Submit
UPDATE: Next issue due online in late March/early April.
> kill author looks forward to receiving your submissions of short fiction and poetry. Send us your work whenever — we’ll put an announcement on the site if submissions are closed temporarily due to apathy, sickness or (our own) death.
Fiction should be no more than 2,000 words in length; nearer to the 1,000 mark is preferred due to the short attention span of the average 21st century internet reader.
We choose not to recognize the increasingly ridiculous term ‘flash fiction’, but do welcome much shorter pieces. Send twenty, thirty or forty words if you want, just as long as each and every syllable is captivating.
No genre fiction, please.
If you’re submitting poetry, please send between two and four pieces at a time.
Photos and artwork: the site design allows space for an image to accompany featured submissions, so use your imagination when searching for suitable eye candy, but be sure to let us know if you’ve sourced your chosen picture from elsewhere.
Bio?
Please include a short third-person bio with your submission. Tell us something about yourself. Where you are. What you can hear. How you’re feeling. The state of your hair. But whatever you do, don’t simply attach a laundry list of all the other places your writing has featured. Please. We mean this. Those things increasingly read like some kind of online trophy cabinet and we’re much more interested in where you’re going than where you’ve been. Include a few notables and we’ll be as impressed as you want us to be; include everything since the piece you had in your school magazine at the age of ten and we reserve the right to edit it down (and probably will). You are encouraged, however, to add a link for your personal blog or site, so that readers can discover more of your words elsewhere.
Published or not published?
Work should not have been previously published either in print or other online magazines, though it’s fine if it’s appeared on a blog or personal site. (For the record, we think magazines that reject even those sources are taking themselves far too seriously and should ease up on the preciousness.) We ask for first electronic publishing rights, after which the rights revert back to you. Your work will, however, be archived on the site.
Multiple and simultaneous?
Simultaneous submissions are allowed; just let us know if the piece is accepted elsewhere. Multiple submissions are not permitted — please only send one piece at a time (or two to four poems, as detailed above).
Payment?
We’re unable to offer any payment for your work, but if you were looking to make money from being published in an online lit mag then you’re obviously in the wrong game.
Formatting and sending?
Save your submission as a .doc or .rtf file, taking care to include your email address at the top of the document too, in case it becomes separated from your message. Make sure you’ve put any desired formatting in the layout, and if necessary back this up with instructions about how the prose or poetry should look on the web page.
Email your work to submissions@killauthor.com.
Response time?
It seems to be an unspoken rule amongst literary journals and magazines these days that writers should be kept waiting ages for a response. We can’t decide whether this is done to make you value their publication more, or make you think it’s incredibly oversubscribed. Whatever the reason, it’s a tradition we hate. We can’t give you an exact time scale, but we’ll do our very best to get back to you as soon as we can. If you haven’t heard from us within one month, drop us a line at sinister.cabal@killauthor.com and make us feel guilty.
Anything else?
If you follow these submission guidelines, we’ll like you. If you don’t, we won’t. But we’re guessing that if you’re among the latter you’ll never realize the depths of our unspeakable wrath, because you won’t have read this far in the first place.
