't hold either of them, wait until next year to try again. Please do not re-submit stories we have already rejected (including stories rejected in previous years).

If you have not previously sold to Sword & Sorceress, please read What is a Short Story? and Why Did my Story Get Rejected? before submitting to us.

Reading period: Monday, April 24 to Sunday, May 14, 2017. Stories received before or after this period will be deleted unread.

Response time is expected to follow MZB's traditional standards: you should hear within a week if we're holding your story for the final line-up or rejecting it.

Length: up to 9,000 words, with preference given to shorter stories. The longer a story is, the better it has to be. Long stories should be submitted early in the reading period.

Cover Letter/e-mail: We don't actually need a cover letter, but our e-mail program does. This year it started putting any e-mail with no body in the spam folder. So...

Please do not explain or describe your story in the e-mail. If your story can't stand on its own, fix the story. The e-mail should be brief. For example:

Dear Miss Waters,

Attached is my story "The Dark Intruder" for consideration for Sword and Sorceress 32.

A bio and/or list of previous sales is optional at this point. If you put one in, it should be no longer than one short paragraph (up to 5 lines long).

Sincerely,

(Ms.) Marion Bradley

If your name could be either male or female, please indicate the gender, so we can address you properly when we reply.

Formatting and Submission:

Format with one-inch margins on all four sides of page.

Please do not use a header or footer.

Your legal name, full mailing address, and email address must be in the upper left corner, single spaced.

Skip two lines, center the text, then put the title, with your name (or byline) on the next line. We're not as rigid as MZB was about pen names, but we expect them to be reasonable, rather than cute.

The rest of the manuscript should be single-spaced, with the first line of each paragraph indented 1/2 inch.

If you need to indicate a break, put "#" on a line by itself, centered.

Do not underline; use italics instead. Do not use bold face. We prefer Courier New font, size 12.

Word count will be determined by our word processor; that way it will be the same for everyone.

Save your document as an .rtf file (rich text format or interchange format, depending on what your computer calls it). E-mail as it as an attachment to mzbworks at gmail dot com. The subject line should be "SS32, your last name, story title" (e.g.: SS32, Bradley, Dark Intruder) -- we don't want submissions caught in the spam filter. Remember that a computer is sorting this, so follow the format exactly. Use commas, not slashes, hyphens, etc. Do not change SS32 to something similiar (e.g.: S&S 32). We do our best to find stories that have not been sorted properly, but we don't guarantee success.

Rights purchased: first rights, non-exclusive eBook and audio book rights.

Payment: 6 cents per word as an advance against a pro rata share of royalties and foreign or other sales.

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31 May 2017 -- Chiral Mad 4 -- ed. Lucy A. Snyder and Michael Bailey

While previous volumes of Chiral Mad focused more on psychological horror, with most stories having some sort of chiral aspect in plot or character development or structure, Chiral Mad 4 will be open to just about anything, as long as the story has some sort of dark or speculative element. The only required chirality is with the collaboration itself … multiple minds working as one, in other words, to create something entirely new. We want this anthology to be as diverse as humanly possible, and will be looking for stories that bend and blend genres, stories that experiment with structure, and most importantly, stories that are not dependent upon common tropes.

Unlike past Written Backwards projects, this fourth volume in the critically-acclaimed series of anthologies will be a completely collaborative effort of originality, collecting 4 short stories, 4 novelettes, 4 novellas, and 4 graphic adaptations (to celebrate this 4th book), all co-authored and/or co-created. And the anthology itself will also be co-edited!

The goal of Chiral Mad 4 is to help bring our creative community together, to make us stronger, to strengthen relationships already in place, and to help create new relationships entirely. It’s time for all of us to play nice, to get along, and to do what we do best: create somethings out of nothings… and we’re going to create these beautiful somethings together. Have a specific writer/artist you’ve always admired? Well, now’s your chance. Reach out. Ask! That’s all it takes to get started. Find a partner, or two, or three, and start collaborating! The more unique the collaboration, the better the chances you have of making it into Chiral Mad 4. The more diverse the collaborations, the better the chances you have of making it into Chiral Mad 4. Now, here’s the hard part: knowing whether or not someone is already collaborating… Email CM4@nettirw.com if you have any questions or concerns about this, or to simply email your submission.

