General Guidelines
Reading PeriodAfter a great deal of debate, we have decided NOT to reopen to unsolicited submissions at this time. We underpublished in 2015, which means we're overstocked right now, and we've decided to take care of all the authors and stories already under contract before we begin to consider new submissions.
Thank you,
Bruce Bethke
Stupefying Stories | Rampant Loon Media LLC
What We Buy
We buy science fiction and fantasy stories for publication in Stupefying Stories magazine, the Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE webzine, and the Stupefying Stories Presents line of theme anthologies. Our tastes run from the light-hearted and whimsical to the cold-blooded and terrible, and we consider horror to be more a flavor than a genre, so yes, this means we are open to horror, too. For that matter our definition of "fantasy" is a bit broader than most people's and encompasses surrealism, magical realism, slipstream, Commedia dell'arte, and other things we have yet to define, but we know them when we see them.
We also buy cover art, but our needs are very specific. Artists, please query first. Whatever you do, do not send us your entire portfolio by email, as it just clogs up our email server.
Our original vision of creating a magazine that “transcends the genre barriers” fell victim to hubris. Darn, those genre barriers are tough! Therefore, as much as we love them, we are no longer accepting straight-up mystery, mainstream, or historical stories. If your story does not contain some element of the fantastical or scientifictional, we're the wrong market for it.
We do not publish poetry. Don't send it to us.
Length
We publish stories from flash fiction to novella length, but query first before sending anything longer than 10,000 words. At the moment we are overstocked on novelettes and novellas and you'll have your best luck sending us shorter stories. All stories under 2,000 words in length are automatically considered for use in SHOWCASE. If you do not want your story considered for webzine publication, please say so in your cover letter.
Rights Bought and Rates Paid
We buy worldwide English-language first publication rights, for publication in electronic and print formats, under a limited-use contract. At this time our base rate is 1.5-cents (USD) per word or a minimum of $15.00 for stories up to 1,000 words in length. We also pay a $50 bonus for stories selected to be magazine cover stories. We do not publish reprints, except under very special circumstances. If in doubt, query first.
How to Submit a Story
Effective April 1, 2015, we no longer consider simultaneous submissions.
We accept electronic submissions only. Submit your story as an attachment to an email message sent to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com. Be sure to include your name and the story title in the email subject line, as this makes life much easier for our editorial minions, and a happy minion is a productive minion.
We prefer files in .rtf, .docx, and .doc format, in roughly that order. We can handle .odt files if necessary, but they have proven troublesome, so we'll be happier if you re-save your story in .rtf format. We cannot handle other formats such as Apple Pages files, so don't send them.
Send submissions to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com only. We have a plethora of other email addresses, but submissions sent to our other email addresses tend to get lost. The one exception to this rule is for SHOWCASE: if you have a short (2,000 words or less) story you want to fast-track for possible publication in SHOWCASE, send it to submissions@stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com.
Do not send us links to "cloud" or file-sharing sites. Submissions sent as links to file-sharing sites are deleted unread.
One story at a time, please; do not upend your trunk full of unsold stories and send them all to us at once. Submissions sent en masse will be rejected en masse.
After You Submit a Story
We no longer send daily acknowledgments of submissions received. Instead, within a week of your submission you will receive an email message telling you either a.) we can't use your story at this time, or b.) it's being held for further consideration, in which case you'll receive a submission tracking number and further information. If you do not receive either a.) or b.) within 30 days, please query, as this most likely means either we did not receive your submission or you did not receive our reply.
One More Time: Our Email Addresses Are...
For most submissions and queries: submissions@rampantloonmedia.com
For submissions and queries specific to SHOWCASE: submissions@stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com
If you've found another email address for us somewhere, don't use it, as it quite likely goes straight to /dev/null.
Ten Tips for Improving the Odds
We receive a lot of submissions, most of which go straight into the first-round form rejection bin. Here are some tips to help you rise above the common slush and improve your chances of selling to us.1. Make sure your story is as finished and polished as it can be.
We're in the business of publishing fiction, not of teaching people how to write. Much as we'd love to give every author who submits to us a detailed critique of his or her story complete with advice on how to rewrite it in order to make it publishable, there isn't time enough left before the heat death of the Universe to do that. Therefore, make sure that when you hit send, you're putting your best foot (or hoof, claw, tentacle, or pseudopod, as the case may be) forward.
2. Remember to delete Comments and turn off Track Changes.
On a regular basis we receive manuscripts that contain not only the story, but also all the comments embedded in the story file by the other members of the author's writing group. While these are sometimes hilarious, this probably is not the effect you want to achieve.
3. Look at your calendar.
Every October we receive a flood of Halloween-related stories; every December, Christmas stories; every March, Easter stories. We can't use any of them because they're always coming in at least three months too late. In our business lead time is extremely important: for example, we'll be putting the October issue together in July. If your story has a strong seasonal element, remember to lead the calendar by at least three months, and four months is better.
