Southern Gothic Online Submissions

The Encyclopedia Britannica describes Southern Gothic as a style of story set in the American South that is characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents or characters.

Southern Gothic is fiction written by Southerners (native, imported, and honorary) that involves the grotesque, the mysterious, the desolate, and/or the fantastic, to some degree.

What is Gothic?
To be Gothic, there needs to be something ugly in the beauty, or something beautiful amidst ugliness. A juxtaposition of the startling with the mundane, the sacred with the profane. Gothic requires a certain eccentricity of phrase or imagery or subject or mood, or of the writer herself.

Gothic also encompasses its more traditional definitions, involving haunting encounters, strange curses, deadly secrets, hidden doorways into alternate realities, and mysterious encounters with supposedly dead rock stars in empty train stations. Gothic rarely involves cthonic monsters emerging from the darkness to consume helpless protagonists and protagonistas.

What we're looking for:

Gothic tales set in the American South or about people from the American South. At Southern Gothic, we want to see the South in all its savage, haunted beauty.

We want to see well-written stories as well as stories that are well-written. Brilliant language is meaningless without the context of plot and characterization, and the most exciting plot ever devised lies dead upon the page if written poorly.

One of the best sets of Writer's Guidelines around is to be found at Weird Tales. I won't go through the trouble of rewriting them here, so please, take a gander and take it to heart. These suggestions apply to all writing, not just fantasy and horror.

And hell, what are we talking about at Southern Gothic if not some pretty weird tales?

Since this is an electronic publication, we prefer shorter works under 7,500 words. We like good flash fiction and short-shorts, but please be aware that we have very high standards for the ultra short form.

Do we accept non-fiction? Maybe. Try us.

What we're not looking for:

Stories that don't have a Southern element. That element can be slight, but the stronger it is, the more likely we are to like it. Within reason. We reject a good many stories for being outrageously Southern. If we see the words "Mama/Grandma always said" anywhere in the first three paragraphs, we usually stop reading. We aren't looking for feel good stories filled with Southern homilies, nostalgic remembrances of a simpler time in a golden age in your good ole Southern home, or delightfully endearing stereotypes of Southern culture or characters. If your story reads like a Blue Bell Ice Cream commercial, you might want to rethink sending it to Southern Gothic.

Stories that don't have a Gothic quality, as described above. Most of the stories we reject have a weak or nonexistant Gothic quality.

In particular, we aren't interested in brilliantly written stories of Southern life in which nothing at all extraordinary happens, either with the plot, the characterization, the setting, or the writing.

Southern Gothic no longer publishes poetry.

Payment
Southern Gothic is published continuously. Authors published at Southern Gothic retain all rights to their work. Authors published in Southern Gothic are paid 1¢ per word upon publication. If funding increases, this rate will also increase.

Format Requirements

Please follow these guidelines religiously if you wish to get into the good graces of the editor. By following his guidelines, he will know that you care enough about your story to dress it properly before sending it out into the cold cruel world of competitive publishing. Why should he care about your story if you don't?

Send your fiction submission in the body of an email after clicking the button below. Be sure to put SUBMISSION in the subject of your email. Do not send attachments unless you want your email deleted unread - if we decide to use your work, we may ask for a Word document at that time. Do not send hardcopy submissions - email submissions only. He has been lax in the past about the attachments rule, but no longer. If your story is deleted unread, you only have yourself to blame.

Single-space your text and place a line space after each paragraph. Do not indent paragraphs. Do not use italics. Where you want italics to appear, offset those areas with underlines, _like this_.

We are open to Simultaneous Submissions, as long as you indicate it in your email. We are less willing to entertain previously published work unless the story is of exceptional quality and/or has been out of print for a long time and/or was more recently published in a journal of equal or greater obscurity. Previously published work is paid at the same rate as unpublished stories.

Please submit one story at a time, and wait until you hear from us before submitting another one. No more multiple submissions. We used to be ok with multiple submissions, but we grew weary of wading through every unpublished story people could dig out of their trunks going all the way back to high school.

We try to respond within 90 days. According to Duotrope.com, our current acceptance rate is a little under 6%, and average response time within 37 days. Our actual acceptance rate is around 1%.

Send your submissions by clicking below: