* What Does It Mean To Publish With Us?
* Pay Rates And Lengths
* How to Get Published With Us
* How to Get Rejected By Us
WE DO NOT PUBLISH EROTICA.
Strange Horizons, a well-known online speculative fiction magazine, publishes a list on their website of stories they see too often, as part of their submissions guidelines. Please review this list carefully before submitting a story to us.
General questions should be sent to the editor, and any problems with the website itself should be reported to the webmistress.
Can I Be A Straight, White, Able-Bodied, Cis-Gendered Male And Still Publish With You?
Yes, so long as your story, carefully researched, directly promotes the inclusion of under-represented people. By way of example (and this is not an exhaustive list), in our first issue, Angel of Light by Joe Haldeman and Njàbò by Claude Lalumière are both written by straight white men, as is Icetide by Eric del Carlo in Issue Ten. Angel of Light takes place in a future society in the Middle East where Christianity and Islam have merged, Njàbò features a multi-racial, queer and polyamorous family, and Icetide has a gay narrator.
We do not publish stories which do not directly further our mission in some way. There are no stories which can fit with a general “theme” of our magazine without in some very specific way or ways authentically promoting diversity in the genre and the voices of those from under-represented groups and backgrounds. Your story simply being a “good story” (or, even, a story about “social issues” or about a social outcast) does not mean it fits with our magazine. Please be aware that most of the stories we publish (approximately 90%) are by women authors and/or authors from under-represented backgrounds.
Do You Accept Mainstream/General Fiction?
No. Although we do encourage and applaud the increased representation of under-represented authors and characters in mainstream/general fiction, we only publish speculative fiction.
What Does It Mean To Publish With Expanded Horizons?
We buy the right to publish your story on our website for the duration of one issue. Publication on our website is not, in our eyes, preclusive of any prior, concurrent or subsequent publication online or in print. We simply buy the right to publish your story on Expanded Horizons for the duration of one issue and to include your story in our downloadable version for that month. We hope, but do not require, that you allow us to continue to post your story in our archives, but you may remove your story from the archives at any point.
We are non-proprietary in our philosophy. We do not believe in any legal, financial, or reputational distinction between first printing and subsequent printings. Authors retain all rights to their stories and need not ask our permission to do whatever it is with those works that they wish to do. We explicitly do not include in our contract that we are purchasing “First Electronic Rights” and we will take no action against an author who sells these rights, or any other rights, to any other venue after a work has appeared in our magazine. Your story is your own. We buy only the right to keep your story on our site for one month, and to include it in the downloadable version for that month. If you ask us to remove your story at any point after one month, we will remove it and modify the downloadable version on our site accordingly.
Simultaneous submissions are allowed (please follow proper simultaneous submission etiquette), and multiple submissions are also allowed. We accept both unpublished works and reprints, as long as republishing your work in Expanded Horizons does not violate any contracts you signed with prior or concurrent publishers or infringe on their legal rights in any way. We will have to remove your story if contacted by another publisher about such a violation.
In other words: We, Expanded Horizons, do not care if you have your story in another magazine concurrent with publication here. We do not care if you have published your story elsewhere before. But if your other publishers do care, and they don’t like that you published with us first or simultaneously, or even perhaps they prohibit you from submitting to or publishing with us at all, then you submit to us at your own peril.
Pay Rates And Lengths
We are looking for stories of about 6,000 words or fewer. There is no hard minimum length. We will not consider novels published in serial. Stories must be completed at the time of submission. We will NOT accept erotica.
We are also looking for essays of about 6,000 words or fewer. As with stories, there is no hard minimum length. Longer essays may be accepted on a case by case basis — please contact us first.
We pay US $30 for each story or essay accepted, regardless of its word count.
What We Want
We accept stories from all over the world (or off-world, if you can manage it!). We only publish in English. Publication will be digital, in standards-compliant XHTML format rather than Adobe PDF for maximum compatibility and accessibility.
We aim to be a venue where people of under-represented backgrounds can tell their stories in their own voices, and where authors not of those backgrounds can help increase the authentic representation of under-represented people through both carefully researched stories, and the creation of characters whom people of those same backgrounds would still, upon reading the story, recognize as “of their own”.
We publish not only stories and poetry, but also essays and reflections on speculative fiction and fandom that challenge the established biases of the field/genre. We created Expanded Horizons so that those whose points of view tend to be under-represented, or represented unrealistically or negatively in most speculative fiction may speak out in their own voice.
How To Submit
We do not publish material which does not fit with and further the mission of our magazine. If you doubt your story is a good match for our magazine, you are probably right, and you should not send the story to us because it will be summarily rejected. Please read carefully about our mission and what we are looking to publish before submitting a story to us. It takes us time to review each story, and we are a small magazine. Please do not send us stories that are a poor fit for us.
We only accept electronic submissions. Please email your stories, in RTF format, to submissions@expandedhorizons.net. Do not put your story in the body of the email, even if your story is short. We will try to keep our response time to under a month.
We’d appreciate it if you told us a little about yourself as well, in order to help build our community.
SOURCE
This blog is no longer updated. Please instead visit Writers For Diversity for new opportunities for women/ LGBT writers and writers of color. Thank you.
