Eposic: Guidelines for Fiction Submissions

If you are less than 18 years of age, please ask a parent or guardian to submit your materials to Eposic on your behalf.

Please be sure to read the General Guidelines for All Submissions.

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Eposic is glad to announce the theme for our Summer 2009 anthology, Out of Order. The theme for Out of Order is the same events experienced or observed in different orders by different participants or observers. See below for more details about the theme. Any work of speculative fiction that fits the theme will be considered, subject to the following conditions.

Reading Period: The reading period for Out of Order will not be announced until February, 2009 or later. DO NOT send submissions for Out of Order until the reading period opens. Submissions received outside of the reading period may be deleted without being read or acknowledged. Watch this space for further details.

Word Length: Stories must be 20,000 words or less. Most stories accepted will be 2,000 to 9,000 words—we'll likely accept about a dozen stories in that length range. We will likely accept no more than four stories of less than 2,000 words. We will likely accept no more than four stories in excess of 9,000 words.

Rates: All contributors will receive one softcover print copy of the anthology. Beyond that, rates and royalties depend on the word length of your story; advance cash payments are made in US funds and are made when we have a contract signed by both parties in hand. For stories of 3,000 words or less, payment is 3 cents per word lump sum, with the minimum payment being $10.00. For stories of length between 3,000 and 6,000 words, payment is 2 cents per word plus a share of a 20% royalty (that's 20% of the net amounts Eposic receives from sellers or distributors or from selling direct to consumers). For stories of length over 6,000 words, payment is 1 cent per word plus a share of a 40% royalty. If you are an author of some renown, we might negotiate different terms with you; contact us to start a discussion. We prefer to make all payments via PayPal, but are willing to negotiate other payment methods, including making full or partial payment to you in copies of softcover or hardcover copies of the anthology. We'll also allow contributors to order copies of softcover or hardcover editions of the anthology at a discount off the normal retail price, for promotional or professional use.

Rights Sought: We seek first English language, world wide rights, exclusive rights for one year from contract execution (with exceptions in the contract allowing your story to be published in "Best Of Year" collections at the end of the year in which your story is published by us), and non-exclusive rights for an additional five years after the first year. If you're willing to give us the option to automatically renew the rights to the story for another six years after the first six years expire, we'd like to include that in the contract, but that's something we'll discuss if we accept your story. We are willing to consider reprints, but it's unlikely that we will accept more than two reprints for the anthology, and all other things being equal, we prefer new fiction over reprints.

We seek print and eBook rights to submitted works. We also seek various rights to aid us in promoting the anthology. Such rights include the right to read some or all of your work in public, to make and distribute audio or video recordings of readings of some portion of your work (not more than 1000 words or 50% of your story, whichever is lesser), to allow consumers to preview or search the anthology via standard preview and search mechanisms on bookseller web sites, and to allow your story to be stored and transmitted on our computers and networks and those of our printers, sellers, distributors, and, for eBooks, those of consumers. All this will be spelled out in the contract. Some of it is negotiable.

Contract: For any story we accept, we will require you to sign a contract before we publish the story. The specifics of the contract supersede and replace anything you read on this page. For the contract, we will need certain identifying information from you. This includes your real name, your street address, your birth date, and your citizenship. If you are unable or unwilling to give us this information before signing a contract, please do not submit stories to us. You must be at least eighteen years of age to sign a contract with us (if you are under eighteen, ask your parent or guardian to submit your story to us on your behalf). Please visit our Policy page to read how we handle your personal information. We will not ask for any tax identification number—you will be responsible for paying any taxes associated with the income you receive from your submission. Submitting stories to us does not create an employment or any other legal relationship; you are not performing a work for hire and you are not an employee of Eposic.

And Now About the Theme...

To reiterate, the theme for Out of Order is the same events experienced or observed in different orders by different participants or observers. Here's an example: Henry walks to the store and buys a bag of chips. He goes to the park, where he meets Sarah, and they share the bag of chips. Unbeknownst to Henry, Sarah is a time traveler. Sarah's experience goes like this: She meets Henry in the park and shares the bag of chips with him. Then she goes back in time and is there to see Henry walk to the store where he buys the chips. Within Sarah's stream of consciousness, the events were experienced in the opposite order to how Henry experienced them. The key detail here is stream of consciousness. In reality, Sarah's observation of Henry walking to the store did indeed occur chronlogically before Henry went to the park and shared his chips with her. But within Sarah's stream of consciousness, she experienced the sharing of the chips before she observed Henry walking to the store to buy them. And for purposes of meeting the theme, that's what matters. (Our example is not a compelling story, but it serves to demonstrate the requirements of the theme.)

