Submission Guidelines
Escape Pod is always looking for quality fiction to feed our listeners. If you’re a writer with a speculative short story that you’d like to hear narrated by one of our very nearly talented performers, we’d like to see it. Probably.
What We Want
EP is a science fiction magazine. We’re very broad-minded in our vision of the genre’s scope; we follow Damon Knight’s definition, “Science fiction means what we point to when we say it.” We’re not going to pin ourselves down and say we’re only looking for space opera, or cyberpunk, or stories with rigorous scientific background. We want all of those, of course; but in a more general sense we want that which evokes a sense of wonder, or fun, or simply makes us think about our own world in a new way.
Escape Pod is not looking for horror or fantasy. Please send horror stories to our sister podcast, Pseudopod, edited by Ben Philips; and send fantasy stories to our other sister podcast, PodCastle, edited by Rachel Swirsky. We don’t share our slushpiles, so if you send to one market and we feel it’s appropriate for another, we’ll simply ask you to resubmit over there. No hard feelings if that happens.
We’re primarily interested in two lengths of fiction, which we’ve dubbed (somewhat arbitrarily) “short fiction” and “flash fiction.”
Short Fiction: This is our meat and potatoes, the heart of our weekly podcast. We want short stories between about 2,000 and 6,000 words. Shorter stories would get overwhelmed by our intro and outro segments, and longer stories are difficult to fit into our upper time limit, which is roughly an hour. No, we won’t be counting exact words, so don’t lose sleep over which prepositions to cut. We’ll know if the story’s the right length by looking at it, and “the right length” is a bell curve. The sweet spot’s somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 words, if you insist on a target. If you do have a story that’s longer than 6,000 words, use your own discretion; we’ve run longer stories than that, but be aware that it’s a much harder sell. The longer the story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest. We pay $100 for short fiction at this length.
Flash Fiction: We often podcast short five-to-ten minute “bonus” pieces between our weekly main episodes. For this we’re looking at fiction up to 1,000 words, with a sweet spot at 500 words. Yes, that’s really really short. That’s the point. Our flash pieces are frequently quirkier, more experimental than our weekly features. We pay $20 for flash fiction.
What happens if you have a story between 1,000 and 2,000 words? We’ll make a judgment call, based on whether we think the story would work better as a featured story or a bonus. We’ve occasionally bought one 1,500 word story at the full-length rate and another one at the flash rate. Doesn’t sound fair, but it made sense for those stories. In general, your odds are considerably better if your story’s either shorter or longer than this.
We do not discriminate between previously published and unpublished works. We’re an audio market, and we buy nonexclusive rights, so it doesn’t hurt us if a story has previously appeared in another market. In fact, we encourage new authors to send their work to other markets first, and then send it to us for audio rights after the story has appeared. You’re welcome to give us first dibs on anything you like, but consider: if your story’s good enough for us to buy it, it’s probably good enough to sell to another market first. Why not try that, and get two audiences and two checks?
Content: We are an audio magazine. Our audience can’t skim past the boring parts, and stories with beautiful language at the expense of plot don’t translate well. We’re looking for fiction with strong pacing, well-defined characters, engaging dialogue, and clear action. It can be beautiful too, if you’ve got all those other bases covered, but above all we’re looking for fun.
Humor is highly encouraged. Upbeat, optimistic stories are encouraged. Moody, depressing stories are not rejected out of hand, but we do buy fewer of them. People will listen to these on their way to work, and we’d prefer not to ruin anyone’s day.
We are highly unlikely to purchase stories focusing on rape, incest, child molestation, body mutilation, hate crimes, unsubtle religious or anti-religious propaganda, or current politics. We don’t need the headaches, and frankly, it’s very unlikely that your story is fun in the sense we mean. We will not balk at sexual content or strong language, but if your story is primarily erotic or scatological in nature, it may not be for us. Come back to us when we’ve launched an erotic stories podcast.
Again, above all: fun stories. You can get away with breaking almost any of these rules if the story is fun enough. What’s fun? We know it when we see it.
How We Want It
We accept stories in e-mail, in plain text format, at the address submit@escapepod.org. We don’t want Word files, PDF files, scanned images of a book, or sound files of you reading the story. Messages with any such attachments will get bounced. We will accept messages that are HTML formatted, but if you know how to turn it off, we prefer plain text. Send it from the e-mail address at which you want us to correspond with you; if you give us three e-mail addresses and say “Use this one on Tuesdays, and this one when Neptune is ascendant,” we’ll probably forget.
On the Subject: line of the message, be sure to include the title of the story. Most of our workflow involves bouncing your e-mail message from one folder to another, and we use the e-mail subject to identify the story. A subject like “story submission” doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
In the body of the message, what we want is as follows:
- Your name. (Your real name. The story can have a different byline, and we’ll credit that byline in public, but we need to know who’s legally offering us this story and to whom the check should be written.)
- Your mailing address. (We need this for contract purposes; it will be kept confidential.)
- A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits, and in particular telling us whether this story has been published before or adapted into audio. If there’s anything we need to know about available rights, tell us that too. This section is optional, but it’s helpful for us to have this information if we buy your story and want to know more about you for bio purposes. (Note: When we say “briefly,” we mean your top five or six publications. We have literally had people send us resumés that were longer than the story submitted. This only makes us sigh.)
- The word count of the story, rounded to the nearest hundred words. Don’t go nuts over which word count method to use, or whether to round up or down. We pay flat rate; we really don’t care. We just want a ballpark so we know how long it’ll take to read.
- The title of the story.
- The story’s byline. (Optional if it’s the same as your legal name.)
- The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ for emphasis.
