AGNI
This respected literary magazine charges for online submissions, but postal submissions are still free. They publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Also, “We have no word limits, though space is at a premium and length sometimes affects our decisions.”
Deadline: 31 May 2023
Length: One story, one essay, up to 5 poems
Pay: $20/page for prose, $40/page for poetry, up to $300
Details here.
(And The Paris Review is open for poetry submissions in April – via Submittable until they reach capacity, and by post; they will not accept work postmarked after 30^th April 2023. Details here.)

Translunar Travelers Lounge
The editors of this speculative fiction magazine want fun stories. Their guidelines say, “A fun story, at its core, is one that works on the premise that things aren’t all bad; that ultimately, good wins out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your story has to be silly or lighthearted (though it certainly can be). Joy can be made all the more powerful when juxtaposed against tragedy. In the end, though, there should be hope, and we want stories that are truly fun for as many different kinds of people as possible.” Also, “Swashbuckling adventure, deadly intrigue, and gleeful romance are some of the most obvious examples of what we’re looking for, but we won’t say no to more subtle or complicated topics, as long as they fit under the wider “fun” umbrella.”
Deadline: 15 April 2023
Length: Up to 5,000 words
Pay: $0.03/word
Details here.

(– And Lightspeed Magazine is open to science fiction short story submissions from all writers until 7^th April 2023; they want stories of 1,500-10,000 words. They will open for fantasy short fiction submissions from BIPOC authors only during 23^rd to 30^th April, and from all authors from 1^st to 7^th May. Also see their submission periods for science fiction flash fiction, as well as fantasy flash fiction. They pay $0.08/word. Details here and here.
— Strange Horizons, a magazine of speculative fiction, also accepts poetry, reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and round-tables. They publish works up to 10,000 words, though up to 5,000 words preferred, for fiction. Submissions for fiction will open on 26^th April 2023, and will stay open until their submission cap is reached. Poetry reopened on 1^st April. Pay is $0.10/word for fiction, $50 for poetry, and varies for others. Details here, here, here, and here.)

The Threepenny Review
This respected quarterly journal will close its reading period for the year at end-April. They accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and submissions for their ‘Table Talk’ column.
Deadline: 30 April 2023
Length: Up to 4,000 words for stories or memoirs, 1,200-2,500 for critical articles, up to 1,000 words for Table Talk, up to 100 lines for poems
Pay: $400 per story or article, $200 per poem or Table Talk piece
Details here and here.

Brick
This is a Canadian magazine of literary nonfiction, and they accept submissions from all over the world. They publish a wide range of non-fiction – see guidelines for some of the past works they have published. Do not submit fiction or poetry.
Deadline: 30 April 2023
Length: “While Brick does not set a word limit, we tend towards a range of 1,000–5,000 words.”
Pay: $55-685
Details here (guidelines and pay rates – scroll down) and here (Submittable).

The Georgia Review
This literary magazine publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Online submissions for non-subscribers are charged, but there is no fee for mailed submissions.
Deadline: 14 May 2022
Length: Up to 9,000 words for prose, 6-10 pages of poetry
Pay: $50/printed page of prose and $4/line of poetry, up to $800; $150 for reviews published on GR2
Details here.

Bio: S. Kalekar is the pseudonym of a regular contributor to this magazine. She can be reached here.

Avon Books UK, an imprint of Harper Collins, is one of the rare imprints open to direct submissions that focuses on commercial fiction.

This is how they define what they are looking for in terms of Commercial fiction: “Commercial fiction is usually plot-driven. It follows specific formulas and tropes for a certain genre (for instance, enemies to lovers in romance or the locked-room mystery in thrillers). The writing is accessible and understandable, and the pacing is quick. The primary goal of commercial fiction is to escape, entertain and appeal to the mass market. An easy way to decide if your book is right for us, is to ask yourself the question: can you picture your book winning prizes at Cannes Film Festival or is it something you can see as a Netflix smash-hit? If it’s the latter then it’s one for us!”.