4. Make sure you're sending us the story you want us to consider.
We continue to be surprised by the number of nice cover letters that arrive with no story attached. After that, the next-strangest things that routinely show up in our inbox are the cover letters that don't match the attached stories. We've seen authors reference one title in the email subject line, another in the body of the cover letter, a third in the name of the story file, and a fourth in the actual story itself. Our mind-reading machine broke down some time ago and the replacement parts are on backorder, so we have no way of knowing whether this is the story the author intended to send us or something else that got attached to the email by mistake. When confused, our default response is to hit reject.
5. Make sure you're sending your story to us.
Every week we receive submissions addressed to other editors and other publications. These go straight into the form rejection bin.
6. Keep your cover letter short and to the point.
Remember, we buy stories, not resumes, college transcripts, or publication histories. At this point we really aren't interested in your personal theory of truth, beauty, art, and literature (although we may be later, if we like your story), and if you send us a detailed synopsis of your story, all this does is reduce our desire to read the story. What we like to see in a cover letter is something interesting about you as a person that will make us more interested in reading your work, and it's a definite plus if you also include the information we need for our submission tracking system: specifically, your real name, your pen name (if used), and the full title of the story.
Please don't send us a cover letter loaded with links to everywhere you've ever published, every place your fiction has been reviewed, and every e-book for sale somewhere that includes something you've written. Above a certain threshold our email system automatically tags link-laden messages as junk mail, and while someone is supposed to check the junk mail bin once a week to make sure there's nothing important in there before the automatic purge function kicks in, that doesn't always happen.
7. Learn and use standard manuscript formatting.
We're not absolute sticklers for common formatting conventions, especially as they differ from country to country and we've bought some of our favorite stories from countries where the local conventions are quite different from U.S. standards. All the same, submitting your story in something recognizably close to "standard" manuscript formatting really helps. In particular, your manuscript should:
- Have your real name and address on the first page.
- Have a slug line on each page giving the title (or at least a key word from the title), your name (or at least your last name), and the page number.
- Have double-spaced body text.
- End with "The End," or "###," or "-30-," or something like that.
(Seriously, nothing brings a slush pile reading session to a screaming stop like someone getting to the bottom of the last page of a manuscript and asking, "Is this it? Where's the rest of the story?")
8. Remember to include an ending.
Few things are as frustrating as reading a story that is just brilliant for the first twenty-one pages and then collapses into a puddle of meaningless goo on page twenty-two. Remember, a short story is not a scene, it's not a vignette, and it's not an excerpt from your novel-in-progress: it's a complete, self-contained narrative with its own story arc. To paraphrase Mickey Spillane, it may be the beginning of your story that gets someone interested in reading it, but it's the ending that determines whether they want to read anything else by you. (Or in the case of an editor: whether they want to buy and publish your story in the first place.)
Your readers are giving you something incredibly precious: their time. You owe it to them to deliver an ending that leaves them feeling, "Wow! I'm glad I read that!" and not "Well, there went an hour of my life I'll never get back."
Over the past five years we've especially come to dislike what we call "the Dan O'Bannon ending." It's basically the antithesis of the deus ex machina ending, except instead of a magical being suddenly popping up onstage and solving everyone's problems, the jack-booted minions of a secret government agency suddenly storm in and kill everyone. Really? That's the best you could come up with? You were so frustrated by your inability to bring the story arc to a real conclusion that you just decided to slaughter your characters? Sheesh...
9. Remember to include at least one character.
We don't require that stories have heroes who emerge victorious, but your story should have at least one character who engages the readers on some kind of significant emotional level. It can be positive or negative—the readers can be rooting for the character to succeed, crying when the character fails, or sincerely hoping the character really gets his/her/its just deserts (never underestimate the power of schadenfreude)—but travelogues, history lectures, “Encyclopedia Galactica” entries, stories about boring characters who do boring things (or worse, nothing), stories about repugnant characters who do revolting things to other repugnant characters for repellent reasons (or worse, for no reason at all) tend to leave readers with a profound sense of, "Meh. That was a whole lot of nothing."
10. Read and follow the submission guidelines.
Editors don't post submission guidelines because they're constipated prigs; they do so in order to save writers wasted effort and themselves and their staffs wasted time. Editors truly do want to see more stories that fit their publication's needs, and to give more attention to the writers who create those stories. Therefore it behooves the savvy writer to read the posted submission guidelines—and then to reread them, if they haven't looked at them lately. Guidelines can and do change, and an editor can go from "Please send me more zombie stories!" to "Please God, no more damn zombie stories!" overnight.
If you ever find yourself writing a cover letter that says, "I know your guidelines say you never publish stories about [something], but I think you'll agree, this one is different..."
