Guidelines for Submissions
The Fictional Café, entering its twelfth year, seeks new boundary-breaking short stories, flash fiction, novel excerpts, poetry, creative nonfiction, visual art, audio dramas and audiobooks. A thousand Coffee Club members in 70 countries read our highly original ‘zine. We welcome all genres. Your work must be tasteful, original and well written. We look for engaging characters and the thought-provoking, avant-garde, or unconventional approach. Bold, sophisticated poetry collections and artist exhibits are welcome. Your work will be reviewed by our baristas.
Your submission must be original material, submitted exclusively to us. We do not accept simultaneous submissions or requests to review books. Work we accept becomes eligible for publication in our print anthology and considered for our annual Pushcart Prize nominations.
Important things to note:
One: Please become a member of our Coffee Club when submitting your work. Only member work appears as a Featured Post on the home page slider.
Two: Your submission must be an exclusive submission to The Fictional Café.
Three: When you fill out your Coffee Club membership, please tell us how you heard about FC.
Four: Please note that The Fictional Café is a non-profit labor of love, so we are unable to provide an honorarium for accepted submissions. All your baristas work for free; we don’t accept advertising; and we never charge you for publishing with us.
- Send your work as an attachment to your email (Word or a similar word processing app). Do not send a PDF because we can’t edit or post it. Your filename should be in this format: “Hemingway – Bell Tolls” or “Browning – 3 Love Poems.”
- A maximum of two (2) submissions may be submitted in a given year. Once your work has been posted, we have a waiting period of one year before you can submit another work for consideration. This is to ensure new voices have an opportunity to be heard.
- Please include a photo of yourself and a personal bio (as a Word document) so our readers can learn more about you. It can include links to your website, social media accounts and links to any publications in which you’ve been featured.
- Fiction Writers, please submit a single piece of fiction. Total length must not exceed 3,000 words.
- Poets, please submit a single document of 4-8 poems or a minimum of 200 words. Single poems or collections under 200 words will not be considered.
- Artists, please send six to ten photographs or photos of art. Images should be in JPG file format, 1MB or larger.
- Audio stories should be fiction under 30 minutes in length, in MP3 format and no larger than 64MB. If the MP3 is too large to send as an attachment, please contact us for uploading instructions.
Submit your work by email, click here or send to: submissions@fictionalcafe.com
We respect the time and effort it takes you to create a stimulating and challenging work of prose, poetry, art or audio. Thank you for your interest in publishing with us. We look forward to reviewing your work.
