Want your story on 55aday? Submit it for Guest Story Sunday! Submissions are accepted until each Friday, after which they're in fact still accepted, but then it's for the following Sunday.
We are now paying $0.55 (fifty-five cents) a story. Should we accept your story, you will receive your payment via PayPal. the story's If you want to wait until you have several stories published and have us pay you in bulk, that works too. And if you wanted to donate the fifty-five cents back to us, well, we'd be mighty grateful. This site is nowhere close to breaking even.
You still own your story and you can publish it in any other form. By submitting it, you are giving us permission to place it on this site and to publish it in an anthology should we ever get one together. But you are not giving us any other rights. Your story will always be yours.
You may send as many stories as you like. You're not likely to get rich this way even if you submit hundreds, but it's worth a shot. And who knows, maybe someday we'll be able to offer $1.10 a story. Whew, then we'd be for serious.
To submit your story, email it to:
Ari Collins [at] gmail [dot] com
or you can put them in the forum to submit them for publication. You can also use the forum to get constructive feedback on a story, either before submission or after unsuccessful submission.
Please include a byline; pseudonyms are perfectly acceptable. If you want your byline to link to a website, let us know.
The stories will go through a short editorial review process, and we'll let you know on Sunday whether your story made it to the site or not.
If your story is not accepted, you are encouraged to submit it for peer review on our forum, then submit again. You can also use the peer review option to workshop your story a little before you submit, of course.
Here are some quick guidelines for stories:
Your story needs to be told in exactly 55 words. We also prefer the title be no more than seven words (fewer's fine), but we're flexible so long as you're not using the title to "cheat" and tell half your story.
We want prose, not poetry. Poetry's fine and dandy and all, but this isn't the space for it. Any genre of prose is fine, however.
Similarly, stories that are no more than jokes are unlikely to be accepted. Humorous stories, sure, but no outright jokes, please.
Stories that manage to tell a story without relying on a last-sentence twist are more likely to be accepted. But as long as the last-sentence twist is a good one, or the twist isn't the story's only reason for being, we'll probably accept it.
For some idea of cliched stories to avoid, please check out this article by the amazing speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons.
A quick note on story length: make sure you count your words yourself, as word processors can occasionally be off by a word here or there. Most of the time, it's due to hyphenated words being counted as one when we would count them as two. Our rule: if you can separate the hyphenated phrase into two words that stand on their own, then they are in fact two words. For example, "co-worker" is one word, but "long-suffering" is two. No matter what, though, we'll give the word count one last check before we publish.
And one final note: we really appreciate every story we receive, whether we accept it or not. This site is a labor of love (still haven't figured out how to make it pay for itself), and every story we receive is like a little Christmas gift, waiting to be unwrapped. Thanks for all the presents, folks!
-Ari
Now back to the stories.