Just stop right there. It ain't gonna work. You're about to have a "hold my beer and watch this" moment, and we all know how those end.
The Secret 11th Tip
As your reward for having read this far, here's the secret 11th Tip. Right now, because of external events in 2013 and 2014, Stupefying Stories is overstocked with fantasy, horror, and paranormal stories. We're hard at work on reducing this backlog by getting new books out the door and the magazine back onto a regular monthly cycle, and are committed to publishing every story currently under contract (though not necessarily in strict FIFO order).What this means to you is that for the next few months, we're going to be a tough market to sell to—but here's the caveat. We would really love to get more good, short (5K words or less), hard science fiction stories. We're seeing a lot of science fiction-flavored product—stories by people who clearly have good chops as writers and storytellers, and a good understanding of character development and all that—but the science in them is like something out of a grade school textbook written in 1965.
If you can write good, modern, hard science fiction stories, that reflect an understanding of contemporary science and technology, not the vision of science and technology that was enshrined in the science fiction stories of decades ago, we'd love to hear from you.
Five Stories That Are Pretty Hard To Sell To Us Right now
These are not forbidden topics or absolutely impossible to sell to us right now, but you should know that we see a lot of stories like these, so yours will have to be pretty amazingly awesomely brilliant in order to stand out from the crowd.1. Gory horror.
It’s still possible to sell us a really top-notch horror story, but there are a heck of a lot of other writers tilling these same fields and fresh ideas have become scarce. If you do not have a deep personal attachment to writing gory and gut-churning stories, why not explore some other currently out-of-fashion horror subgenre? You might be the writer who brings one of them back—from the dead! Bwa-ha-haaa...
2. Paranormal romance.
While we’re still in theory open to it, we’ve seen far too many self-identified paranormal romance stories that would be described more accurately as fang-porn. If your literary model is Lady Chatterly’s Lover, we’ll save you time and pass on it now.
3. Imitation Tolkien.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An elf, a dwarf, and a wizard walk into a tavern. The barkeep says....
Oh, never mind what the barkeep says; we don’t care. Yes, we loved The Lord of the Rings. Yes, we’ve played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, we understand that Terry Brooks has made a lucrative career of writing Imitation Tolkien, and in point of fact some of our close friends made very good money cranking out Dragonlance books back in the 1980s. The point is, we have seen so many, many, many, many Imitation Tolkien stories, we grow glassy-eyed the moment dwarf lord Grimdark Neckbeard sets down his tankard of ale, looks across the table at 18th-level wizard Verdigris the Green, and says, “I don’t like working with elves.”
If you don’t have a deep emotional attachment to stories set in the world of Lower Middle Earth, why not try writing fantasy that borrows from some other body of folklore? There’s a world full of it out there, waiting to be explored.
4. Anything more than 10,000 words long.
At this time we are overstocked on novelettes and novellas. It’s a simple matter of space and budget. We have trouble making room for longer works, so for the next few months we’ll be buying very few of them.
5. Zombies.
Yes, we loved Shaun of the Dead. Yes, we published Doctor Dead, and it’s a sort of a zombie novel. (Mind you, though, it’s one with Haitian voodoo zombies, not George Romero zombies.) Yes, we published (or will be publishing, depending on when you read this) Putrefying Stories, our all-zombie special.
All the same, we’ve reached the point where when we find another zombie story in the slush pile, we just want to shoot it in the head. You’ll have to send us one pretty spectacularly amazingly fantastically different zombie story, if you want to stop us from tossing it on the burn pile.
Eighteen Ways to Get a First-Round Form Rejection
After reading through more than 5,000 submissions, I've developed a very strong sense of what I'd just as soon never read again. Break one of the following rules and you're certain to get a first-round no-comment form rejection.1. No porn.
Seriously, no porn. We don't publish it. Stop sending it to us.
2. No poetry.
Ditto.
3. No more straight-up crime, mystery, historical, or contemporary mainstream stories.
Our dream of building a magazine that transcended genre boundaries ran hard aground on the rocks of marketing realities. We still have a mystery special in the works, but now buy science fiction and fantasy only. If your story doesn't have some kind of science-fictionish or fantastical element, we're the wrong market for it.
Note: Slapping a gratuitous SF/F element onto an otherwise non-SF/F story—e.g., "Jennifer bitched to Rhonda about her relationship problems for thirty pages, and then a unicorn ran past the coffee shop window"—does not make it an SF/F story.
4. No torture porn.
There seems to be a subset of writers who think we'll make an exception to the "No porn" rule for horror stories that include gruesome torture along with the explicit sex. We won't. There's a market for that kind of stuff. We aren't that market.
