Submissions

Submissions for Luna Station Quarterly 010 are closed!

Submissions will reopen on June 15th for our September issue.

Criteria

Luna Station Quarterly publishes speculative fiction written by women. We think girls write awesome characters and really cool stories and we want to show it to the world. We will consider stories submitted by any writer, regardless of experience or writing resume.

Stuff we want:

• Fantasy
• Science Fiction
• Space Opera
• New Fairy Tales
• Some creepiness
• Stories that explore the nooks and crannies of an original world
• Big events from the everyman perspective
• Unique settings and storytelling forms
• Well written stories with strong characters

Stuff we don't want:

• Anything biased toward any religion, race or moral preference
• Extreme gore or sexual content (everything in moderation)
• Fan Fiction (original stories only, please)
• Bad grammar/punctuation (please proofread and watch your sentence structure!)
• Mary Sues and Gary Stus
• Plagiarism

Stuff that will be a hard sell, but if it's truly awesome we want to see it:

• Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, dragons, and other clichéd monsters
• Urban fantasy or magical realism
• Zombies, pirates, or ninjas (we love them, but there's a glut right now)
• Deus ex machina

Format and Details

Stories should be 500 to 5000 words in length. We may publish longer or shorter works, but the greater your story is above or below limit, the less likely we are to publish it. No poetry please.

Exception on length will be made for our special drabble issue for the fourth quarter each year (see details here).

Submit your work by using our dedicated submission form. We welcome simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

A Note on File Format

Send your submissions to us (via our submission form) as an RTF, DOC, DOCX, or ODT attachment. All other attachments will not be read. Standard Manuscript Format preferred, but not required.

Reprints & Multiple submissions

We prefer original works, but will consider reprints. Authors should be sure they have the right to sell reprints. If your work is a reprint, include any necessary reprint information at the bottom of the work, such as "First appeared in XYZ Magazine, May 2009."

You may submit up to three stories in any one submission period.

Deadlines:

Luna Station Quarterly is published once a quarter, and has the following schedule:

Submissions will not be accepted for the two weeks prior to and two weeks after publication. During this time the submission form will be disabled.

Response Time

Response time varies, but we try to respond as quickly as possible. At the latest, we will reply to you by the end of the submission period for each issue. Feel free to contact us (via the contact form) if we do not acknowledge your submission within one week of the end of the submission deadline.

If you want to ask about something you have submitted, it is extremely important to use the contact form) and include the following information: When you sent the submission and to what address you sent the submission.

If your story is accepted, you will receive an email that includes the publication date and a short, simple contract. This must be returned before publication or your story will be held back from publication.

Rights

Copyright remains yours at all times. We simply ask for the right to publish your story on our website, and also add it to the pdf downloadable/printable version of each issue which will be available to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license. All stories will be archived indefinitely on our website. If you want us to remove a story from our archive or the pdf download, please write us via the contact form to let us know.

Anthology rights: to be determined later (most probably a percentage of sales). If ever such a thing comes to pass, authors will be contacted to work out terms.

Important Note

While Luna Station Quarterly is not a paying market, having your work published by us is considered publication.

Most print magazines, and many online ones, will not publish work that has previously appeared on the internet.
If we choose your story, it can only be marketed to other publications as a reprint. This will limit both the number of publications that will accept it and also the amount of payment you might receive.

It is up to you, the author, to decide if you are willing to give up your First Publishing Rights in exchange for the exposure we provide.

Payment

At this time, Luna Station Quarterly cannot pay its authors. However, we do provide an profile page for all authors which may be used to link to a homepage, display contact information, and list other publication credits. In other words, a bit of free advertising.

Final Notes

We reserve the right to change the submission process between issues. If you have any futher questions regarding this process, please use the contact form to get in touch.