Submission
The Lemonwood Quarterly is a new literary magazine.
Submission Guidelines
Contest Details and Author Compensation
Writers may submit up to four short stories or plays annually, one submission per quarterly issue. (Please do not resubmit the same piece a second time unless it has been significantly altered.) Every three months, ten stories or plays are selected for publication in that season’s issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly. The authors are awarded a $200 payment, and their story or play advances to the final round in December, for consideration for one of our annual prizes, the $1000 Charlotte Ann Porter Prize for Fiction or the $500 Hononegah Mack Prize for the Best Play.
We respond to all submissions within thirty days of the submission window deadline.
What to Submit
The Lemonwood Quarterly seeks the best English-language short stories and plays we can find. We do not publish poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction prose, book reviews, or interviews. We are looking for superbly written stories and play pieces between 2,000 and 10,000 words.
We especially seek out stories with female protagonists who are well into adulthood. There’s no minimum age requirement, but if your protagonist is not at least over thirty years old or so, it could be difficult for them to carry forward the type of stories we aim to publish. We definitely are not looking for coming-of-age stories. We are excited to showcase stories with protagonists who have already passed through those earlier milestones or hurdles and are at a different point in their lives. Although The Lemonwood Quarterly is especially interested in stories with a female protagonist, that does not mean we are looking for work that focuses on the theme of “being female”.
Who Should Submit
We welcome and encourage submissions from writers of every gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality —including writers without MFA degrees or previously published work, and whose perspectives might be underrepresented in the literary world. Please do not send us work that includes machine-generated or AI text.
How to Submit
We accept submissions via our Submittable listing. Please do not send us emails or hard copies of your manuscripts. An online submission fee of $4 to help cover administrative costs is required to complete your submission.
Submissions are read anonymously, so please do not include your name anywhere on the short story or playscript document.
When to Submit
Our magazine is quarterly, so we are frequently considering new submissions. Our submission period may close if we reach our submissions capacity, so submit early. Please submit only one story or play at a time and wait to hear back from us before submitting again. We aim to respond within thirty days of the submission window deadline. If your story is selected for publication, please wait until the issue with your piece has been published before submitting another story.
Simultaneous Submissions to other Publications are fine, but please let us know and withdraw your submission immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
All work should be previously unpublished in any form, including online, in blogs, or in print.
Translations are accepted. Translators should acquire translation rights from the copyright holder before submitting. If selected, the translator will be asked to provide a copy of the original work, the author’s name, the work’s original title, a note stating the original language in which it was written, as well as a short bio about the author.
Revisions
Please send us your work in its final fully edited form. We do not have the staff available to consider individual revisions. If you feel you must revise, please withdraw your submission and let us know that you will resubmit an edited version.
Sign up for our free newsletter!
The best way to know what kind of short stories and plays The Lemonwood Quarterly publishes is to read the magazine! We encourage all authors and playwrights to sign up for our free newsletter of announcements. You will receive our Calls for Submission right into your inbox and will be notified when a new issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly is published. Our magazine is free for all readers, so sign up today!
We send out around two announcements a month. Our list of subscribers is never shared.
Submissions Link
Thank you for sharing your work with us. We are excited to read what you have written!
Click on the above button to our Submittable listing, where you will upload your story or play. You will need to have a Submittable account to submit your work; Submittable accounts are available free of charge.
Please check your information carefully and make sure you are uploading the correct document. Once paid, the $4 submission fee cannot be refunded.
Thanks again for submitting your writing to The Lemonwood Quarterly!
Follow-up Details
After selection for publication:
- Authors will receive a contract upon acceptance, and payment upon publication in the quarterly issue. The Lemonwood Quarterly’s publishing agreement includes the following rights: First worldwide electronic publication rights; non-exclusive online rights on our website, and other limited rights. Copyright is retained by the author. Authors are free to resell the work, although we do ask for a 90-day exclusive from our first publication of the work. We ask that whenever an author reprints a piece that first appeared in our magazine, The Lemonwood Quarterly is given acknowledgement as the work’s original publisher.
- Contributing authors will be featured on our website and will have the opportunity to submit an updated bio, a photo, and any links to their social media.
- In order to draw more readers to the terrific stories, every issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly is launched with a publicity campaign, and every published story is individually promoted on social media. To spread the word about all the great stories, we request that authors participate in the social media promotion to the best of their ability.
- We nominate as many pieces as we can to annual literary prizes such as The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Award and The Best American Short Stories.
- All stories published by us in the calendar year are automatically entered for consideration for the $1000 Charlotte Ann Porter Prize for Fiction.
- All dramatic pieces published in The Lemonwood Quarterly in a given calendar year are automatically entered in the running for the $500 Hononegah Mack Prize for the Best Play.