They are particularly focused on the following genres: crime, thriller, women’s and contemporary fiction, romance, romantic comedy, historical fiction, saga and time-slip fiction.

They ask that every author submit the following:

• A short author biography (100-200 words)
• Your social media links (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc)
• A blurb/elevator pitch for your book (100-150 words)
• A short synopsis of your book (300 words)

They also have helpful tips in terms of these components, that you can read here.

They try to respond to all submissions within 12 weeks.

Learn more here.

Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2022 Guide to Manuscript Publishers.

Arboreal is published online as a downloadable journal, and their next issue will also be published in print. Their first issue was published in February this year, and it contains work from 22 author and 10 visual artists. You can read it before submitting to get a sense of what they like.

Now through April 15, Arboreal is seeking submissions for their second issue. It’s themed “Perseverance,” and it’s scheduled for publication on May 15 of this year. They invite both emerging and established authors from all backgrounds to submit. You can read more about the theme on their website.

Poets may submit up to four poems. Authors of fiction and nonfiction may submit one piece, 4,000 words or fewer. Arboreal does not accept translations, excerpts, book reviews, or plays. Submitting authors can expect a response within one month.

Arboreal accepts submissions online using Submittable, not via email or by post. They accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors withdraw work published elsewhere. They do not accept previously published work, including self-published writing. However, they do accept writing that’s been published on personal social media pages. Arboreal does not accept writing created by AI (artificial intelligence); they only accept writing authored by humans.

Arboreal only accepts submissions that follow the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you would like to learn more or submit to Arboreal, please visit their website here.

Bio: Ella Peary is the pen name for an author, editor, creative writing mentor, and submission consultant. Over the past five years, she’s written hundreds of articles for Authors Publish, and she’s also served as a copywriter and copy editor for a wide range of organizations and individuals. She is the author of The Quick Start Guide to Flash Fiction. She occasionally teaches a course on flash fiction. You can contact her at ellapeary@gmail.com.

I started writing every day when I was 16. Because I was young, I’d developed certain ideas about how writing works by learning about other writers’ processes.

I took these notions with me to my writing desk every day for over three years. And I watched as each was built upon or torn down as I continued writing. At the end of my streak, when I took some time to reflect, I realized that the process is both subjective and objective. Some things happen with everyone—no one writes a publication-ready first draft, for example—and some things vary from writer to writer.

More specifically, I noticed that there are certain notions around the process that can be quite limiting, ideas that might prevent you from putting words on paper. Many such ideas, as I learned by writing every day, are simply not true.

Writing is fun. Writing is difficult

It’s a common notion that writing is hard, that it’s supposed to be hard. You’re supposed to cry, bleed, spill your guts out (not literally, unless it actually happened to you and now you’re writing your medical miracle memoir about it). The pain almost seems romanticized.

However, that’s not always true. Sure, writing is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be painful. That’s not to invalidate people’s writing about their pain. Be it memoir or fiction, writing is how many people cope with their pain, give it meaning, find solace. I’ve done it too and found it helpful.

But I love putting words on paper. It doesn’t mean I’m less of a writer (or a person). Ray Bradbury refused to let his work be work—he jumped out of his bed every morning excitedly to get writing. I started my streak at a young age and fortunately didn’t have any dark or painful experiences to write about, and so my mind couldn’t wrestle with the idea of writing being painful. Was I a writer if I hadn’t suffered?

Turns out, I was. You do not have to suffer for your art.

Motivation is fleeting (if you don’t work at it).

Once the initial excitement faded away, motivation wasn’t enough to keep me going. I needed to have something at stake. The streak itself fulfilled this purpose. Having read about how authors struggled with keeping up a writing habit, I was quite proud that I’d managed to write every day during that first month. The streak’s value only increased with each day that I sat down to write.

