Submissions are Open

Seaside Gothic is open to submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual collections from 8th April to 14th April 2024!

If you would like to submit a short story, a poem, a piece of creative nonfiction, or a set of images, then we would absolutely love to see it, but please take care to think about whether your submission would fit in with the Seaside Gothic aesthetic and also meet the terms we specify on our Submissions page. If you want to know about our acceptance rates, previous Seaside Gothic submission statistics are available to all paid subscribers.

Written submissions need to be stand-alone and no more than 1,000 words. Visual submissions should be presented as a collection of no less than five and no more than ten images which work together to tell a story or present a theme. Each submission must meet the three criteria that define seaside gothic literature:

1. It is led by emotion, not reason, exploring the human experience mentally and spiritually as well as physically, and is unashamed to embrace the violence of the sea and the wind along with the beauty of the land and the sky and the ever-changing tide.
2. It addresses duality—land and sea, love and hate, the beautiful and the grotesque—to reflect the structures that line the coast, which are both those solidly braced against the fiercest elements and those built from what surrounds in a state of shanty transience.
3. It connects to the edge, living on the seaside either literally or figuratively, and has one foot in the water and the other on solid ground, presenting the juxtaposition of a physical border with open space and a wilderness of water that provides life yet is inconsumable.

To get an idea of the type of work Seaside Gothic is actively seeking, please read some examples from previous Issues.

Seaside Gothic kindly requests first UK publication rights and a three month exclusivity period beginning from the date of publication of the print Issue. Accepted work is published in print (ISSN 2752-7867) and digitally (ISSN 2755-001X), with print copies available to buy from seasidegothic.com and a selection of retailers, and with digital content available online as a mix of free-to-access and subscriber exclusives for those with a Patreon subscription. Seaside Gothic is non-profit and pays for accepted content with rates based on income. There are no submission fees.

Submissions will remain open until midnight Greenwich Mean Time at the end of 14th April 2024. For full submission details please see the Submissions page.