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Submission Guidelines

Fiction | Poetry | Non-Fiction | Art | FAQ

Fiction

We are looking for unpublished, engaging stories that pull us in from the start and tell a great tale.

Genres

We accept anything considered speculative fiction. This includes science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and any sub-genres that fall into these categories.

Word Count

  • Subscribers and Australian/New Zealand authors: up to 20,000 words.
  • Non-subscribers and non-AU/NZ authors: up to 10,000 words.

Manuscript Formatting

Please only submit your manuscript as an RTF file. This ensures all our staff can access your story.

Please submit using Modern Short Story Manuscript Format, but remove ALL personal information from your manuscript (i.e., please remove your name, byline, postal address, phone number, and email address from the title page and all headers). We use an anonymous submission system to give all authors a fair chance at publication. The first page of your manuscript should look like this:

Payment

1 cent per word (AUD) with a AUD$20 minimum and a AUD$100 maximum per piece. For flash fiction (under 1,000 words), we pay AUD$10 per piece.*

Every contributor also receives an electronic copy of the issue in which their item appears, whether it’s fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or artwork.

Notes

  • We only accept unpublished stories.
  • We prefer Australian English spelling (-ise instead of ize, for example).
  • We do not accept simultaneous submissions or multiple submissions. This means only one story per author until we have responded with a decision to hold or reject your story.
  • We do not accept serialised submissions, so please don’t ask.
  • Andromeda Spaceways is intended for a wide audience, so we don’t want anything more than M-rated: no gratuitous sex or violence.

*Please be aware that you will be paid based on the number of words in the final product, not what you initially send us. ^

Poetry

Genres

We accept any unpublished poetry that is considered speculative fiction. This includes science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and any sub-genres that fall into these categories.

Word Count

Poetry should be under two pages.

Manuscript Formatting

Please submit using poetry manuscript formatting, but remove all personal information from your manuscript (i.e., please remove your name, byline, postal address, phone number, and email address from the title page and all headers). We use an anonymous submission system to give all authors a fair chance at publication. Please only submit your manuscript as an RTF file. This ensures all our staff can access your story.

Payment

Poetry pieces will be paid at a flat rate of AUD$10.

Notes

  • Poetry must not have been published anywhere else.
  • We accept only one poetry submission from one author at a time. A single file with multiple poems will be rejected.
  • We do not accept simultaneous submissions or multiple submissions. Please do not submit your poem anywhere else or submit another poem to us until we have responded with a decision to hold or reject your poem.

Non-Fiction

Topics

We’re after articles on the speculative genres and their writers, weird science, real science, weird history, straight history, con reports, fads, geekdom etc. We’re somewhat less interested in articles about how to write. We’re going for broad interest, and there are other publications for those.

Word Count

Please keep articles under 5,000 words. We find 3,000 words to be the sweet spot.

Manuscript Formatting

Please submit using Modern Short Story Manuscript Format, but remove all personal information from your manuscript (i.e., please remove your name, byline, postal address, phone number, and email address from the title page and all headers). We use an anonymous submission system to give all authors a fair chance at publication. Please only submit your manuscript as an RTF file. This ensures all our staff can access your article.

Payment

Non-fiction articles will be paid at a flat rate of AUD$10.

Art

If you send us artwork, be aware that every editor has different needs, and so your work might be just the style that one of them wants. Putting it in our gallery means they can see immediately what your style is like, without having to trawl through a heap of websites, and it means you don’t have to keep reminding us that you exist! We also commission new work, so if you want to sell your samples elsewhere, feel free.

Please note, the gallery is password-protected and only available to editors, so your art is safe. We can’t send you a link, but trust us—each entry only says who you are and what you’re prepared to do for Andromeda Spaceways.

Choose a sample painting, if you’re interested in producing cover art, and/or a black and white piece, if you’re keen to do internal art. Samples of your work can be sent as scanned images at screen resolution (96dpi, no more than 300kb per image, please).

Please send artwork to asimeditor[at]gmail[dot]com.

Payment

AUD$100 per cover and AUD$20 per internal piece.

Frequently Asked Questions

Submissions

Formatting your manuscript properly reduces a lot of headaches for us. Please remove all personal information from your manuscript (i.e., please remove your name, byline, postal address, phone number, and email address from the title page and all headers). Please see the following manuscript examples by William Shunn:

These are industry standards, and they will help your story look professional. The story itself … well, that is up to you!

  • For short stories, a maximum of 10,000 words for non-subscribers and non-Australian/New Zealand residents; or, 20,000 words for AU/NZ residents and subscribers anywhere in the world.
  • For poetry, no more than two pages in proper manuscript format.
  • For non-fiction, a maximum of 5,000 words, though we find 3,000 to be our sweet spot.

Spelling

Andromeda Spaceways uses the Australian Macquarie Dictionary. While some leeway is given to country-based spelling and style, each work submitted should be consistent.

Proofread your work. While we are all well aware that typos happen, you should still take every effort to make sure that your submission is as typo-free as you can manage. If it looks like you haven’t taken the time to do even a basic spell-check, your manuscript will not be well received.

Grammar

None of us here at Andromeda Spaceways are Grammar Nazis. Nobody is going to get bent out of shape over a split infinitive or dangling participle provided the story is good. However, there are some things that drive even the most mild-mannered editor to distraction, and chief among these is the incorrect use of homonyms: explicitly, it’s/its, there/their/they’re, and your/you’re. Get it right!

Check out the following links if you need help:

We use RTF file format to ensure all our slush readers and editors can have access to your submission. The Submissions Editor also finds RTF easier to manipulate and prefers to see formatting like italics presented as the author intended, rather than the makeshifts required by plain text.

