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Submission guidelines

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

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.

We (the editorial staff at Hemelein) have the final authority regarding acceptance or rejection of any submissions.

Contents:
    What We Want
    What We Don’t Want
    Story Length
    Submission Format
    Short Story Submissions
    Poetry Submissions
    Essay Submissions
    Novel/Short Novel Queries

What We Want in a Story

Hemelein Publications publishes science fiction, fantasy, light horror, detective, crime fiction, and mystery 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, stories that inspire and uplift. They 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We accept story submissions from anyone, even unpublished authors.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 entertains and keeps our interest. Everything else is secondary. If the story entertains, it will help sell itself and people will tell their friends about it.

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 at a “PG” level), or gory violence. We generally don’t publish dystopian, grimdark, darker horror, and dark fantasy stories, especially those that offer no hope. 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 for a specific call for submissions, a response date will always be included within the call. Otherwise, if you submitted a story to Hemelein and you have not heard back from us after 90 days, please contact us.

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.

Please do not submit reprints unless a call for submissions specifically states they are acceptable (many of them do).

Story Length

For anthologies, we specify the acceptable length 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. Please do not submit in any format other than those specified here. 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.

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

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

Short Stories, Novelette, and Novellas

We are not currently accepting unsolicited short-form submissions. Only submissions for a specific call will be reviewed. For submissions for a specific call, please submit the full short story, novelette, or novella as an attachment using our submission form. Be sure to select the appropriate project from the drop-down list.

Poetry

We are not currently accepting unsolicited poetry submissions. Only submissions for a specific call will be reviewed. For submissions for a specific call, please submit the full poem as an attachment using our submission form. Be sure to select the appropriate project from the drop-down list.

Essays

We are not currently accepting unsolicited essay submissions. Only submissions for a specific call will be reviewed. For submissions for a specific call, please submit the full essay as an attachment using our submission form. Be sure to select the appropriate project from the drop-down list.