Online Short Fiction · 4:16pm Feb 2nd, 2014
Recently, I’ve found that I’ve become sort of a cheerleader for Online Short Fiction. If you don’t already know, a number of sites have opened up shop and started buying original short stories, many of which post the stories online to read for free. It’s becoming a hassle, fetching the links and typing it all out, every time I find someone who looks like they’d be interested. So I’ve decided to collect all of the E-zines that I know of into one blog post that I can pass around.
Almost all of these markets pay professional rates (about 5¢ a word) and all but one of them publishes their content free online for all to read. This way your followers can still enjoy them same as your pony fics, without much extra effort. Now you can write original stories without pony-fying them and people will actually read them. And this is a much more reliable way of making grocery money than throwing stuff on Amazon.
I got most of this information from a site called The (Submission) Grinder, which lists all of the paying fiction markets and lets you track which ones you’ve already submitted something to. My post here is only of the cream of the crop, so please check it out. Also, I wouldn’t have discovered most of this if it wasn’t for this video series about writing and selling Short Fiction.
Tor.com
Known for publishing The Wheel of Time, Ender’s Game, and A Certain Scientific Railgun, Tor Books is the number one publisher of Fantasy and Sci Fi in America and one that I am confident will still be around in two years. Their blog, Tor.com, is easily one of my favorite Sci Fi/Fantasy websites on the internet. They don’t limit themselves to just talking about their own books, or even just books at all, from movies to TV to books from other publishers. Oh, and they also post short stories.
They are easily the highest paying online fiction market as of this writing at 25¢ a word for the first 5k. Though since their blog is basically one big publishing advertisement, much of the fiction they post are novel excerpts, but those are easily filtered. For a taste of the kinds of stories that they just love, you can get “Some of the Best” anthologies for free on Amazon.
Surprisingly the only romance market on this list, Heroes and Heartbreakers is basically everything I said about Tor.com, but for stories of love. Makes sense, considering that they’re both owned by Macmillan.
Their pay rates are… different from the rest of the markets on this list. Instead of a single payment, they pay an advance against royalties. For you mortals, that means they pay $1000 up front, and then you might get once enough people buy the Ebook version. Their soft word count requirements are 10-15k, so while they may or may not pay as much as Tor, they still pay way more than most everyone else at the moment. Sadly, I can’t seem to find any stories of lesbian romance on their site, but I’m sure that will change after today. 
The Writers of the Future contest
The contest is for new authors of “All types of science fiction, fantasy and dark fantasy.” It’s just for unpublished writers though, so if you’ve sold over five thousand ebooks then, well, I’ve got some bad news for you… But luckily anything you post online for free doesn’t count, so don’t worry about being disqualified because of your attempt at writing the next Fallout: Equestria.
This is the only entry on this list that, at the moment, doesn’t post stories online for free. They’re planning on putting up some of the older volumes, but I guess that doesn’t help unless you’re Patrick Rothfuss. Still, this is a big enough deal that it shouldn’t be too hard to find the books at your library, and the Ebook versions are pretty cheap if you can’t.
A magazine that does audio recordings of all their stories, they buy Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, with fairly broad view of the genres. They pay 10¢ for the first 4k words and 6¢ for the next 4k; anything longer is auto rejected. Every year they reprint everything in an anthology.
A “premiere source for all things sci-fi & fantasy.” They also take stories in other genres that cross into speculative fiction, as well as horror. They pay 10¢ a word.
Despite the title, they take Fantasy as well, among other things. The stories they accept tend to be on the super-short side, which makes sense considering that they post a new story every weekday and pay 8¢ a word. Think the kind of thing that one would read over a cup of morning coffee in terms of length. At the end of the year, they collect all the new stories into an anthology that’s slightly longer than the longest book DAW has ever published.
With a broad take on what speculative fiction is (except horror,) they pay 8¢ a word. They have a soft word limit of 9k, but they prefer 5k, so maybe make sure that your novelette doesn’t feel like nine thousand words before submitting to them. If you have Hypertext Fiction, they’re the only place I know of that still accepts it. Also, they have a fondness for stories that “that address political issues in complex and nuanced ways, resisting oversimplification.”
