Submission Guidelines

Thanks for reading our submission guidelines and allowing us to consider your work. Without your support and creativity, we wouldn’t have an online magazine. To submit your work, please follow the guidelines below.

We understand you want to receive speedy news of acceptance. So we’ll do our best to reply quickly and personally to each inquiry. We read year-round and as writers, we are conscientious about responding to manuscripts promptly. But with a high volume of submissions, it may take some time to reply. Apol for the delay.

At a Glance

Markets: Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, artwork, and photography
Genres: All
Length: For fiction, flash and short-story
Reading time: Year-round
Unsolicited submissions: Yes
Query first: Nonfiction only
Simultaneous submissions: Accepted for fiction and nonfiction only. Please indicate this in your cover letter.
Multiple submissions: Accepted for poetry and artwork only. Please indicate this in your cover letter.
Previously published: Yes. Please indicate this in your cover letter.
Book excerpts: Yes
Submission type: Email only
Media: Online only

Following the guidelines below, submit materials to:

—    Kerry Cohen, essay editor: essay[at]writersdojo.org
—    Kirsten Rian, poetry editor: poetry[at]writersdojo.org
—    James Bernard Frost, fiction editor: fic[at]writersdojo.org

Category Guidelines

POETRY
We are open to a wide range of forms and styles in contemporary poetry. Please send three to five poems and a brief biography. Poems and bio should be sent inside the body of the email following our submission guidelines.

Submit your work to poetry[at]writersdojo.org. Our poetry editor is Kirsten Rian. You can learn more about Kirsten on her bio page.

FICTION
We seek flash fiction and short stories. We want your well-crafted prose—material that has been revised, reconsidered, and read by your writing group or other colleagues. We love brilliant prose and we have a voracious appetite across all genres. Anything that strikes us as emotionally or intellectually gut-wrenchingly honest, vulnerable, hilarious—or that stirs thought-provoking discussion—will be considered for publication. We look for work that is layered, fresh, subtle, often character-driven, traditional storytelling or alternative, non-mainstream, and experimental voices.

Submit your work to fic[at]writersdojo.org. Our fiction editor is James Bernard Frost. You can learn more about him on his bio page or on his blog.

ESSAY
We are looking for the high-quality nonfiction between 500 and 5000 words that challenges the reader to know him/her self more intimately. Sometimes it means the reader is made to feel something s/he already feels but didn't have the right words for. Always, it means that the writer will give us a new or enhanced understanding of what truth is.

Send personal essays, excerpts from memoirs, and journalism that goes beyond a straight news story. Please, don't send anything that hasn't been thoughtfully crafted—we aren't interested in diary entries or rants.

Submit your work to essay[at]writersdojo.org. Our nonfiction editor is Kerry Cohen. You can learn more about Kerry on her bio page.

ARTWORK
Artwork will be used to both illustrate and complement our literary pieces. We look for a variety of contributors from different backgrounds and geographic areas. We accept all film and digital sizes (16mm, 35, 120, 4x5, 8x10 and anywhere in between). For photo essays, describe the work that you’ve done or propose to do; and if possible, provide a link to view the project online.we are also open to showcasing a body of work of visual art in other media.

By submitting your work, you are confirming that you own the Copyright or Creative Commons License to the material, and are granting usage of the work to WritersDojo.org. Unless otherwise stated or negotiated, our copyright is for Web usage only; we maintain online rights to publish and display work for up to ninety days. Afterwards, all rights revert to the contributor. We do, however, reserve the right to archive materials as a permanent record in our searchable, online database.

Send a link to a web accessible portfolio or individual image or send up to six images in jpeg format to Doug@writersdojo.org to showcase your ability. E-mailed jpegs should be 800 pixels on their longest dimension, saved at 72 dpi. We will contact you for larger versions of pictures that are accepted. Your email file size should not exceed 5megs. E-mails in excess of 5megs will be deleted. Please name your files with the image title and/or the date you took the photo (or your name), if possible. Please do not send files with the title beginning with IMG or DSC. We’d like to be able to easily distinguish submissions by file name. Do not send your attachment in a zipped file. We will not open zip files from unsolicited submissions. Viruses, y’know.