5. Absolutely no more serial killer stories.
There's another subset of writers who have been ruined by watching too many slasher and splatter movies, or too many episodes of Dexter, who seem to believe that including a serial killer makes it horror. It doesn't. We've seen hundreds of such stories, and stories about serial killers who pile up the corpses for no other reason than that they're serial killers are a snore.
The investigating cop who's actually the serial killer? Been done. The first-person interior monologue of the serial killer? Been done. The serial killer who considers his crime scenes artwork? Been done. The little kid who was physically and/or sexually abused by a parent or other authority figure and subsequently grows up to become a serial killer? Been done, been done, been done, been done...
6. No more stories about child abuse and/or child sexual abuse.
These are serious topics, but we've seen far too many such stories that cross the line into torture porn or just plain old porn. If you frequently fantasize about doing hideous things to children—especially if you're a teacher (and yes, we see a disturbing number of such stories from writers who self-identify as teachers)—please get professional help.
7. Watch your language.
We're no prudes, but a few carefully chosen earthy Anglo-Saxon expressions go a long way. If we like your story we may ask you to tone down the language, but if your story begins with a barrage of f-bombs, we'll bounce it before we read the third page.
8. No stories that have been published somewhere else.
We don't buy reprint rights. If your story has already been published somewhere else, don't send it to us. We don't care how obscure or defunct that previous publication was, or how long it's been out of print; we don't want it. Especially if you have previously self-published the story: we don't want it.
The one exception to this rule is if the previous publication was not in English, but in this case, please query first. Do not (as has been done) send us your entire catalog and ask us to pick the stories we want.
9. No resubmissions of stories we have already rejected.
We do in fact track all submissions we receive and will recognize a rejected story if it shows up in our inbox again. The two exceptions to this are if we’ve asked you to make changes and resubmit the story, or if we’ve said we can’t use the story at this time but suggested a time when we’d like to see it again. We do keep close track of all rewrite requests we send, though, so trying to pass an unsolicited resubmission off as a requested rewrite never works.
10. Persistence is a virtue, but...
If you’re writing a series of stories set in the same world and starring the same set of characters, and we’ve already rejected the first six stories in the series, the odds of our liking the seventh are pretty slim. Why not send us something else for a change?
11. No more stories written to work out your personal psychological and/or sexual problems.
Your therapist may say your story is fascinating, but he's being paid a lot of money to listen to you babble about your genitals.
12. No more stories written as catharsis to deal with your personal relationship problems.
That story you wrote to tell the whole world what a b!tch or @$$hole your ex- is, which optionally includes the prolonged torture-porn scene in which you take vicarious revenge? Send it somewhere else.
13. No more near-future Christian fascist dystopias.
Pardon the expression, but Lordy, we’ve seen a lot of these lately, and they’re beginning to strike us as more ludicrous than nightmarish. You can’t get a bunch of Christians to cooperate long enough to run a church rummage sale, much less an oppressive police state.
14. No more religious tracts or screeds.
That story you wrote either to tell everyone how wonderful [creed of your choice] is, or else how evil and stupid the people who believe in [other creed of your choice] are? Send that somewhere else. This includes "wrapper" stories, which are stories only in the sense that they introduce a fictional character who then proceeds to deliver a sermon or screed on behalf of the author. A sermon delivered by a sock-puppet is still a sermon.
15. No more political tracts or screeds.
That story you wrote to make a straw man in the image of those [brainless liberals | heartless conservatives | dangerous libertarians | whatever], just so that you could then have the pleasure of beating the stuffings out of it? Send that somewhere else, too.
Exception: however, if you want to send me stories set in oppressive near-future socialist or communist dystopias, you’ll get no arguments from me. Personal experience. H. L. Gold had his agoraphobia. I have my equivalent.
16. No more thinly disguised fanfic.
If your epic space opera demonstrates that you've watched every episode of every Star Trek series ever broadcast and yet clearly never had a single original thought about what it might actually be like to live in a space-faring civilization, you'll get a form rejection.
Likewise, we see a fair number of allegedly "hard military SF" stories that seem to be not so much stories as blow-by-blow transcriptions of the author's latest romp through Fallout: New Vegas. To be honest, these kinds of stories are about as exciting as reading a play-by-play of a golf tournament.
17. No more rewrites of old Twilight Zone scripts.
Does this really still need to be said? Apparently so.
18. Mind the pandering.
Many great literary careers have begun with a reader throwing a book or magazine down in disgust and saying, "Geez, even I can write better than that!" Note that the operative term here is "better than," not "just as badly as." Your readers are giving you a very valuable commodity: their time. You should not reward them by returning contempt for their intelligence.
This list is my no means all-inclusive and we reserve the right to add to it on an as-needed basis. However, this should at least serve as a good starting point for what to avoid. And if you're one of those people who wants to complain that this list puts too many restrictions on your artistic freedom, please write up your arguments in thorough detail and send them to /dev/null.
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