Welcome to Read Short Fiction, a place dedicated to shorter works of fiction and their amazing readers. Yes, a reader of short fiction is someone special – someone who wants the essence of life distilled down to its core, savoring it just as one would a gourmet meal that the chef reduced during cooking to concentrate its flavor. You, reader, are welcome here. We want to amass for you a wealth of wonderful stories to entertain and inspire, because life’s too short to read boring fiction.
OUR GOAL
We want Read Short Fiction to be for the short story what so many branded mass market outlets are for celebrity, sports, and political news. On a downslide for years as money flowed towards novels, the short story (and other shorter forms, like flash fiction and other micro-fiction) is ripe for a rebirth in the everyday reading world. Think about it: we’re all busy people — often insanely so — and more and more our world around us is getting faster and more condensed. What, then, makes for better material to read and be entertained by in this always-quickening world: a 300+ page novel, or a 3-10 page short story? We here at readshortfiction are ecstatic that short fiction is making its comeback and will get its day back in the sun, and we want to be there with the bottle of champagne to welcome it home.
FOR READERS – COMMENTS POLICY
readshortfiction.com, as a reader-focused journal, allows readers to comment on the posted stories. We believe reader-response to be the essential part of reading that makes it such a worthwhile activity, but with a voice comes responsibility, and we moderate comments to ensure a fair discussion.
Please observe the following one, simple, easy-to-remember guideline when responding to a story. Ready for it? Here it is: 1. Be nice. Civil discourse is what we’re about. It’s fine to comment that you didn’t care for a story, if you’re substantive and forthright. But rants, flames, and senseless barbs have no place here (but you knew that already).
There’s a sub-guideline to remember (there always is, right?). Ready for it? Here it comes: 1a. Be prudent. We’re not a critique site. If you’re looking for one, we recommend www.urbis.com. If you have sweeping revisions that you’d like to suggest to a story published here, we’re sure that many of our authors would welcome your detailed constructive feedback, and most of them have private contact information in their bios at the bottom of each story.
All comments include a “Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down” feature. Comments are moderated to prevent spam and to preserve the spirit of what we are hoping to build together.
FOR WRITERS – SUBMISSIONS POLICY
readshortfiction.com is dedicated to publishing quality stories of almost all genres (we don’t publish erotica, and, as we are seeking stories designed for a large audience, we will rarely publish work that is too experimental). Word lengths should be between 500 and 3,000 words. Please submit your work as text pasted into the body of an email with the following subject line: “Submission: [Genre]: [Title]: [Author Last Name]“ So, if your name is Joe Smith and you have a mainstream fiction story called “Her Wooden Chair,” your subject line should be “Submission: Mainstream: Her Wooden Chair: Smith”. It is important to specify genre, as it helps us route it to the correct parties. Please use the genres as-categorized on our site (Literary, Mainstream, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Romance, Historical, Action/Adventure, Western). We love humorous stories, but humor is really a tone of one of the primary genres.
Please include a brief bio at the start of your emailed submission, and please paste your story into the body of your email. Please also provide a personal website or other contact information, which will be included in accepted stories.
As we publish an image with each story, if you have a royalty-free image that ties in with your story that you’d like to suggest, please feel free to attach it to your submission and indicate that the image is cleared for rights.
Submissions should be emailed to submissions@readshortfiction.com.
Simultaneous submissions are acceptable (we’re writers, too), but please notify us immediately at the above address of an acceptance elsewhere. Please have only one story under consideration with us at a time.
We will occassionally publish reprints of top-notch, engaging work. Please let us know in your original submission when and where the story first appeared and provide a link to the original, if possible. We link out (when possible) to the rest of your body of work because it’s part of our mission. If someone walks through our door and finds through a link a highly-niched site that meets every need they could possibly want then, well, we consider that a pretty good day at the office for us.
For first-time publications, we are contracting for First North American Serial Rights to your story, along with the right to archive the story on our site indefinitely. As syndication is one way to get short fiction into the limelight, we are also contracting for the right to include your story in syndication feeds such as RSS (your story will always remain attributed to you). For reprints, we are contracting for Second North American Serial Rights, the right to archive, and the right to syndication with attribution.
Here is our current status of submissions: We’ve responded to all submissions sent on or before: 6/13/2010. We don’t have set reading periods and we are always open for submissions, so please submit whenever you’d like.
At the moment, we cannot compensate authors, but we hope that authors consider the marketing we do of their work to be a form of compensation. We run paid advertising on Facebook tied to keywords related to the themes, setting, and other hallmarks of your story. We run these for a minimum period of 2 weeks and (currently) generate between 500 – 1,000 (depends on how well we can target) unique visitors per published story that are coming to the site to read your work. Below is a recent sample of the type of ad that we run and what it looks like behind-the-scenes:
This was the ad for the story “The Man Who Shot Stonewall Jackson.” We attempt to target those who may be interested in the subject matter of the story without much consideration as to whether or not they read short stories today. That’s our mission: bringing short fiction to a wider audience.
ABOUT US
We’re editors (and writers) who want to see the day that people talk about the latest Jhumpa Lahiri short story at the water cooler with as much emotion as they do American Idol. We may be dreamers in that regard, but nothing was ever accomplished without first being someone’s dream.
More specifically, we are:
- Robert Mayette, a writer in several genres, primarily literary fiction, historical fiction and fantasy. Mr. Mayette holds an MA in English Literature and when not working on his own writing, he loves curling up with anthologies, the occassional literary novel, and works of sci-fi and fantasy. By day, he works for the consumer marketing division of a major print media company out of New York.
- Kristi Petersen-Schoonover, a writer of literary fiction and horror. Ms. Petersen-Schoonover holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, where she also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Pitkin Review. You can read more about Kristi at her website.