Our Process

The Forge Literary Magazine publishes one prose piece per week selected by a rotating cast of editors. Each submission is read anonymously. If a story is chosen to move forward, it is read by our Editors of the Month who make the final decisions on the stories they receive. Since we are a diverse, international group of writers, our tastes and styles are wide-ranging. Read more about us here. Questions? Please email us.

Fiction and Nonfiction

Free submissions open on the 1st of each month. If there is no free link, we’ve hit our quota. We occasionally close tip-jar submissions to catch up with reading. (Exceptions include September, when we run our contest, and December, when we are closed.)

We prefer stories under 3,000 words but will consider up to 5,000 words. We love flash and micro!

We consider previously unpublished pieces only.

Simultaneous submissions are encouraged! Withdraw via Submittable if accepted elsewhere.

We will only consider one submission from you at a time, and no more than one submission a month to the free category. You may send one additional piece per month to our tip-jar category.

We read anonymously, so do not put your name anywhere in the file. Please double-space your document for readability.

We do not consider AI-generated work. We reserve the right to rescind acceptances from any work found to be AI-generated. Works by authors who have sent AI-generated work in the past will be deleted, unread.

Literary excellence is our only criteria. We are open to all genres and voices, and stories with any background, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual or personal identity from all over the world.

We work hard to respond quickly to all submissions. Please wait four months to inquire about the status of your submission.

Please don’t withdraw and re-submit if you upload the wrong document, notice a typo, or forget to remove your name. (It will take away a free sub from another writer.) Use the “Messages” tab in Submittable to let us know and we will make your submission editable. Minor typos will not prevent us from accepting excellent work; we work with writers to copyedit after acceptance.

Former contributors: Please wait at least six months before you submit again; we only publish one piece per contributor per year. Contest winners are exempt from this policy.

Payment and Rights

We pay, upon publication, $100 flat regardless of length. We request exclusive  worldwide English language rights to publish in the Forge Literary Magazine, an online journal, for a period of one month, after which all rights revert to the author. Authors outside the U.S. must be able  to receive payment via PayPal.

***** If you don't see the free submission link, that means we have reached our limit for the month. We will reopen at the top of each month, except for September when we have our annual flash competition and December. We occasionally close tip-jar submissions to catch up with reading. *****