The Pretentious Literarian

Submissions

 

What We Publish

We want stories that actually tell stories. Characters make choices, things happen, the ending matters. If your piece reads like a diary entry or a mood board, please don’t send it. If it reads like a narrative with shape and consequence, we want it.

  • Word count: 500-5000 (a little wiggle room both ways if it’s great)
  • Genres: Any. If it moves, we’ll look
  • Form: Micro/short/flash fiction or CNF. We don’t publish poetry or academic essays.

Cover Art Submissions

Artists – we will need a cover art piece for each issue. We’ll leave the creativity and inspiration up to you! We prefer hi-res JPG or PNG. The selected cover submission is paid $5.

What We Don’t Want

There are a few things that will get rejected immediately. Please don’t submit anything that contains:

  • Politics of any stripe (politics in the story are fine, just don’t send us screed disguised as fiction)
  • Vignettes where nothing happens
  • Transgressive fiction, shock for shock’s sake, erotica
  • Profanity is fine if it serves the story and is not gratuitous

Rights & Payment

  • We ask for first electronic serial rights. After publication, all rights revert to you. We keep non-exclusive archival rights so your story stays on our site. We also keep non-exclusive print rights in case we create an anthology or special print issue in the future. We’ll notify you and provide a contributor copy if we do.
  • We ask that you credit us as follows “First published at The Pretentious Literarian” if you publish it anywhere else (including a personal blog.)
  • We pay $5 for every accepted piece via Venmo or CashApp.

How to Submit

Submit through Duosuma
  • Submissions are via Duosuma.
  • Submissions are open until the 25th of the month before publication.
  • Email submissions will not be read or accepted.
  • We especially encourage submissions from new and unpublished writers. Credits don’t matter here — a good story is a good story.
  • One story per submission (except micro/flash – you can submit up to 3 stories totaling less than 1500 words.)
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine, just withdraw if it’s accepted elsewhere.
  • Prior publication on a personal blog is fine. If accepted, we’ll ask you to update that blog post with a credit line and a link back to us.
  • Our goal is to send rejections within one week; acceptance within two.

Who Can Submit?

Are you a white male? Are you gender non-conforming? Are you a Republican? (gasp!) Are you a Democrat? (gasp!)

Great! We don’t care and we don’t want to know.

What matters is whether your story makes someone clutch their pearls, think, or chuck a laptop across the room before realizing it’s an electronic magazine and they’ve just destroyed their Lenovo ThinkCentre m90a, which is not a thing the editor has ever done.