Standard Submissions

Guidelines for the STANDARD STORY SUBMISSION category:

We are interested in reading your original, unpublished short stories!

We don't publish stories for children, I'm sorry.
It's fine to submit the same story to different categories; competition submissions are automatically also considered as standards.
When we accept a story for publication, we are purchasing first-publication rights. (After we've published it, you can include it in your own collection.)

To make a submission:
Please send your work via our new online submission procedure. It's easy, will save you postage and paper, and is much easier on the environment. Just click the yellow Submissions button above to get started!

Dates:
The category will be open to submissions for one full month, from the first day through
midnight (Pacific time) of the last day of the month. To check status of your story at any time,
log in at www.glimmertrainpress.com and click on My Submissions.

January. Results by April 30.
April. Results by July 31.
July. Results by October 31.
October. Results by January 31.

Reading fee:

$0 per story.

Payment for accepted stories:

$700, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 10 copies of that issue.

Other considerations:

Open to all writers.
Stories not to exceed 12,000 words.(No minimum, though it's rare for a piece under 500 words to read as a full story.)
Okay to submit up to three stories per submission month.

We look forward to reading your work!

The strongest temptation is to think, Oh, but they wouldn't be interested in that. But the most ordinary parts of our lives are the very things that tie us to the human condition.
--Barbara Scot

All my life has been an interest in stories, forever and ever and ever.
--Annie Proulx, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

Instead of saying, "I want to be a writer," and then sitting around wishing I were a writer, I've been really trying to throw myself into it.It's taken me a long time to get around to writing. I'm forty-one years old and this is my first collection of stories. I don't think I could have gotten to it much earlier.
--Kevin Canty