Submission guidelines

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Please note that we are not currently accepting unsolicited submissions. Please check back later for any open submission projects that may come up.

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Our submission guidelines are similar to those used across the industry. Please follow them when submitting (including for anthologies). Any submissions that do not follow these guidelines will be rejected.

What We Want in a Story

Hemelein Publications publishes science fiction and fantasy (construed broadly) anthologies, collections, novellas, short novels, and novels. We especially love space opera, hard science fiction, adventure fantasy, stories of wonder and discovery, planetary romance, humorous stories, and pulpy stories. We also don’t mind a good romantic story if it fits into the above sub-genres or categories.

The stories should be entertaining and not preachy. If you have a theme or moral to your story, that’s fine, but please make sure it doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the story itself. Story is king. We want strong stories with strong and interesting characters. We want stories that inspire and uplift. The stories don’t have to have a happy ending, but they should leave the reader feeling satisfied and hopeful.

We accept story submissions from anyone, even unpublished authors. Our main concern is whether the story keeps our interest and entertains. Everything else is secondary. If the story entertains, it will help sell itself, people will tell their friends about it, and everyone is happy.

What We Do Not Want in a Story

We want our stories to be accessible to a broad audience, old, young, and everyone in between. Therefore, please do not submit stories with explicit sex, explicit adult themes, excessive swearing (please try to keep things about “PG” level), and gory violence. We generally don’t publish dystopian, grimdark, darker horror, and dark fantasy stories, especially those that offer no hope. We (the editorial staff at Hemelein) reserve the right to determine what those are. If your story feels like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, this is probably not the place for it. If you think your story may be on the border with one or more of these, either modify it before submission or submit it elsewhere.

We do not accept simultaneous submissions. If the work is currently on submission elsewhere, please wait for a rejection from them before submitting it here. If you submitted a story to Hemelein and you have not heard back from us after 90 days, please contact us. If you submitted a story for a specific call for submissions, a response date will be included within the call (and it may be different than the 90 days mentioned here).

We do not accept submissions generated by so-called AI systems. If we determine (at our sole discretion) that a submission was AI-generated, it will be rejected and you will no longer be eligible to participate in future projects at Hemelein. Please don’t do that.

Unless specifically mentioned in the call for submissions for a specific project, or unless explicitly requested, we do not accept reprint submissions.

Please do not submit in any format other than those mentioned below. So, no ODTs, PDFs, Google Docs, etc. Doing so will earn you an automatic rejection. We want to spend our time reading your story, not wrangling with the format or trying to access it online somewhere.

Story Length

For anthologies, we specify the length of the story in the call for submissions.

For novels, we prefer stories between 70,000 and 120,000 words, though we may occasionally go slightly below or above that range. We aren’t looking to publish 1200-page doorstops (though we have enjoyed reading them on occasion). Please don’t submit really long works unless specifically and explicitly invited to do so.

Submission Format

We only accept electronic submissions, and only in DOC/DOCX, RTF, or Pages format.

The story should be in standard manuscript format, so double-spaced and in 12pt Courier, Times New Roman, or another very readable font. If you don’t know what that is, read Bill Shunn’s great article. If we can’t read it easily, it will be rejected.

Short Stories, Novelette, and Novella Submissions

Please submit the full short story, novelette, or novella as an attachment using our submission form.

Please make sure your ISFDB entry and/or Wikipedia entry are up to date. We tend to review those to get a better feel for your body of work. Your bibliography may even suggest to us that you’d be great for a future project we have. Who knows?

Novel and Short Novel Queries

     Please note that we are not currently accepting unsolicited submissions.

Before submitting a short novel or novel, please submit a query letter and the first three chapters (the chapters should be an attachment). The query letter should introduce yourself, and it should be in the body of your email. Please include relevant information (such as you being a crime scene investigator in real life if you are submitting a science fiction or fantasy CSI story), but don’t make it a resumé. Please keep this to no more than 300 words. In addition to the 300 words, include your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, the story title, and the length of the story (word count).

If you have been published, include the URLs (http:// addresses) to your website bibliography, your ISFDB entry, and/or Wikipedia entry (if any).

If we are interested in the short novel or novel, we will contact you and request the full manuscript.