Submissions

 

We pretty much stick to fiction and poetry, and the occasional essay. To be honest, though, for the most part we don't often publish essays or non-fiction pieces.

Previously published material is fine, as are simultaneous submissions and reprints. The only rights we ask for are exclusive electronic rights to your work for the three months or so it is featured here online. That's it.

We don't have any hard policy, as far as how much work to submit, but we really, really prefer that you stick to sending us a reasonable amount of work, say one longish story, or two or three short pieces, or five or six poems, or some combination thereof.

We're much more inclined to publish work by new authors to Pig Iron Malt, if all other factors are equal. Our main goal is to publish good stuff, so indeed, we've published multiple authors multiple times, and will continue to do so. But we're a bit biased, in the sense that we try not to publish the same author in consecutive issues. Another way of saing this is that we are but a lowly online journal, amongst many online journals. We try our best to spread the paucity of wealth around.

We appreciate all submissions, and try to respond as fast as humanly possible. That said, at any given time we have around two hundred submissions in the hopper. Despite our liberal use of the term "we", our staff is, how shall we say, rather limited. To be brutally honest, the average response time is around 3 months or so. It's frustrating, we know, especially when dealing with electronic data shooting around at the speed of light. But it's the only way we know to be fair, as far as considering all work received equally, and the only way for us to not go insane.

Unfortunately, we receive many more submissions than we can use. We have to send many rejection emails. This sucks, royally. We hate it and whimper like small babies when we have to do it. The only thing worse than receiving a rejection letter is sending them, over and over and over. When we do send them, we try to be creative, and to add an element of humor and fun, to a decidely un-fun experience. Please take it in the spirit it is meant. It does not mean we take you or your work lightly. If anything, it means the opposite, as the easiest thing for us to do would be to send a stock two-line form letter.

We prefer submissions sent as Word attachments, but can deal with submissions that are copy and pasted into emails. We do not accept paper submissions, as we don't see the point. Plus we think trees are cool.

Please send submissions to:

submissions@pigironmalt.com