An online magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, they consider no subject to be off-limits and want writers to “take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.” They pay 8¢ a word for stories between 1.5-7.5k words, but prefer them to be under 5k. Also, half of the stories they publish every issue are turned into audiobooks.
AE - The Canadian Science Fiction Review
Despite the name, they do take submissions from outside of their native country, but when they say “science fiction” they mean science fiction, so no stories about elves unless they’re really aliens. They also buy Webcomics, though I’d imagine that the Tumblr scroll style of sequential art that everyone in this fandom draws wouldn’t fly with them. Their word limit is 3k.
Released the first Tuesday of every month, they take all sorts of speculative fiction from Sci Fi to Fantasy to Horror to everything in between. They have a word limit of 5k, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a minimum outside of what would be necessary to actually tell compelling a story. Also, they accept poetry at 25¢ a line.
A fantasy magazine that publishes two “literary adventure fantasy” stories every two weeks with one audio reading of a past story. Sadly, they do not take Present-day Fantasy, Fairy Tales, or Science Fiction, but anything that would be considered Secondary World is good to go. They also have a yearly “Best of” anthology for a small fee.
Described as a Science Fiction Podcast Magazine, they want stories that are fun. Even though they’re sort of a podcast, they also post text versions of the stories on their website. Also, for those of you who want to listen to the podcast away from your computer, but don’t own a CD burner or an MP3 player (or just feel like supporting them,) you can buy drink coasters that have collections of their stories etched onto them. They also have two sister podcasts, but those markets only pay a flat $100 instead of 5¢ a word.
One of the few markets that accepts basically every genre, and as the name suggests, the type of story they accept is on the fairly short side at less than 1k. They also have a fondness for the holidays, so that thing you wrote about St. Patrick’s Day might be a good fit.
Horror d'oeuvres
Despite the title, they take pretty much all stories that could be considered Dark. They only accept flash fiction under 999 words though.
The only YA market on this list, they publish stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Like many of the sites on this list, they have a strong interest in stories with characters with ethnicities or sexualities or genders other than what populate the great majority of American media. Their word count limit is 9k.
An “online magazine dedicated to fostering a love for traditional poetry,” they also take short fiction with a soft word limit of 4k. They pay 6¢ a word up to $240 per story and $1 a line up to $100 for poetry.
Actually three magazines, one about insects, another about technology, and the third one varies from year to year. Sure, bugs may be a very specific topic, but bug words aren’t so different from pony words, and all of you wrote several billion of those.
A theme magazine that changes with every issue, they publish three issues every year. They pay $50 a page with a word limit of 3k. While they do post everything online, those who wait too long to read will have to flip through an online PDF instead of a regular HTML page.
A market with fairly broad genre tastes, they pay a flat rate of $250 for Short Stories and $100 for Flash Fiction. “The important factor for us is that the work use story, characters, emotions, and other fundamental elements of storytelling to think, to ask questions, to move the mind forward.” They also have a fake rejection generator to ease the pain of the real thing.
Giganotosaurus
Publishing fiction that’s too big for other magazines. They post a story of Science Fiction or Fantasy that’s between 5-25k words once a month. While they only pay a flat rate of $100 a story, that’s to be expected when you’re one of the only markets that buys novellas.
Is there, like, a way to favorite blog posts, because I really wanna keep this one forever and ever.
1787583
Well, you can always download an HTML file of it from the Gdoc.
1787589
Hmm, good point.
Whelp, I'll be off to spread the word!
And maybe write some new types of stories as well!
When you do this, do you sell your rights away from the story you write?
1787946
Nope, just first printing rights.
Basically that means that for a certain amount of time, the site that buys the story will be the only place where anyone can read it. All of the markets that I listed let you keep merchandising and film rights and what have you.
That said, there probably are places out there that are... less than legitimate. And it's entirely possible that someone with more selfish purposes could buy up one of these markets and change the contracts to screw over future submissions. So make sure you read the submission guidelines thoroughly.
1787979
Thanks!
Comments
This is great! Folks, thumbs-up this on the Fimfiction Editorial nominations for February if you want to share it.
1820977
Glad you liked it.
1790234
Replies
This is the first blog post that I have ever bookmarked.