If you’re sending us sample artwork then save your files in .jpg, jpeg, .gif or .png format. Screen resolution should be 96dpi, with a file size of no more than 300kb.

Please note that your file must not contain any weblinks or URLs.

No, Andromeda Spaceways does not allow simultaneous submissions. Once you’ve submitted your work to us, we keep it until we either accept it for an issue or reject it.

If you would like to submit your work elsewhere, let us know and we’ll release it back into the wild.

We don’t normally want resubmissions. Sometimes, though, we’ll get a feeling of unrealised potential, that the piece could be exactly what we want, but isn’t quite there yet. In those cases, we’ll specifically suggest a resubmission after reworking, along with providing, as usual, the heartfelt, educated and above all free advice of our submissions team. Note that if we do suggest that a reworking might be useful, we’d want to see the resubmission actually reworked. This may come as something of a surprise, but we’re firm on the matter. In short, you’ll know if we think it might be worth a resubmission, because we’ll tell you.

We do not accept multiple submissions. Whether it’s a short story, poem, or piece of non-fiction, we accept only one story per author until we have responded with a decision to hold or reject your story.

Selection Process

Stage 1

When your story arrives, it is sent to a random reader who gives it an initial assessment.

Stories that are approved are sent to other readers, each of whom also gives it a score. If the story is given a good enough score, it is forwarded to our editors. We rely on unpaid readers who lead busy lives so occasionally it can take up to three months. Please be patient at this time.

At this stage, you will receive advice that your story has been accepted or rejected. A rejected story will be returned with any reader comments attached. An accepted story will be put on hold for selection by our editors.

Stage 2

By this stage, the story is considered good enough to go into an issue of Andromeda Spaceways Magazine (ASM). Editors of upcoming issues then select the stories they want to publish. With the number of submissions we receive, only about 1 story in 20 makes it into print. If your story is really good we may want to hang on to it for the next issue if it doesn’t make it into the current issue.

Sometimes it can be a few months before we can give you a definitive decision to publish or release your story. Please take a delay at this stage as a compliment that your story is really good and we’re working hard to see whether we can fit it in somewhere. If you would like to submit your story or poem somewhere else you can always withdraw in our Submissions Manager.

If no editor selects it for an issue, the story is reluctantly released and sent back to you (again, possibly with reader comments attached).

Stage 3

If your story is selected for publication, you will be contacted to confirm you still wish to be published in ASM. From this point onwards you’ll be working with one of our editors to make your story the best it can be, all ready to be published.

Arbitrary? Yes, it is. It is possible that your story could hit a reader on a bad day and get rejected out of hand. It’s possible it could be the best story ever written, but languish in the submissions pool for two months and eventually be dropped because it doesn’t happen to fit into any of the upcoming issues. That, unfortunately, is life in the world of publishing. We do our best, though. The important thing to remember is that every other magazine goes through some variation of this process. We’re just more open about it than most.

Don’t worry, rejection doesn’t mean we hate you. So far, for every story we select, we reject around 100. Apart from questions of quality, there is a limit to how many stories we can print. What is more, each story is sent to the readers with no author details attached, so every story has to stand entirely on its own merits. There are all sorts of reasons a story might be rejected, ranging from the fact that the author does not know how to write basic English, through to “this is great, but we’ve already got a shapeshifting transvestite elf story in this issue”.

If we do reject your story, take a look at the reader comments, take them on board and then apply them to your next piece of work. Learning from your mistakes means that the next time you submit a story to us, it’ll be better!

You can also check out these helpful resources:

The comments are supplied because we here at Andromeda Spaceways are bending over backwards to make our magazine as writer-friendly as possible. We make no guarantees as to the usefulness or fairness of the reader comments, or that any will be supplied at all.

The readers are all unpaid volunteers and we are not a critiquing circle. (If you’re looking for one, we strongly recommend Critters.) The overwhelming response to our practice of supplying reader comments has been enthusiastically positive, but once in a very long while somebody writes back to complain that we got it wrong.

However, sometimes the comments have clearly been attached to the wrong story—it happens. In that case, let us know and we’ll be quite happy to sort it out.

Rights and Payment

Andromeda Spaceways buys First Australian Serial Rights and limited electronic rights for four months.

Andromeda Spaceways Magazine is available in both eBook (MOBI & EPUB) and PDF (printable) formats. Contracts ask for limited electronic rights, rights to re-publish works as well as rights to include a work in an annual “Best of” anthology.

More information is available on request.

Short Fiction: 1 cent/word (AUD) with an AUD$20 minimum and $100 maximum per piece.

Poetry and Flash Fiction (under 1000 words): AUD$10 per piece.

Non-fiction: AUD$10 per article.

Artwork: AUD$100 per cover and AUD$20 per internal piece.

Every contributor also receives an electronic copy of the issue in which their item appears, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, artwork or poetry.

* Please be aware that you will be paid based on the number of words in the final product, not what you initially send us.

Submission Troubleshooting

This usually occurs because you’ve saved the RTF from MS word and it’s included unnecessary formatting information, like fonts and themes. in MS Word, before saving, do the following:

  • Ensure that you only use 12 pt Times New Roman.
  • To ensure you’ve got all the text in the correct font, use CTRL-A to select everything and choose the appropriate font.
  • Make sure you aren’t using any large and complex themes. Under the Design menu select “Office” from the Themes drop down in the top left corner.

This is usually caused by punctuation characters in your filename. WordPress either does not submit your uploaded file with the form or it hangs. Please ensure that your filename only contains letters, numbers, spaces and full stops.