I started writing because I was motivated. Then I wrote to motivate myself. Repeat. It’s a formula that has been my savior many times—on the bad days, on the days when I didn’t have the energy or the ideas or the time. I wrote to sustain all that the streak kept giving me—most importantly, the confidence that I could do it.

I learned not to depend on motivation but instead have something that would force me to keep coming back.

Embrace influence.

In the beginning, I could see the influence of my favorite authors on my writing. But the more I wrote, the more my writing broke free of their influence and developed its own voice.

It’s worth noting that the influence didn’t always show in my voice. Sometimes it showed up in the kind of stories I was writing, the characters I was developing, the settings I was building. And that’s okay. Whenever anything doesn’t feel true to me, in fiction or nonfiction, I delete it.

Noticing the influence helped me identify what wasn’t a product of my imagination and let me explore new and different paths. Common tropes exist, but what can I do differently? That’s something I learned only by writing regularly, training my mind to understand how stories work.

It is impossible to avoid writing crap.

Every writer has a lot of good and bad words in them. We just have to let them all out so that we can keep the stuff that works and throw away the rest.

You’ll be surprised.

Sometimes my writing took me to unexpected places. And I couldn’t always tell if it was a good trip or a bad one.

Several times while rereading my own writing, I’ve surprised myself. I found stories I didn’t remember writing; stories that were so good I was surprised and glad and proud that I’d written them. This sort of judgment, however, comes only after some time has passed. The distance and perspective and practice allowed me to find the diamonds in the rough. Writing is full of surprises—isn’t that great?

It pays to experiment.

I’m not a poet. I suck at writing poetry. But there have been days when I’ve written poetry to keep my streak burning, and enjoyed it. I gave 100-word stories a go and fell in love with the limitation it provided. It’s a good exercise in brevity (and there are magazines that specifically publish 100-word stories, so you might score an acceptance or two if you practice enough and send them out!). I also tried my hand at science fiction and enjoyed myself immensely.

There were times when I thought I couldn’t do certain things or that I wouldn’t enjoy doing them. But it was fun to step out of my comfort zone once in a while and discover what I could or couldn’t do. I couldn’t have known without trying.

Remember to have fun.

I had bad writing days, but it didn’t happen every day. There were days when I had loads of fun telling a story or writing a blog post. I made a point to note these down because I wanted to remember these times. I’d committed to writing and getting published. What would be the point if I didn’t have fun?

Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a freelance psychology and culture writer from New Delhi, India. She has previously written for Tor.com and Submittable’s blog, Discover. Find her on her website.

So I ended up whipping up a few quote memes and sending them to him with a note that said, “Hire someone to make these.” By the end of the day, the first meme had ten times more likes than anything else he’d ever posted, and he was already asking me to make more.

I’m not sure when exactly the meme making, and social media managing, turned into working together, but at some point before our second anniversary we agreed that, “oh well, we broke that rule”. Which is good, because I was able to convince Jacob that he needed to start Authors Publish with me. Since then I have run the editorial side of the business and he has managed the logistical side. Without his practical know-how, I would be lost.

I knew right from the start that I wanted to start a website that made publishing more accessible. I could see how publishing in literary journals could make people’s whole careers, and yet many writers didn’t know they existed, and if they did know they existed, they still didn’t understand how they functioned.

Duotrope, which had helped me start my literary journal journey, had just started charging subscribers, and I wanted to create a website that would help authors  get started without charging anything. I was teaching at Seattle Pacific University at the time and I could see how much a site like that could help my creative writing students.

The first issue of Authors Publish had three subscribers, and it took about six months for Authors Publish to really get off the ground. The turning point was when we started adding one review of a manuscript publisher seeking direct submissions to each issue. This was based on readers’ feedback and it really did make a huge difference.

