Fiction submissions are open April 15, 2024 to May 15, 2024 for our themed issue on “Point of View”.
Who can submit
khōréō is dedicated to diversity and amplifying the voices of immigrant and diaspora authors and artists. We welcome, but do not require, a brief description of the author’s identity in their cover letter.
We invite you to submit if you identify as an immigrant or member of a diaspora in the broadest definitions of the terms. This includes, but is not limited to, first- and second-generation immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, persons who identify with one or more diaspora communities, persons who have been displaced or whose heritage has been erased due to colonialism/imperialism, transnational/transracial adoptees, and anyone whose heritage and history includes ‘here and elsewhere’. We especially encourage BIPOC creators who identify as the above to submit their work.
When reading submissions, we take in good faith that you identify as an immigrant or member of a diaspora as described above. If you still aren’t sure if you should submit, please email contact@khoreomag.com.
We kindly request individuals who do not identify as such to support the magazine by reading our stories, subscribing, and helping spread the word instead.
What we want
We are looking for short speculative fiction under 5,000 words. Because we are a young journal, we have a stricter budget and therefore prefer stories under 3,500 words.
As a new magazine, we’re still finding our identity: therefore, please don’t self-reject because you’re not sure if your work is a good fit. We won’t know until we see it, so please give us a chance to look!
Please submit stories through our Moksha system. Please submit based on length — stories ≤1,500 words should go into our flash queue, while stories 1,501-5,000 words should go into the short story queue. Writers may submit one story each to the Flash and Short Story queues every submission period.
Please format your story using the Shunn modern manuscript format (details at this link: https://www.shunn.net/format/story/). Writers may omit their mailing address for submission, but accepted stories will require a mailing address for our contracts.
4.4 ISSUE THEME: POINT OF VIEW
“[I]f we went to Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, everything we might see there would take on the same aspect as the things we know on Earth. The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be […].”
– Marcel Proust, translated by Carol Clark
Our theme for Issue 4.4 is “Point of View”. We are looking for unusual, unexpected, and uncanny takes on POV!
Submissions for fiction written in or translated into English will be open from April 15, 2024 to May 15, 2024.
Some areas we are especially interested in:
- Unreliable narrators
- First-person plural
- Second-person plural
- Experimental takes on third-person POV
- Non-human / more-than-human POVs with horror or ecological elements
Several stories whose use of POV the editors enjoyed include: The Last Will and Testament of the Last Elder by Chiara Situmorang, A Song for Sleep by Bora Chung and Anton Hur (translator), How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga by S. M. Hallow, Gordon B. White is creating Haunting Weird Horror by Gordon B. White, and This Village by Eugenia Triantafyllou.
This list is not exhaustive, and we are NOT asking for imitations of the stories above. We absolutely welcome stories beyond the above guidelines that attend closely to POV in any genre of speculative fiction.
We would prefer not to see:
- Conventional approaches to an “unfeeling” AI society
- Non-human POVs that are no different to human POVs
- POV equivalent of blackface
What we offer
Payment at SFWA pro rates ($0.08/word $0.10/word).
What we don't want
Please do not send us stories with gratuitous gore or violence; fridging (where a character dies or undergoes pain in service of the protagonist’s story or to serve as character development); overwhelming racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. elements that are not subverted or challenged; clichés; “it was all a dream” endings; stories where a person from a non-marginalized group experiences life as someone from a marginalized background.
We are currently not accepting novelettes or novellas, but hope to expand in the future. We may also consider serialized stories one day.
We do not accept multiple submissions within one category, unsolicited resubmissions, reprints, or AI-generated submissions.
Please do not withdraw and resubmit the same story in one submission window; stories that are caught doing this will be rejected.
Stories over 5,000 words will be rejected without being read. Please don’t try to “trick” us.
Lots of additional, optional information
The remainder of the information may be helpful for those who want more details on our submission process, how to write a cover letter, and more information on content warnings.
Submission Process
1. First round of reading
A First Reader will read the piece in its entirety, then provide a rating out of 10 and an initial recommendation of the story’s potential to the editors.
2. Second round of reading
An editor will review each story, taking into account the reader’s feedback, before finalizing their decision (reject or hold for discussion). The writer will receive a notification at this point once the editor’s decision is made.
This will usually be one of the following:
Rejection
Rejection with an expression of interest in the work/request to submit again in the future
Notice that we’re holding the submission for further consideration
Notice that there’s a technical problem with the submission
Query about you and/or the submission because we need additional context
We endeavor to respond to all submissions within two weeks of each submission period closing.