If we were to write this story, there'd be more going on, and that bag of chips would have some important impact on the story. (Maybe they later got food poisoning from the chips, Henry dies from it, Sarah survives, then goes back in time to try to stop Henry from eating the chips.) It would depend on the story as to whether we wrote the story only from Sarah's point of view, only from Henry's point of view, or from both points of view. Regardless of point of view, however, the story would meet the theme, as long as it was obvious that Henry's experiences and observations of the events differed in order from Sarah's.

As this example illustrates, time travel stories can easily fit this theme. What else might work? We'll certainly consider time travel stories for this anthology, but we're also keen to see what else authors can come up with. Note that your "participants or observers" don't have to be human, but they do need to have some form of awareness, or at least an implied form of awareness.

Perhaps your mind is racing right now with ideas. Before you get too carried away, have a look at our list of DON'Ts for Out of Order:

Paradoxes. This is the numero uno of DON'Ts for Out of Order. If an event happens in your story, you, as the author, need to know the truth of what happened, and you need to stay consistent with that truth throughout the story, no matter how many times the occurrence of that event is described by various characters (or even by the same character, if that character experiences the same event multiple times). The event might be interpreted differently by different characters, or by the same character at different moments within that character's stream of consciousness. But the truth of the event should remain constant in the author's mind, and it might be nice if at some point in the story you shared the truth of the event with the reader. It's fine if characters in the story perceive a paradox, as long as it's not a paradox.

Note that we don't necessarily consider it a paradox if a time traveler visits himself or herself in the past or future; such visits can occur without causing paradoxes if you're careful. For example, far-distant future Sarah could go back in time and secretly observe Henry sharing chips with her. That in itself does not cause a paradox. But if far-distant future Sarah went back in time and stole the bag of chips from Henry before he could go to the park, while in another part of the story you claimed that Henry strolled from the store to the park and shared the chips with Sarah without incident, then you've got a paradox, unless you can explain in-story to our satisfaction why it isn't a paradox, in which case you might get our attention.

Remember, perceived paradoxes are fine. Actual paradoxes are not. It is a fine line, and one you should feel free to approach as closely as you dare! Of course, we'll be the judge of what crosses the line. (In particular, a story where the protagonist saves the day by changing history will likely go straight into the rejection pile. Attempts can be made to change history, but they should all fail.)

Merely Remote Observation. For purposes of meeting the requirements of our theme, we want participants or observers of events to experience or observe events up close and personal, not merely via some special type of perception from a distant place or time. Dreaming, scrying, or otherwise having visions of events in distant locations or in the past or future can occur in your story, but are insufficient to meet the requirements of the theme.

Mind Tricks. Magic, illusions, sleight of hand, misdirection, and hypnosis can be fun when done right, but using them to alter the senses of participants or observers of events won't help you to meet the requirements of the theme. A magical spell for time traveling is fine. A magical spell that makes someone think they traveled through time is not.

That's it for our list of DON'Ts. As for the DOs, please try to give us some new twist. Time travel has been a staple of speculative fiction for some time. If you can come up with a story that fits the theme and doesn't involve time travel, or that gives a different treatment to the concept of time travel, we'll be very interested to see it. Any type of speculative fiction will be considered, and feel free to mix genres. We'd especially like to include at least one or two good horror stories in the anthology. (We realize that good horror isn't easy to write, and we are not interested in stories that substitute blood and gore for true horror.)

So there you have it; your mission if you should choose to accept it. We're giving you a decent head's up on this theme, to give you time to come up with something. We look forward to opening the reading period and seeing what you come up with. When we open the reading period, it might be only for a couple of weeks, so get your story written now!

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Eposic will publish up to four fiction anthologies annually. Each anthology will be based on a central theme, which will vary from one anthology to the next. We only accept submissions that fit the theme for a planned anthology, and only for one anthology at a time. We prefer that you not try to write to a specific word length requirement; tell the story you have to tell, trim out any excess wordage that you can, and submit the result to us if it's less than 20,000 words and fits our theme.

We have specific reading periods for each anthology; please only submit your submission for an anthology during the reading period for that anthology. Submissions received outside of the appropriate reading period may be deleted without being read or acknowledged.

No fan fiction, please.

Themes of future anthologies will be revealed on this page as soon as we decide what those themes will be.

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