[The Coil]: Fiction

This is the open-reading portal for pieces of short fiction published on The Coil online journal. Please know what the journal is before submitting.

We’re seeking individual stories/pieces of fiction (NOT chapbooks or book-length manuscripts). We want to read your microfiction, flash fiction, short stories, hybrid, experimental, one-act plays, and short novelettes.

We welcome diverse and underrepresented voices and are a liberal, fact-minded, non-religious journal that is a safe space for LGBTQUIA2+ and BIPOC+ authors, and writers of all ages, cultures, backgrounds, and abilities. Hate speech and harmful agendas are not welcome here. We reserve the right to refuse any material that doesn’t align with the principles of our journal.

• This category is only for INDIVIDUAL standalone fiction (not book-length manuscripts). Submissions can be experimental, flash, short novelettes, long stories, short plays, or hybrid prose. (Hybrid that most closely resembles poetry should be submitted to the Poetry category. Nonfiction pieces (essays, articles, columns, reviews, memoir, journalism, interviews, booklists, literary trends) should be submitted to their respective Nonfiction categories.)
• All genres, styles, and subjects considered. A soft upper limit of 5,000 words is suggested.
• You may submit up to 4 stories in a single document file.
• All work must be in English and must be the author’s own. Single work by multiple authors considered. We do not consider A.I.-generated works.
• If you need to adjust a submission, please use the Request to Edit option through Submittable. Please don’t request to edit for minor flaws, however—all accepted work will go through an editing process and will have the chance to be updated before publication, and your work will not be disqualified for a missing comma.
• All authors must be at least 18 to submit.
• Simultaneous submissions allowed. You do not have to withdraw a piece that is accepted elsewhere, as long as you still own the reprint rights after first publication.
• Previously published pieces are considered, as long as you still own the reprint rights.
• Submit via Submittable only. We do not accept email submissions.
• There is a $6.99 fee for each submission (up to 4 pieces in a submission). You may submit as many times as you’d like, but each submission (of up to 4 pieces) must be made separately with a separate fee. The fee helps us with needed administration and journal production costs, and we pay our submission readers for their time and effort, but it’s not meant to be too inhibitive. If you are unable to pay, please email us for an alternative submission method.
• It is highly recommended that you read our past published fiction.
• We will send a response and notification to every submission within 4 months. Form response only, unless we are interested in publishing your work. We are regretfully unable to provide feedback. If you have not heard back after 4 months, please feel free to follow up (kindly).
• Accepted or solicited pieces vetted through our editors and submissions portal will receive $10 after publication; there is no payment for promotional guest columns or automatic posts as part of a book tour package.
• We acknowledge that we are headquartered on what should be Arapaho land on a street that is instead named for a dead white male president who owned enslaved people and severed Native American Nations apart irrevocably. To honor the reparations that this entire country needs to make, Black writers and Native American Indigenous (United States and Canada) writers may submit appropriate submissions for free to this open-reading period (please note that if the portal is not open, then we have reached our free-submission monthly cap until the beginning of the next month).

If you like our journal, please consider subscribing for less than a cup of coffee, or signing up on our free email mailing list.