General Guidelines for All Submissions

EMAIL QUERIES AND SUBMISSIONS
Send your queries and submissions via email, according to the guidelines below. We only accept query letters for nonfiction work. We accept unsolicited submissions in all categories via email only. We do not accept submissions via U.S. mail. Please wait at least thirty days after hearing from us before submitting again, even if to a different section.

UNSOLICITED, PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED, AND EXCERPTS
We do accept unsolicited material and previously published material, if it is truly timely and worthy of re-publishing. Some of our favorite pieces have been unsolicited, previously published work. Excerpts of novels or other manuscripts may also be considered. An excerpt of a longer piece, such as a chapter from a novel that you’re already planning to publish elsewhere might also be of interest—as long as we have copyright approval from that publisher.

SIMULTANEOUS AND MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS
Simultaneous submissions are only accepted for the fiction and nonfiction work. Please indicate this in the cover letter portion of your email submission. We do not accept multiple unsolicited submissions for fiction or non-fiction. We do accept multiple submissions for poetry and artwork when the pieces can be considered together as a group, i.e., a set of three poems on a theme.

CUT AND PASTE
Please paste your entire story into the body of your email. Please do not send text attachments. We will not open your unsolicited MS Word or PDF files, as we are wary of viruses. If you are submitting art, please follow the guidelines below for sending your work.

FORMATTING
Your text submission should be formatted with basic black type and one font—Georgia 12 pt or Verdana 10 pt work best for our site format—without strange, cute, or other funky formatting. If your submission must contain strange formatting for poems, multimedia, or you are otherwise unable to fit your submission into these basic formatting guidelines without it losing some of its meaning, just contact us with a query email for special instructions.

PLEASE BE AWARE
Strange formatting may occur when you cut and paste a document into the body of an email—especially if you have non-standard punctuation or multiple fonts used in a piece. Some of MS Word’s auto-formatting features—for example, smart quotes and em dashes—change in appearance when pasted as text into an email. When we receive this type of email, the text may appear as unreadable “Unicode”. Please edit your submission in the body of the email to ensure there are no smart quotes, curly apostrophes, or other problematic formatting issues. If you have any questions or concerns, ask first.

YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION
Please include your name and contact information in your submission. Please share a brief biography per the guidelines for your submission category. We’d like your name, phone number, and email address at the beginning of your email, along with the type of submission you are making and the number of words or poems it contains. (We will not share your contact information.)

Here’s a sample of how it should look:

—    title or headline explanation of submission
—    type of submission, such as nonfiction or poetry
—    number of words/poems/pictures
—    name
—    phone
—    email

EMAIL SUBMISSION SUBJECT LINE
You can help us read your email submission faster by following our conventions for your subject line. Please use your last name and a shortened version of your title. For instance: “Fast Ink fiction by X. Ample”. There is no need to use something cute or strange in the subject line as this will likely cause your email to be deleted.

More Information for Contributors

COPYRIGHTS
By submitting your work, you are confirming that you own the copyright to the material, whether words or images, and are granting usage of the work to WritersDojo.org. Unless otherwise stated or negotiated, our copyright is for Web usage only; we maintain online rights to publish and display work for up to ninety days. Afterwards, all rights revert to the contributor. We do, however, reserve the right to archive materials as a permanent record in our searchable, online database.

BIOGRAPHY INFORMATION
It is appropriate to provide a brief biography with your query or submission. If your submission is accepted, we will contact you if we need additional information to include in your bio, which will be linkable from your byline. For example, we may ask you to provide a photograph, links to your web site, or links to your other published works. In some instances, we hope to provide a more intimate snapshot into the life and times of our writers and artists through a complementing profile piece and interview.

PAYMENT
Sorry. We can not provide monetary payment at this time. We hope to rectify this situation shortly with help from sponsors and online advertisers. In the meantime, we can provide our contributors a connection to a group of devoted readers along with online promotional opportunities. As our readership grows and we can afford to pay writers on a professional payscale competitive with national markets, precedence will be granted to those writers and artists who have generously supported us from the beginning with their stellar submissions.

TIMELY REPLIES
Our goal is to respond to submissions within a month. There should be no need to resend your submission—in our experience, as email is profoundly efficient. Occasionally, online technical glitches and spam filters may somehow thwart our communication process. If you have not heard back from us within two months, please send us a follow-up email to the appropriate submissions category.

Thank you for your interest in the Writers’ Dojo. We look forward to connecting with you and sharing your work.