Submit
UPDATE: We’re now reading for Issues Eighteen and Nineteen, with #18 due online in the first half of April 2012.
GUIDELINES UPDATE: We’ve recently changed our ideal response time from within a month to within six weeks. We’ll always aim to get back to you sooner than that, but in future please leave six weeks from the date of your original submission before enquiring. Thank you for your patience.
> 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 3,000 words in length. We will occasionally consider longer work too, but do ask that you thoroughly acquaint yourself with previous issues and what we’re looking for before submitting lengthier pieces. There’s no second guessing required — the evidence is there on the pages in the work we’ve chosen to feature.
We choose not to recognize the increasingly ridiculous term “flash fiction,” but do actively welcome much shorter pieces (especially as the average 21st century internet reader often has a short attention span). 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 let us know about 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?
We use the excellent Submishmash manager to handle all submissions. You’ll need an account, but with an increasing number of literary magazines using the same system, it’s worth your time to set one up if you haven’t already done so.
We accept .doc, .docx or .rtf files. 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. All multiple poetry submissions should be attached in a single document.
Go to killauthor.submishmash.com to send us your work.
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 six weeks, drop us a line at mail@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.
