Tilted House publishes a biannual journal as well as an online magazine. The journal—The Tilted House Review—is handbound in small batches and features a letterpressed cover. It’s also available as a free downloadable PDF.

Tilted House’s online publication—The Titled House Web Magazine—is published weekly and features work from one to two authors.

Tilted House accepts submissions separately for the two publications, The Tilted House Review and The Tilted House Web Magazine. The guidelines are similar, but they accept somewhat longer writing for The Tilted House Web Magazine.

For The Tilted House Review: Poets may submit up to three poems. Authors of fiction may submit up to two short stories totaling 1,000 words or fewer, or up to three flashes totaling 800 words or fewer. They also accept excerpts from longer works of fiction. Authors of creative nonfiction may submit up to two essays totaling 1,000 words or fewer. Authors of plays may submit one short play or an excerpt from a longer work, 1,000 words or fewer. The Tilted House Review also accepts reviews. They like reviews on anything—not just books—and advise authors to, “Get weird.” Authors may submit one review, 1,000 words or fewer.

The current deadline to submit to The Tilted House Review is March 16. Authors published in The Tilted House Review receive one copy of the handbound journal.

For The Tilted House Web Magazine: Poets may submit up to three poems. Authors of fiction may submit up to two short stories totaling 2,000 words or fewer, or up to three flashes totaling 1,000 words or fewer. They also accept excerpts from longer works of fiction. Authors of creative nonfiction may submit up to two essays totaling 2,000 words or fewer. Authors of plays may submit one short play or an excerpt from a longer work, 2,000 words or fewer. Like The Tilted House Review, The Tilted House Web Magazine accepts reviews on anything, not just books. Authors may submit one review, 2,000 words or fewer. The Tilted House Web Magazine accepts submissions on a rolling basis.

Tilted House accepts submissions in all languages, as long as the writing is accompanied by an English translation. The Tilted House Review accepts submissions online, 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. Submitting authors should wait at least three months before submitting again.

Tilted House only accepts submissions that adhere to the guidelines they’ve posted online. Please read these guidelines in full before submitting.

If you’d like to learn more or submit to The Tilted House Review, please visit their website at https://www.tiltedhouse.org/submit.

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.

They charge 7 dollars for general submissions and 25 dollars for the contests they run, but many of the imprint submissions are free, including their Latinographix series and the Machete nonfiction series. We are only listing them because of the free submission options.

This is what they say about their Latinographix series “This series showcases graphic novels, memoir, nonfiction, comic books, and more by Latinx writers and artists. The series welcomes projects with any balance of text and visual narrative, from larger graphic narratives to collections of vignettes or serial comics, in color or black and white, fiction or nonfiction.”

The series editor is Frederick Luis Aldama, and you can learn more or submit to this series here.

This is what they say about their general submissions window: “We also welcome general submissions in nonfiction and fiction that don’t fit within the purview of any of our series, especially those which align with Mad Creek’s mission to provide a platform for historically marginalized and underrepresented voices, ideas, and perspectives.”

You can learn more about their other series here.

You can see what they’ve previously published here. Because they are part of a larger university press they should have decent distribution, although I was unable to find out who their distributor is.

Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2021 Guide to Manuscript Publishers.

No debate divides a bunch of writers faster than a discussion on whether they plot their written pieces or not. Some writers feel that creating a plot for their story or article is limiting. They feel that spending time on a plot outline stifles their creativity and they do much better when they just roll with it. I’ve been on both sides of the debate. Going with the flow worked very well when I had fewer writing commitments. I could lose myself in one article for an entire day and spend time working and reworking the structure of my written pieces for another entire day. However, free flowing never allowed me to finish a book. I have started many book manuscripts, but never finished one, because I did not take advantage of the simple technique of charting a plot outline.

So, today I want to talk to you about what is a plot, why you need it, and what options are available to you:

What is a Plot?

A plot is what I am doing right now. It is what I did in the line above this section. I identified a problem statement in the opening paragraph and in the one line above, I gave some structure to how I will be solving this problem statement. That is precisely what a plot does.

A plot helps us craft an outline for the piece we wish to write. It is a breadcrumb trail for the writer to follow as they work their way to the end of the story. It also helps a writer marry the characters with the incidents of their and each other’s lives, holding it all together like a faithful Maypole. Just as the dancers go around the Maypole weaving intricate patterns with their ribbons, so can the writer lead his characters through the intricacies of their story if he has a strong plot figured out.

Why Do You Need a Plot?

A plot is the most useful tool in your arsenal that will help you achieve your objective; to tell an impactful story. It allows you to engage in some creative envisioning with regards to what you want to say in your story. You see, most of us approach a piece of writing from a single idea. It is usually a small spark that gets us going but more often than not, the steam runs out after we‘ve written a little bit. As we approach the part where we need to add details, our minds begin to wander to other juicy and inspiring ideas, thus, giving rise to the singular reason for the lack of existence of several books.

For example, consider the bestselling book, The Devil Wears Prada.  Lauren Weisberger based this novel upon her experience of working as an assistant to a famous editor at a popular publishing house. Now, what she had was a working knowledge of the ins and outs of daily life of those around her and a boat-load of seemingly ridiculous incidents that she could spin into a book.  However, a book needs more to feel complete, for its readers. She needed to think about a problem statement for the book to solve, so she shared that she wanted to write for The New Yorker but she needed a job in the meantime, hence she accepted this assistant position. She wanted to tell us about funny incidents with other characters in the office, but incidents have more impact when we know something about the characters. So, she gives us a description of her boss, the highly successful and complex Miranda Priestly, her counterpart with a superiority complex, Emily Charlton, her boyfriend Alex Fineman, her friend Lily Goodwin and the flamboyant Creative Director, Nigel. The author did not end up with a great finished product just by telling a true story, she identified the main characters, identified a series of incidents she wanted to cover, decided how those would progress the problem statement, each character’s lives, and how that would make them all a part of the climax.

