They are fairly active on social media including Facebook. On their about page, it’s hard to learn much about the company and who is actually running it but they link to the media coverage their books have received, which is a good sign. I was able to do a little bit of Twitter detective work and discover that the co-publishers are In Churl Yo and Jason Henderson.

You can get a good feel for what they’ve published previously by visiting their catalog here. You can get a good feel for the covers, which I think are a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly genre appropriate. They have published a number of anthologies but submitting to those is based on invitation only. I was not able to ascertain who their distributor is.

They have an imprint that publishes books for younger readers, but they have so far only published one series, and don’t appear to be open to submissions.

They accept all submissions through Query Manager. Manuscripts they publish are between 80,000 and 120,000 words in length. They allow simultaneous submissions and try to respond to queries within six months.

To learn more, you can go here. Read their submission guidelines carefully, and please make sure the manuscript fit is good, before submitting.

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.

The Berlin Review is a new online journal of literature and art, produced and published in Berlin, Germany. They “just want good writing,” regardless of trends. They aim to publish a diverse range of voices, both emerging and established, and they especially hope to showcase marginalized authors. They publish writing on any subject.

Right now, The Berlin Review is seeking submissions for their first issue, themed “Tropical Trees and Seas.” They welcome authors to be creative when interpreting the theme.

Poets may submit up to five poems. Authors of fiction may submit short stories and flashes. There’s no word limit, but they aren’t likely to publish anything over 5,000 words.

The Berlin Review also accepts nonfiction travel writing: “Do you have an interesting and unique travel experience? We want to hear about your adventures around the globe!” Submissions of travel writing should include a brief summary of the story and the reasons it should be published.

All submissions should include a bio, 100 words or fewer. Submitting authors can expect a response within one month.

The Berlin Review accepts submissions via email, not online or by post. They accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors withdraw work published elsewhere. They do not accept previously published work.

The Berlin Review 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 The Berlin Review, please visit their website here. Their Twitter account is here and they did note on March 24th (this review was written and scheduled long before that), that they have already received a lot of submissions.

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’m writing this article from my perspective, which is that of a writer who is also part of the publishing industry as both an editor and a researcher.

This article is about the current and possible future implications of AI writing which is largely, right now, linked to ChatGPT.

My partner who is tech inclined, first told me about ChatGPT back in the late fall. He’d been chatting to it, and trying to get it to write a poem. It only wrote rhyming poems, even when he told it not to. I was not impressed. The poems were horrible, and most of the non-poetic answers were also bad, because they only seemed to make sense, if you read them closely they stopped making sense. It was easy to tell within a few sentences that something was awry — like they were writing around a point.

I was a little alarmed because my artist friends had already been badly impacted by AI’s advancements in their field, but it all seemed a little abstract. But just a few weeks later I started seeing ads for AI writing assistants on FB.

Within a month I received an article submission that read exactly like ChatGPT’s responses to my partner’s questions. Seemingly substantial but saying nothing concrete the minute you started to look close. I ran it through a detector and sure enough, it was AI written. I rejected the author without specifying why, and moved on.

I’ve gotten only a few AI-written submissions since then, but other publishers have closed to submissions because of it. Clarksworld recently had to close to submissions because of the situation (you can read more about it here). Candlemark & Gleam, a speculative fiction publisher we recently reviewed had to close for the same reasons (you can learn more here).

So far it has seemed to impact science fiction publishers the most. But a number of non-genre literary journals have started to add notes about not allowing ChatGPT’s submissions to their publications. It’s even started to impact fanfiction. A03, the Hugo award winning fanfiction site, has had more and more chat-written fics populating the site, although their terms of use have not changed to exclude them, at this time.

The problem is, that many traditional publishers already struggled to keep up with submissions when they were just written by people. Many publishers were already struggling with mass submission issues, that I write about at length here. It’s one of the reasons why many publishers are closed to un-agented submissions or have very short windows for submissions, even before AI writing showed up on the scene.

As someone who has spent the last decade plus of their life trying to support diversity and accessibility in publishing, this is really disheartening. A lot of publishers in recent years have started having open access submission windows as a way to counter the long-term gatekeeping and insular nature of publishing. I’m worried that these developments will hamper a lot of their effort, and encourage publishers who have been more open to general submissions in the past to change their policy.

As a writer who passionately loves writing, I have a hard time making sense of why anyone would use ChatGPT, because why would I get an AI to do something that gives me so much joy? I’d much rather have a robot vacuum my floors so that I have more time to write, than to have it write for me.

But I do know writers that have found it helpful to figure out plot holes and other aspects of writing. I just already know it’s not for me.

The last thing that I want everyone to consider, in closing, is how visual artists are already being impacted by this in a real way. I have a friend, who’d made his living for years as an artist until recently.  This fall he had to return to a more traditional day job, because his clients had replaced him with AI.

As fellow creatives I think writers need to stand in solidarity with artists and not use AI image generation, which many people are already using for book covers (sometimes unknowingly, till a certain point) and other promotional material.  You can learn more about how it is impacting artists and stealing from them here.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or are a tech writer with a more informed opinion on that side of this issue, I’d love to hear from you, at support@authorspublish.com.