While half the anthology will be filled with commissioned works (the book is nearly half-filled already, with a few of the early acceptances announced below), the rest of the anthology is open for submissions for a short period of time. The submission window for non-commissioned contributors closes May 31st, 2017. So get to it! This is a very short window of opportunity.

Acceptances for non-commissioned work will not be announced until after June 30th, 2017, so we ask that we hold onto your work exclusively until then, as each submission will be carefully considered and agreed upon by both editors of this anthology. No simultaneous submissions, please.

What are we looking for?

== 4 short stories (5,000 words max)
== 4 novelettes (10,000 words max)
== 4 novellas (20,000 words max)
== 4 graphic adaptations (1,500 words max, or 10 pages)

Payment will be $.06 per word, capped at the max word counts listed above, split evenly between contributors. Two contributors writing a 5,000-word short story, for example, would split $300, or $150 each. Contributors writing a 10,000-word novelette would evenly split $600. Contributors writing a 20,000-word novella would evenly split $1,200. Graphic adaptations will be determined by the publisher/creators prior to acceptance; these are unique collaborations and payments for such are not as simple to calculate. In fact, 3 of the 4 slots for graphic adaptations are already filled, so please query CM4@nettirw.com before submitting. And, as always, contributor copies of each edition are part of the deal. Written Backwards has worked with many illustrators and artists in the past, so if you have a script but not an illustrator/artist lined-up, please let us know and we can arrange one for your story if we fall in love with your script.

So, hopefully all of this gets you excited, gets you eager to reach out to others in our creative community. Chiral Mad 4 is the most ambitious project ever imagined by Written Backwards. Please, be a part of it. Send your work to CM4@nettirw.com.

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This is Angie again. If you've gotten this far, I assume you're a writer who thinks this monthly listing is useful.

I've been doing this for quite a few years now, and I spend some hours each month searching the web and putting this listing together. That's time I could spend writing. I feel good about doing this as a community service, but there are definitely times when I'm busy with other projects, don't have time to write for an anthology, and wouldn't have bothered going searching if it weren't for doing this post every month.

I've had a few people poke me about giving folks a way to donate a few bucks. I'm pondering the thought, and decided to see what you folks, the ones who actually use the listing, think.

What I'm considering is a Patreon. Let me think with my keyboard for a few....

First, this listing will go up here on my blog for free for as long as I keep doing it. If you can't afford to chip in, that's fine, I won't cut you off. But I've thought of a couple of incentives I could offer for people who are willing and able to pay a bit.

Payment would be per posting, not per month. So if I miss a month (which I've done, once when I was in the middle of moving, and once during a December when I was doing holiday stuff and just zoned on it :P ) no one will be charged.

For $1 per month, I'll e-mail you a PDF copy of that month's listing, so you don't have to remember to come here looking for it.

For $2 per month, I'll e-mail you a PDF copy of that month's listing a week before it goes up on my blogs.

For $5 per month, I'll e-mail you a PDF of my entire on-deck listing, a week before the regular post goes up on my blogs. That's all the anthologies I know about at that point. I only post about two months' worth at a time, but I always have more on deck. This level would give you everything I've got, which gives you a lot of time to come up with story ideas and fit a project into your schedule, for projects I find early, and I find some way early. Right now waiting on deck I have two anthos with deadlines in July, one in September, one in December, and one in January.

What do you think? Would anyone sign up?

If you don't want to comment here, e-mail me at angiepen at gmail dot com.

And heck, even if you can't afford to contribute anything but you think this listing is useful, comment or e-mail me anyway, whenever. Especially if you got something published in an anthology you found here -- I love when folks let me know about that. :)

Thanks for your time, and best of luck with all your submissions,

Angie