Our Process

The Forge Literary Magazine publishes short prose 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 but we only want to read work written by humans. Read more about us here. Questions? Please contact us at editor[@]forgelitmag.com. 

Fiction and Nonfiction

We welcome submissions via Submittable. 100% of what we publish is unsolicited.

Free submissions open on the 1st of each monthJanuary - November. We accept 200 free submissions per month. If there is no free link, we’ve hit our quota. We close tip-jar submissions mid-month.

We strongly prefer stories under 3,000 words but will consider exceptional stories up to 3,500 words. Submissions that exceed our word limit will be declined unread. We love flash and micro but only send one per submission. Genre elements are fine, but please only send us literary fiction/nonfiction.

We consider previously unpublished pieces only.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 work that has been generated with the assistance of AI in any way including using Chat GPT for spelling and grammar checks. We reserve the right to rescind acceptances from any work found to be AI-generated in any way. Works by authors who have sent AI-generated work 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.

Each published piece will be considered for the Annual Forge Editors' Prize which will be awarded to the fiction or nonfiction piece voted by the editors as the editors' story of the year in late December. The prize for this will be $500. 

Former contributors: We will only publish one piece maximum per contributor per year so please wait at least six months before you submit again.

Teachers and mentors of writers in prison can email submissions on their behalf. Contact forgelitmag at google dot com for more info. Prose only, please.

Combatting AI

We believe that AI scraping, absent explicit permission, is theft. In order to protect our contributors’ copyrighted material, we employ a number of countermeasures to discourage AI bots. This is an evolving field, and we can’t guarantee that our site will not be scraped, but we will continue to pursue the latest and best practices for this.

Payment and Rights

We pay, upon publication or sooner, $100 per piece 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 (1) month, after which all rights revert to the author. Authors outside the U.S. must be able to receive payment via PayPal. Please note that our acceptance to publication time ranges three to four months generally but occasionally longer.

***** 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. *****