Over the years we’ve kept growing and evolving and things have very much changed. The one major business shift we’ve made in the past ten years, is in terms of how we make our income. We initially made all of our money from ads, but over time we’ve shifted into offering courses, that have a cost attached. Authors paying for the courses help make the newsletter possible.

Now we have over 200,000 subscribers, and our resources are regularly shared by organizations like The Society of Writers, Authors Guild, and by BA, MA, and MFA programs at major universities throughout North America.

We also offer eBooks and lectures for free, as well.

We are hoping to celebrate our tenth anniversary with some great guest lectures in the fall, and I almost didn’t write this, but I thought it was important to mark this anniversary in a small way, before it, too, zoomed past, and thankfully a lot of subscribers helped as well by sharing some very thoughtful messages, which I also share in this issue.

I also want to share my gratitude for our long term contributors, S. Kalekar, Ella Peary, and Emily Harstone, They are very much the reason Authors Publish is successful, and I’m grateful for their abilities as writers and researchers.

It’s also important to thank, S Bavishya for the wonderful job she’s done with our social media presence over the last year.

We are also very grateful that for the last five years we’ve lived and worked in Toronto, or Tkaronto, which was this region’s traditional name. Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties, and is the traditional home and unceded land of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga (Haudenosaunee), the Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ,  Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Mississauga and the Wendake-Nionwentsïo.

I have a mixed relationship with land acknowledgements, which is to say that I think it is very important to acknowledge whose land we are really living and working on, and that this acknowledgement can be a potential source of disruption, but I also feel like it can come off as rote, as something said without intention or meaning, or follow up. So every time I do this, I also recommend a different book written by an Indigenous author, which this time is The Gift is in the Making: Anishinaabeg Stories by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Among other things, we also regularly contribute to local Indigenous organizations, like the Anishnawbe Health Foundation.

I am very grateful that I was able to spend the past ten years doing something I love, and I hope to continue to do so for a long time.

— Caitlin Jans

Caitlin Jans is co-founder of Authors Publish and The Poetry Marathon. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Adroit Journal, Rust + Moth, Barrow Street Journal, and Killer Verse. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, BILiNE, and The Best of the Net.You can learn more about her writing at www.caitlinthomson.com. You can follow her on FB here.

“There is no possibility that I could have progressed in skill, discipline, diligence, confidence, motivation, and effort without the broad, well-sourced information provided by Caitlin and Jacob Jans at Authors Publish. Still, that’s only part of the picture. In addition to the nimble, well-presented outgoing opportunities they put into my inbox once or twice a week, they are equally responsive – and rapidly so – to almost any question, request, or dialogue (of a reasonable nature) one can raise with them. It is rare that 48-72 hours would pass before I would get a personal, informative, and to-the-point response from either Jacob or Caitlin on the matter at hand. Try that with Duotrope.”
Lance Mason

“I wanted to write and say Happy 10th Anniversary! I signed up to Authors Publish back in August 2013 and have been reading your weekly newsletters ever since. It helped me find publications that I eventually got published in, read great advice and start being a Volunteer Reader for a couple of magazines. I couldn’t have done any of that without the great newsletters Authors Publish sends. Thank you so much and here’s to the next 10 years!”
Jennifer Kennett

“As a published author of non-fiction, I ventured into writing fiction for the first time. I attended many workshops, joined writing critique groups and did most of the things that writers do to improve our skills. But one of the most valuable learning tools for me has been your excellent online lectures. The quality of the speakers is phenomenal, and always fresh. Just yesterday Emily Colin presented strategies for polishing your manuscript. I thought I’d polished enough, but went right to work and improved the important first page of my novel!

Thank you so much for making knowledge available to writers, and without charging fees. I never miss an opportunity to learn, when Authors Publish lands in my email!”
Kathryn Hack

“I’ve been subscribed to Authors Publish for a couple years and it is hands down the BEST free writer’s newsletter that I’ve found yet. Free lectures and books open to everyone with some wonderful authors and paid intimate classes.