Cast Macabre is temporarily closed to MOST submissions!
We are closing temporarily in order to catch up on our backlog of submissions, and to move over to a more advanced submissions system. This is being done in an effort to improve our response times going forward. The show itself is still running. Please follow us on twitter to keep up to date on when we re-open. The original guidelines are still below for your reference.
Special Notice to HWA members
We are still open to submissions to HWA members. This is mainly because of our inclusion in a recent HWA newsletter, and our on-going attempt to foster a special relationship with the association. I'd like to re-iterate here that we are usually open to everyone, and keen to give younger writers a break, but we've chosen to temporarily close to general subs because of the reasons stated above. It's not a permanent members-only club!
Cast Macabre is usually open to submissons for short length and flash fiction, and poetry. Stories longer than 4,000 words or so take over twenty minutes to read, which is about our limit, but if the story is good we may make an exception. Flash fiction (1000 words or less) will be read in our special flash episodes, you'll be credited and will get the usual author bio after the story instead of in the intro. We like short, dark, poetry, which we sometimes use on its own in a special episode, or as an appetiser before our main features in regular episodes.
Cast Macabre is a horror fiction podcast, but we don't see horror as a genre, more as an effect. Your story should induce fear in the reader, or hold a light up to the darker sides of human nature. But if the story's just a gratuitous description of violence with no point, or features a despicable character that doesn't get his or her comeuppance, that's not what we're after. Horror stories should still be morally satisfying. Stories do not require a speculative or supernatural element, but we do like weird.
Response Times
When you submit you'll get an auto-response, just to let you know that we received your story.
Writing Guidelines
We like a proper narrative structure and a unique prose style not laden with cliches and overworn idioms, but ultimately, you're the writer, you know what works and what doesn't, so we'll trust your craft.
We accept reprints, as long as we're allowed to use them. You may find that you can sell a story for more elsewhere first, so we encourage you to try that before coming here, but we most certainly do not value reprints more. The story is all that counts.
Payment
At the moment we are are only able to pay a flat rate of £5 for stories. Most of the time we'll pay £5 for flash and longer works of poetry too, but at only at our discretion. If the work is exceptional, and in order to bring our audience great fiction, we will occasionally pay higher rates. As our audience grows we will be able to increase these payments. We believe authors should be paid for their work, and we'll try our best to support and help them. By encouraging people you know to come to the site and join in, you'll be increasing your future chances of being paid more. Payment on acceptance, by PayPal only.
Effective from 17th June 2010 we require all our authours to sign a One-Time Rights contract upon acceptance, entitling us to use your story as an audio reading in one episode of Cast Macabre, which will be available for free download indefinitely.
Cast Macabre is open to new writers, we are looking for new talent and original stories. We also occasionally run public domain classics.
Cast Macabre runs a very infrequent subscribers-only newsletter featuring author interviews, so we'd appreciate it if you agreed to be interviewed over email upon acceptance. We encourage our authors to promote their stories on our fan site and be involved once the episode is out. This is the 21st century, and now authors are expected to do their own promotion; we'll help you with that.
How to submit
Send an email to editor at castmacabre dot org from the account you want to use as your primary contact address.
Subject:
Submission: story title, author, word count
Body:
- Anything you'd like to say , including relevant credits and awards.
- Author byline (i.e. by Edgar A. Poe, your byline may differ from your name)
- Plain text of story pasted into mail
Cast Macabre is licensed under a