Story Submission Guidelines
Please read the following guidelines if you plan to submit short stories to Antagonist Games, Inc..
How to submit short stories
All short story submissions should be made through our contact email with the subject “Short Story Submission – “ and then the project you are submitting for. For example, “Short Story Submission – Midnight Velvet.” Submitting to any other email in any other format will be ignored or not get to us correctly. Please do not drop submissions to us in person at public events. These will also be ignored.
What we’re looking for
We are open for general short story submissions throughout the year and run a series of themed submission calls. To find out what’s happening at the moment, please see our social media sites (listed below).
Antagonist Games Anthologies may contain short stories from new and established authors. We strongly recommend reading one of our settings guides before submitting: Our settings have some particular features, and if you take the time to discover what they contain, you’ll find it much easier to decide what to send us.
One other thing to note is that we’re looking for stories about people and places rather than about writing itself. If the most important thing about your story is its quirky narrative structure, or if the protagonist is a writer who’s writing a short story about the challenges of writing a short story about the challenges of being a writer, then it may not be for us.
Word count and Formatting
We can consider stories between 1,000 and 10,000 words; please do not send anything longer or shorter than this. (Most of the stories we publish are between 2,000 and 7,000 words.)
Please format the short story in accordance with the guidelines found here: https://www.shunn.net/format/story.html
How much we pay
We are currently paying $10 per thousand words for stories that we publish (for example, $20 for a 2,000-word story or $100 for a 10,000-word story), or you can opt for a flat 5% royalties off of sales through our Drive-Thru RPG sales. Contributors also receive two complimentary paperback copies.
Deadlines and when to submit
We have no deadlines for standard acceptances, and deadlines for Anthologies will be posted with the announcement for that Anthology.
International submissions and translations
We accept short story submissions from authors all over the English-speaking world. We currently don’t have the staff to translate work so they must be done in English.
Rights
We ask for the first serial rights on any story we publish. This means the story should not have appeared anywhere else in print or online. (This includes publication on an author’s website.) When we publish a story, we ask for a brief period of exclusivity (usually six months) and the right to keep the story in print as part of the anthology. We don’t ask for website/online rights or place any limits on what you can do with your story after the exclusivity period.
File formats
Please submit your short story in .docx, .doc, or .pdf format if possible. We also accept Google Docs pages which can be shared with our contact email address. However, please avoid Microsoft Works or Apple Pages documents, as we aren’t always able to open these.
Submission fee
We charge a $10 submission fee for each story submitted to us. This helps with our running costs and allows us to devote more time and attention to the submissions we receive. It also enables us to work faster: we aim to respond to all submissions within two weeks. Our form now includes an option to purchase one of our anthologies instead of paying the fee. Payment can be made at the time of submission via PayPal (paypal.me/AntagonistGames).
Multiple and simultaneous submissions
It’s OK to send us more than one story at a time. We prefer to see two. Please don’t send more than three, though; please send them separately.
Our response times
We aim to reply to all submissions within two weeks, although we sometimes go slightly over this during busy periods or holidays.
If you’re waiting for our reply, please watch your junk mail folder, as our replies sometimes make their way there. If you submitted it over three weeks ago and have not heard back from us, please recheck your junk mail folder. If you do night find a response from us after that, please email us at our contact email address.