That is the power of a powerful writing and if you want to write a story with as much impact, you need a strong plot outline.

How Do I Create a Plot?

Now that we have gone through the What and the Why of creating a plot, you may wonder How you can go about creating a plot for your story. There is a lot of material on the internet about how to create a plot outline and the more you look, the more you will find. In this section, I will discuss some of the most popularly offered methods.

The method most commonly talked about is by Gustav Freytag in which he provides a pyramid structure with which to approach a plot outline. Freytag provides an excellent set of guidelines on how to section your plot and what the essentials of each section are. According to the Freytag method, there are five sections of a plot, namely ‘Exposition’, ‘Rising Action’, ‘Climax’, ‘Falling Action’ and ‘Denouement’. The ‘Exposition’ is essentially the Introduction, where you will introduce the main character(s), central conflict, time, location and mood for the book. ‘Rising Action’ is where a series of events occur that contribute to the central conflict and the suspense begins to rise. The ‘Climax’ is where events come to a head and an incident decides the fate of the main characters. The ‘Falling Action’ and ‘Denouement’ is where the tensions of the story ease up and draw to a close. Freytag’s technique is an evolved form of the three-step process of ‘beginning, middle and end’ offered by Aristotle. Both the pyramid technique and three-step technique were meant to help with the playwriting process but work equally well in storytelling for the purpose of novels as well. Speaking from personal experience, Gustav’s technique is fantastic to give structure to an idea. The pyramid structure forms a great base upon which to build your story and serves as a great set of instructions for beginner writers as well as experienced writers.

There are a number of other methods that enjoy varying levels of popularity such as the Synopsis Outline method which almost takes us back to the first plot outline method offered by Aristotle. The Synopsis method encourages the writer to think of the story as something with a beginning, middle and end. It tells the author to create a 1-2 page summary of the story they intend to tell and then create the entire book based on that outline. This method is more suited to experienced writers rather than beginners as it does not have much structure and relies on the author’s ability to mould the summary into a full-fledged story with all the necessary elements of storytelling.

Moving on to a method that is steeped in detail, let’s talk a bit about the In-depth Outline method. This method advises authors to create a comprehensive outline of every chapter, further broken down into scenes which are used to drive the dialogues and plot. This outline method is great for keeping track of the sub-plots, making notes about expected character behavior during each scene, and for keeping track of your own work as you go through it. Picture a ring binder notebook with guiding notes in the margins and post-it notes with guiding notes all over it, that is how this method is done. This method is ideal for beginners as it causes them to think about every little detail and patiently work through it. It is also great for experienced writers who tend to feel overwhelmed by the process at times.

Another interesting method introduced by Randy Ingermanson is the Snowflake method. According to this method, you begin with one idea and expand that into an entire novel. The idea is to not go into any amount of detail at the beginning. Just start with a one-line description of the entire book, just like you would describe another writer’s book to a friend. That one sentence then forms the basis for the expansion of that idea into an entire book. After you have a one-line description that you like, you begin to think about the details such as the beginning, three key situations for the character(s) to overcome, and the conclusion. Then move on to creating the characters by filling the details into the introduction, key situations and conclusions, one paragraph at a time. I’ll be honest, my mind does not work in a manner that is compliant with this method. I prefer to work linearly and this method is circular. However, this method is ideal for writers of a deeply artistic temperament who do not wish to be compliant with structure but just need a few pointers.

This brings us to the last method I want to walk you through, the Bookend method.  This method is exactly as it sounds, the writer begins with identifying a problem on one end and the solution to that problem on the other end. Then, the writer begins to fill in the details with characters, sub-plots, and twists and turns. This technique, I’m afraid, is another one for experienced writers as it requires a certain amount of finesse in your craft to know how to coherently work backwards and forward from both ends to create a story that will hold the reader’s attention.

For ease of reference, I have turned the information above into a table.

With this, I wish you the best in your journey to identifying the best method that works for you and writing your best story yet.

Bio: Sarina Byron is a California based writer whose work has been published in Introvert, Dear, Thrive Global, Walker’s Legacy, Book Series Recaps and a variety of other publications. Sarina covers lifestyle, fashion, business, well-being, book reviews and writing techniques in her writing. Follow her on Instagram @sarinatrodriguez for more

We selected the recipient of the fund using a random number generator. We are announcing the winners of the November, December,  January, February, and March funds today. Due to a high rate of non-responses from literary journals that have applied for the Fund, we’ve started to send out acceptances on a quarterly basis. 

In case anyone is confused by why March is included in the winter fund, it’s because Authors Publish is based in Toronto, and calling March, spring feels like testing our luck.

The following wonderful journals are recipients of this quarters fund:

Mud Season Review is an international literary journal in which writers of all genres support each other’s love of writing and reading, provide vibrant, kind, insightful feedback, forge significant creative relationships, and demonstrate that the pursuit of excellence in their craft doesn’t have to be formal, exclusive, or anonymous. We aim to publish strong, skilful writing from far and wide. In doing so we seek to discover voices new to us and new to publication, work that can teach something about life, but also about writing: what it can do with experience, and the experience it can provide a reader.

Lolwe is an online literary magazine that publishes fiction, literary criticism, personal essays, photography, and poetry.

We will announce our next recipients in the spring. There may not be a round of funding after that, unless more journals participate in the program. Thank you to everyone who has applied.