Obligatory Example:
Edgar Poe
203 N. Amity St.
Baltimore, MD 21223
poeman@gmail.com
Skype: Da_R4ven
Dear Sir/Madam:
I would like to submit my horror story "The Pit
and the Pendulum" for your podcast. My work has
appeared in numerous online and print venues
including _The Norton Anthology of Literature_, the
Project Gutenberg Web site (http://www.gutenberg.org)
and _The Simpsons Halloween Special._ This
particular work is in the public domain, and all
rights are available. It has previously been
adapted into a shockingly strange movie by
Roger Corman. Thank you for your time and
consideration.
6200 Words
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
by Edgar Allen Poe
I was sick -- sick unto death with that long agony;
and when they at length unbound me, and I was
permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving
me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death --
was the last of distinct accentuation which reached
my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial
voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate
hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of _revolution_--
perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr
of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period;
for presently I heard no more. [. . .]
You get the idea. This story would probably be rejected by us for a number of reasons, but the e-mail tells us exactly what we need to know. Once again, that address is submit@escapepod.org. Any stories sent to any other e-mail address will be trashed, most likely without a response.
Update: Please, we beseech you in the name of all appropriate deities, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market. Once we’ve responded to your story, you can send us another, but dropping all forty-seven stories you’ve ever written on us at once is not going to put us in a receptive mood.
What You’re Telling Us
This is the annoying (but necessary) legalese. By sending us your story you understand and agree that:
- You are the original creator of the work submitted to us;
- You are the copyright holder of the work;
- You are not prohibited by any prior agreement from the transfer of non-exclusive electronic and audio rights to the work;
- All information in the contact and cover sections of your e-mail is accurate and truthful;
- You accept sole responsibility for any false statements or encumbrances upon rights not disclosed to us.
If we buy your story we’ll send you a contract, and you’ll be bound to all of the above. So if you aren’t willing to agree to it now, you’re just wasting our time, and we have little enough of that already.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering whether you have audio rights to your stories: unless you’re doing work-for-hire for a game company, all reputable SF/F magazines of which we’re aware acquire serial print rights, often with non-exclusive electronic or anthology options. We know of no regular short fiction market that contracts for exclusive audio rights. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen; always check your contracts. We’re just saying we’ve never heard of it.
What We Do With It
Once you’ve sent us your story, we will review it and respond to you via e-mail. Right now our maximum response time is in the vicinity of a month to six weeks. We have a team of volunteers reading on a monthly cycle, so your actual response time depends somewhat on the calendar and luck. If it takes longer than six weeks to respond to you, it probably means your story was promoted a second review round, which is a hopeful sign. If it takes longer than two months, please query.
(UPDATE: As of August 2007, I’ve had to shamefully admit that we’ve fallen way, way behind in our response times. This is the fault of the editor. Currently we’re about four months behind and catching up. Feel free to query anyway if you think we’re taking too long, and hopefully we’ll be able to remove this note from the guidelines soon. Just wanted you to know.)
If we decide we’d like it for our podcast, we’ll send you a contract as a PDF file in e-mail. You will sign it and send it back to us via e-mail (after scanning it), fax, or postal mail. Then we’ll pay you via check or PayPal and start producing.
Escape Pod pays $100 for short fiction and $20 for flash fiction. If we’re receiving sufficient donations or sponsorships to pay more, we’ll pay more. We know how quickly word gets around about SF markets, and we’ll do our best to treat people right.
During the production process we may contact you with questions about the story, its background, or pronunciations. We’ll also ask you for a brief bio, if your cover letter and Web site doesn’t give us enough to say about you. We hope and expect that you’ll be available to help us, as a good performance makes all of us look good. Unfortunately, as everything we do is on a somewhat fluid schedule, we usually can’t give you an accurate timetable of when your story will appear in the podcast. We’ll notify you when it’s up, but not necessarily before.
What the World Does With It
The audio files Escape Pod produces are released under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way. Transcribing it, extracting portions from it beyond fair use, and mashing it up are all prohibited. This license applies only to our audio performance of your work, for which we’ve contracted and paid you. It does not apply to your story itself; you retain your copyright and all rights to any other use of the story.
We’ve had some questions about this from the writing community, so we’d like to make our reasoning clear. We know that Creative Commons licensing is scary to many writers, and it’s certainly a radical break from traditional rights that expire after a period of time. Our take is this: when we create a podcast, we are putting an MP3 file on the Web. That MP3 file is going to get downloaded and copied onto thousands of hard drives, CDs, iPods, and other portable devices across the world. That’s the point. We want people to listen to it. But once you’ve done that, you can’t take that file back. There is no way to delete the file everywhere it exists. There are some highly fallible ways to lock things down, but DRM sucks, and even if we believed in it it’s too complicated for us to implement.
So from a purely practical perspective, we can’t make our content expire. And we can’t stop people from copying our files, nor should we. Given that reality, why not give our listeners to the full legal right to do what’s totally natural for an audio file (copy it, share it with people, and listen to it whenever they want), but make equally clear to them what they can’t do (share the story outside the podcast, or alter it in any way at all)? That’s our reason for the Creative Commons license. We’re not trying to plant a philosophical flag in the ground here; we’re just trying to reflect reality.
We hope you’ll agree with our reasons and choose to share your story with us. If you don’t, then we’re deeply sorry, but we feel it’s better that you know this now, before you make the decision to submit.
Any questions?
Whew! If you’ve read this far, pat yourself on the back. Or get a friend to pat you. You’re amazing. We know it’s a lot to digest, but we’ve had very good luck so far with people submitting exactly within our guidelines. This only shows what brilliant, brilliant people science fiction writers are. (Or perhaps we’re just successful because we flatter.)
If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or criticism (but not stories) send them to our staff at editor@escapepod.org. We’ll do our best to get back to you within a few days.
Thanks very much for your time, and we look forward to reading — and hopefully speaking — what you’ve got!
