Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Is Accepting Short Fiction and Poems/How To Submit (Pay: $12 – $100)

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is a quarterly magazine dedicated to publishing heroic fantasy — in both prose and poetry.

They are unrepentant in their goal of elevating unapologetic sword and sorcery to a rightful high place.

Submission Guidelines

• The fiction word limit is a soft 10,000 words, although they are willing to serialize at a maximum of 50,000 words over four issues.
• We do not accept multiple submissions for fictions, although you can submit up the three poems with a cumulative maximum of 30 pages.
• Please do not send simultaneous submissions.
•  They prefer stories with historical settings.
•  They accept submissions by email only. Their email address is: editors@heroicfantasyquarterly.com.
• Make sure the subject line of your email follows this formula:
  Submission – [fiction or poetry] – [title] – [your last name].
  For example: Submission – Fiction – Red Nails – Howard
• You can address your submission “HFQ Editors” or “Editors”, they are not too particular about that.
• Do not send attachments unless they ask for them. Paste the first 10 pages of your story or poems into the body of your email.
• It is optional to include a paragraph introducing yourself and detailing your publishing history, and anything you think they need to know about your story. What they really care about is the quality of your story.
• You have about five paragraphs to hook them and 10 pages to impress them, use them wisely.
• Their response time is about 60 days.
• If they like your story they’ll contact you through your email to ask for the rest of your work which they’ll want as an RTF or Word attachment.
• If you’re curious as to what level of violence, sex and/or nudity is too much, just follow what you’d expect to see in movie ratings. An “R” rating is a suitable upper limit.
• They consider reprints by invitation only. Their invitation, not yours.

What They Don’t Want?

• No fan fiction. No thinly-veiled fan fiction. No thinly-veiled real-life revenge fantasies.
• No AI generated content.
• Witty banter usually isn’t.
• Stories that start in an inn are usually out.
• They are not all that interested in stories with vampires, zombies or pirates.
• Keep the backstory under control and reasonable.
• When taking your novel and making a short story out of part of it, try to make it look like it wasn’t clearly cut out of a novel. Your tale must stand on its own.

Deadline

31st August, 2023.

Pay

$25-100 for fiction.
$12.5-25 for short poems, more for longer poems.