Paying market, Western Lit Online, short stories/ poems, pays $0.05 per word/ $1 per line for poetry

We are currently accepting submissions for upcoming issues. We pay 5 cents/word for short stories and are looking to publish approximately 7500 words per issue. We also accept poetry submissions and will buy them as necessary to fill the issue space, paying $1/line.

Our short story pay rate is industry standard and, in time, will count as a requirement for writer's groups, such as the Science Fiction Writers of America (we need to be publishing for a year before consideration).

We also are looking for art submissions, but only will purchase 1 large piece per month (i.e., a cover piece). We will pay a flat $50 for this. Smaller submissions can be sent in, and if we have a story or other piece that matches we will purchase the publish rights for small art at $20.

What We Look For

Western Lit Online is primarily interested in authors from the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, and Alberta) and stories set in the Pacific Northwest. We are primarily interested in short stories, of up to 10,000 words. What is more important to us, though, than the author's origin or setting is strong story and writing. We'll bend the rules a bit for an excellent piece of fiction. So, don't let our guidelines dissuade you from submitting -- the worst we can do is say "No thanks".

We are interested in any genre of story, except erotica. We prefer stories that can be read by a wide age range of audience, although we will not reject a story simply on the basis of explicit language, excessive violence or gore. As long as they are integral to the story being told, these items do have their place.

How to Submit

You should use our submission form to send us your story. We can only accept documents in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice format. Any other format will be automatically rejected by our system.

Payments and Rights

We pay 5 cents/word for your work. For this payment, we are buying first digital rights to the work. This means we can publish the work on the Web (in HTML format), as a PDF, or in any other digital format. After we have published the work, the author can publish the work in any other digital form.

The payment also grants us a non-exclusive one-time right to publish the work as part of an anthology in a hard copy format. No date has been set as to when this may occur.

All other rights remain to the author.

More information here.