We are now looking for poetry as well as fiction! See separate guidelines below:

Fiction Guidelines

Please submit only one story at a time, and please wait at least a month after receiving a response before submitting another story. Any violation of these rules will most likely be met with a severe and perpetual frowning upon and potentially a cursing of your name. Also, a rejection.

Submissions should be less than 4,200 words. We’d prefer an even 4,000, but we know those last sentences can turn into pages. We also love flash fiction.

Include a third-person bio in the ballpark of 100 words with all submissions, ideally at the end of your story.

If you don’t receive a reply from us within twelve weeks, feel free to send a follow-up query to info at jerseydevilpress dot com.

Please, for the love of God, proofread. A typo we can understand, but a complete and utter lack of the basic tenets of grammar is an affront to human decency. Make no mistake, we will reject you – quickly, and with extreme prejudice – if you don’t know how to work a set of quotation marks.

Any submissions sent via email will be deleted unread.

Simultaneous submissions are cool. We’re also down with reprints, especially if the story has only appeared in print before. Just make sure to tell us it’s a reprint and where and when it previously appeared. We don’t accept stories that are currently available online elsewhere. If it’s already up on one site, it seems a bit greedy to us to have it on ours too.

Speaking of greedy, we can’t pay you. We’re sorry. We’re even poorer than you are.

If you’re jonesing for even more rules, or if you just want a leg up on topics that will really get our engines revved, we have prepared more detailed submissions info than you could ever possibly imagine.

Poetry Guidelines

Submit up to 100 lines* of poetry (excluding titles and spaces) in a single file. It can be one long poem or several short poems, as long as the total line count is 100 or less. Please wait at least a month after receiving a response before submitting more poems.

We like metrical poetry and traditional forms. Rhyming is okay if it’s clever. Free verse and prose poems should demonstrate an awareness of sound and have vivid imagery. Weird, funny, dark, lyric, narrative—it’s all good.

Please refrain from sending poems with wonky-ass formatting. If it can’t be left-justified, we can’t publish it.

Simultaneous submissions are fine. If you need to withdraw a single poem from a batch, please send an email to info [at] jerseydevilpress [dot] com indicating which poem is no longer available. No reprints.

*If prose poems are your thing, send 1-3 and give us the word count (instead of the line count).

Bonus hint: we love haiku and all speculative derivatives (scifaiku, horrorku, etc.), especially when they follow Michael Dylan Welch’s tips for writing haiku in English (with some leeway on tip #5—imagination is encouraged here). If you think haiku are chopped up seventeen-syllable sentences, you’ve been missing out on a buttload of awesome poems.

Ready? Submit.

And now, because the founding editor was an incredibly cynical man: Jersey Devil Press accepts no liability arising from the publication of an author’s work. Authors retain copyright on all works. We request one-time electronic rights and, possibly, print rights. We’ll let you know about that last part. Work published in an online issue will be archived indefinitely. Submission to Jersey Devil Press constitutes acceptance of these conditions.