Submission Guidelines

Hello! Please note that all general submissions are currently CLOSED until further notice (most likely permanently, though do stay tuned for results from our first contest). Obviously this is no reason not to compose dozens of pieces inspired by the guidelines below, but you’ll want to submit them somewhere else.

Please read all of our guidelines before submitting. If you don’t, we’ll know.

TO SUBMIT: Send one to three pieces of unpublished fiction/poetry/words of no more than 30 words each to safetypinreview [at] gmail [dot] com. The 30-word limit does not include a title. Be experimental, be poetic, be literary, be daring. You have thirty words and a patch of 9″x11″. Fill it up however the hell you want. Play with form, make us a diagram, a pi chart, whatever, just keep the limitations in mind (a guy with an unsteady hand painting on a patch).

(Work that’s appeared on your personal website or Twitter profile is just fine with us.)

A note about poetry: because of the limitations of the patch, it’s difficult for us to paint poems that are super-lineated or many lines long, because they just don’t fit. Prose-poems work much better. Just keep the medium in mind. Look at past issues to see if your piece would actually, physically fit before you send it to us.

Paste the text directly into the body of the email; please do not send attachments unless you have terrifically complicated formatting (which is exciting). Include a bio of no more than thirty words that we can publish on the site along with your story if it’s accepted, with links if appropriate.

Por favor, no simultaneous submissions. We have a quick turnaround time, and it’s worth the short wait.

You may also see what you can glean from the interview with our curator conducted over at Six Questions For….

RESPONSE TIMES: should be no more than two weeks. If you haven’t heard back from us after a month, please send a follow-up query to safetypinreview [at] gmail [dot] com. After we’ve finished scrutinizing your submission and you’ve received a response of acceptance/rejection, please wait at least two weeks before submitting again, for our sake as well as that of your fellow writers. Violators of these policies will be summarily rejected, with gusto.

Oh yes, and do report your response times to Duotrope, because it is not only valuable, it is invaluable.

PAYMENT: $1.00 per accepted piece, via Paypal. We are young, and have virtually no money. What pennies we do manage to scrounge up invariably go towards buying fabric paint, cloth, Italian olive oil, and/or exotic animals, as well as paying rent.

HOWEVER, because we love you, and firmly believe that a writer should be paid something for their work, if only a token amount, we will pay $1.00 per story. Or, alternatively, you could donate the money back to us in exchange for good karma and knowing that you’re helping to keep us afloat. We’re paying because we want to, not because we can afford it.

Otherwise, the reward is exposure, fame, undying gratitude, adoration from legions of fans, and the opportunity to see your writing in a kickass new medium. We will shamelessly promote you and your work in conversation with strangers and all over the interwebs. We’re very loyal people. Additionally, your work will be featured on the front page of the site for at least a week, after which it will be archived online until we are all dead, and probably long after.

Periodically throughout the week your issue is featured, we’ll post Action Shots – photos of your story being worn in public by one of our operatives.

After your story is published here it’s yours to do with what you like, but it would be nice if you told everyone it was here first. Additionally, if things go well, maybe someday in the distant future we’ll put together some kind of awesome anthology, so we retain rights to that as well. But who knows. We’ve only just begun.

Any reader of the magazine is welcome to become an operative, and wear a story around for a week. Take a look at our list of operatives, and if you’re interested in joining the ranks, send an email, as always, to safetypinreview [at] gmail [dot] com.

OK. Ready? GO.

Thank you for visiting the SAFETY PIN REVIEW. Now send us some work and blow us away.

Love,

Us