With Short Circuit, we’re hoping that each issue will add something new to inspire, delight, move, and challenge readers, transporting them outside of their daily lives, if even for five minutes. Sometimes Short Circuit will be themed; sometimes it won’t. If you submit a piece in April and it isn’t published in the next Short Circuit, that doesn’t necessarily mean it hasn’t been selected. It could simply be that it just wasn’t right for that particular issue.
Please give our editorial team up to 4 months to get back to you about your submission.
Guidelines
- All submissions must be submitted via this submission platform in a copy/paste format. We cannot respond to unsolicited submissions via post or email.
- We welcome submissions from established and emerging writers alike.
- Submissions must be short stories, creative nonfiction pieces and poems of maximum 7,500 characters (spaces included) or children's works of maximum 7,000 characters.
- Regarding Poetry: because the Dispenser paper is only 8cm wide, we advise you to take this into consideration when formating your poems. One line on the Dispenser holds approximately 40 characters, spaces included.
- Works must be previously unpublished in print or online, including on personal blogs.
- Fictional works may be any style or genre, excluding erotica.
- We pay 100 euros for each selected short story/creative nonfiction piece and 50 euros for each poem as an advance payment on the royalties that each author will receive on a yearly basis from the Short Story Dispenser subscriptions.
- Each selected piece will be published as a part of Short Circuit in our Short Story Dispensers around the world and on our website, short-edition.com/en.
- Simultaneous submissions are accepted but please let us know as soon as possible if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere.
- Concerning rights to your work, we ask for:
- the exclusive right to publish your work in our Short Story Dispensers or any similar vending machine.
- the non-exclusive right to use or adapt your work as a basis for audio.
- the non-exclusive right to publish your work via all other media, such as on our website.
- Regarding multiple submissions, we accept:
- up to 3 poems,
- up to 2 children’s works,
- and 1 short story/creative nonfiction piece at a time.
- Please read our Publishing Terms and Conditions here in detail. Submitting your work via this submission platform is an agreement to the full Publishing Terms and Conditions.
- Our response rate could be anywhere from a few days up to four months, depending on the number of submissions we receive.