Short fiction / open door
Submissions.
Sixth Wall Society publishes short fiction and flash fiction.
We like stories that leave something behind. A strange image. A sentence you remember later. A person you can’t quite shake.
What matters most is voice.
What we publish
Strange is welcome.
Short fiction
We’re drawn to outsiders and oddballs, cities and coastlines, weather, animals, memory, night, grief, humour, obsession, tenderness, bad decisions and ordinary lives that have somehow slipped a few degrees out of alignment.
That doesn’t mean your story needs to contain any of those things. Surprise us.
Literary, contemporary, experimental, surreal, strange, dark and genre-adjacent fiction are all welcome.
Ghosts are fine. Spaceships are fine. Something inexplicable standing in the sea is definitely fine.
The easiest way to understand what we like is to read a few stories already published by Sixth Wall Society.
Before you submit
Please send work that is finished.
Proofread it, edit it and send us the version you would be happy to see published.
Please submit one story at a time. There is no fee to submit.
The useful detail
Read this bit too.
Previously published work+
We prefer work that has not previously been published.
If your story has appeared somewhere small, such as your own website, blog or newsletter, tell us when you submit it and we’ll consider it.
Please don’t submit work currently under an exclusive agreement elsewhere.
Simultaneous submissions+
Simultaneous submissions are absolutely fine.
If another publication accepts your story before we respond, congratulations. Just let us know so we can remove it from consideration.
Response times+
We receive a lot of submissions and read every story. Please allow up to one month for a response.
Sometimes you’ll hear from us much sooner. Sometimes the pile becomes a small geological formation.
If you haven’t heard from us after a month, feel free to follow up.
Payment and credit+
Sixth Wall Society is an independent project and is not run for profit. Unfortunately, we are not currently able to pay contributors.
Every published story will carry the writer’s name. We can also include a short author bio and a backlink to your website, newsletter, portfolio or social profile on request.
If our circumstances change, we’ll update our payment policy here.
Copyright+
Your story remains your work and your copyright remains yours.
By agreeing to publication, you give Sixth Wall Society permission to publish the story on the website, retain it in our online archive and use extracts, your story title and its artwork when promoting the story or Sixth Wall Society.
If your work is subsequently published elsewhere, we’d appreciate an acknowledgement that it first appeared in Sixth Wall Society where applicable.
Cover image+
Every Sixth Wall story has a cover image.
When you submit, you’re welcome to suggest an image or visual direction for your story. A link is enough. We recommend looking at Unsplash for photography that can be legally used online. Please don’t send us images found randomly through Google or elsewhere unless you own them or have permission for their use.
You don’t need to find an image yourself. If you leave this blank, we’ll choose one for you. A suggested image isn’t guaranteed to be the one we ultimately use.
AI-generated fiction+
Please don’t submit stories generated wholly or substantially by generative AI.
Using spelling, grammar, research or editorial tools is fine. We’re interested in publishing work fundamentally conceived and written by people.
Writing and editing guides
When something isn’t quite working.
We can’t provide individual editorial feedback on every submission, but there are some genuinely useful free resources for drafting and editing short fiction. These aren’t rules for how fiction has to work. They’re places to start when something in a draft isn’t working and you can’t quite see why.