3. Third round of reading
Stories that are held for further discussion will be shared with the entire editorial team. All editors will read and review the stories in this longlist, and then discuss and make a decision on each piece.
The writer will then receive a notification from us, usually one of the following:
Rejection with an expression of interest in the work/request to submit again in the future
Request to revise & resubmit (usually with substantial feedback offered in the letter or in conversation)
Provisional acceptance requesting specific edits and/or additions
Acceptance, possibly with some suggestions for edits
4. Final decisions and publication process
Once the writer has formally accepted our offer of publication, we provide a contract and an overview of the publication process.
This will include:
A short editorial process to clarify any outstanding issues
Author approval of copy edits
Author communications with the audio department on casting and audio preferences
Author communications with the editor and art director on spot art
All stories go through these steps and no changes are made without the author’s input and approval.
5. Notes
We usually receive ~400 stories per submission period, and about ~80 stories make it to the longlist. As we only publish ~5 stories per issue, there are often many stories we love that we have to pass on, but we will always want to see more work from you in the future!
If you made a truly horrific mistake (like, you submitted the wrong file), reach out to eic@khoreomag.com when you make the discovery and we’ll figure out if there’s a way to make things right.
A typo does not count as a horrific mistake; we haven’t rejected a single story because of a typo. Realizing you could have rewritten a few sentences or added/killed a paragraph does not count as a horrific mistake either, and stories that are accepted go through a revision process; however, please make sure your story is ready and final before submitting it.
Cover Letters
Cover letters aren’t mandatory, but there are a few things that are really helpful for us to see from you.
- Author bio: Tell us a bit about yourself! This can include, but is not limited to, your identity; past sales; inspiration for the piece or particular qualifications for writing it (e.g., if you are an internationally renowned chess player and your story is about chess, tell us!).
- Submission status: If the piece is a simultaneous submission, please let us know in your cover letter and withdraw the piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. Being a simultaneous submission won’t impact our consideration of a piece.
- Content warnings: Please include content warnings in your cover letter and in the text of your piece. Content warnings will not impact whether or not we accept your piece; we’ve published some really dark stories.
- Genre: Please include the general genre of the piece in your cover letter (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc.); First Readers can then see whether they are best suited to read the piece according to their preferences. Submissions that omit this won’t be penalized — it’s just a little more convenient for our team. 🙂
- Feedback preference: We can’t provide feedback on every piece we receive, but we try where we can. If you do not want feedback, please let us know in the cover letter! We’ll respect your wishes.
If you are still unsure what a cover letter looks like, that’s okay! Here are several cover letter templates that you can refer to: How to Write a Cover Letter by Kel Coleman and Cover Letter Guidelines by Strange Horizons. We’re happy to see cover letters formatted according to their advice!
Content Warnings
If your story requires a content warning, please include a brief description below the title of your piece as well as in your cover letter. In addition, please check the box indicating that your story has content warnings on the submission form. Including content warnings will not negatively impact your chances of getting accepted—in fact, noting them where they are warranted actually helps your chances, since that means we can get the story to the right First Reader!
If you’re not sure if your story requires content warnings, it’s better to err on the side of caution. We’ve included a list below for some ideas of what could constitute a content warning, so just flip through it and see if your story contains any of the terms.
If you are fundamentally against the concept of content warnings and refuse to include them on principle, then we are not the right venue for you and we wish you the best of luck submitting your work elsewhere.
- Sexual Assault
- Abuse
- Child abuse/pedophilia/incest
- Animal cruelty or animal death
- Self-harm and suicide
- Eating disorders, body hatred, and fatphobia
- Violence (specifying graphic, against children, domestic violence, etc. is helpful)
- Pornographic content
- Kidnapping and abduction
- Death or dying (specifying death of a parent, child, etc. can be helpful)
- Pregnancy/childbirth
- Miscarriages/abortion
- Blood
- Illness (e.g., cancer, seizures)
- Mental illness and ableism
- Racism and racial slurs
- Sexism and misogyny
- Classism
- Hateful language directed at religious groups (e.g., Islamophobia, antisemitism)
- Transphobia and transmisogyny
- Homophobia and heterosexism
What we ask for
At a high level, we ask for:
- Non-exclusive, non-assignable, non-transferrable first-world English-language rights to publish in digital, ebook, and print
- Right to republish in an anthology of stories that have previously appeared in the magazine within 24 months of initial publication in our magazine
- Nonexclusive, non-assignable, non-transferable license to archive the story on our website for at least 36 months
- Nonexclusive right to record audio and share it on our website for at least 36 months
Any rights not granted explicitly to us by the contract are retained by the author.