A special Flash Fiction contest portal will open at 00:01 on 15 January and close at 23:59 on 15 Feburary. If the portal disappears, submissions are formally closed and will not reopen.
You can find the portal at
https://escapepod.submittable.com/submit
In order to be a valid submission to the contest, each story must adhere to the following rules:
1. The story must be no more than 500 words long, not including its title. Do not use the title to skirt around the word count. Word count will be determined using Google Docs.
2. The story must adhere to the general Escape Pod
submission guidelines. Most importantly, it needs to be a science fiction story; other genres, including horror and fantasy, are discouraged. As a general rule, we will take a very liberal view of what constitutes science fiction, but authors should note that past experience shows that stories which attempt to skirt the genre restriction tend to fare badly in the voting.
3. The story must be original and previously unpublished. Stories will be posted on a members-only portion of the forum, so first publication rights will not be spent if your story does not win.
The person submitting the story must be the story's author (or acting for the author with express permission) and hold full publishing rights to the story. A story that is derived from a previous published work in another format (i.e. not a short story) is fine (assuming doing so isn't in violation of copyright, obviously).
If you are not sure whether your story counts as published or not (for example, if an earlier version has appeared on your blog but nowhere else), please write (PM or send a query to eytan@escapeartists.net with the subjectline "QUERY") and ask before submitting. Please do not submit stories that have been entries in a previous Escape Artists contest.
4. Each author may submit
ONE story to the contest. Note that this is a change from previous contests.
5. The story should be submitted in its final form, as the author intends it to be read by the voting public. We may or may not allow minor typo corrections if those slip in, but as a general rule, we will not allow authors to submit changes to stories, especially not after submissions are closed.
6. Included the body of the submission should be the title and the text of your story. Any byline will be stripped when the stories are posted in the contest, and will be revealed when either the story fails to advance, or ultimately wins. Feel free to request a pseudonym for the byline, but we will
need a legal name if you win for prize purposes.
7. The top three winning stories will be published as part of a flash fiction episode on Escape Pod, and the author will be paid $30, making this a pro-rate publication. In past contests, the editors sometimes approached authors of additional stories and purchased them as well. This may or may not happen this time, at the editors' discretion.
8. Authors under 18 are welcome. By submitting, any author under 18 asserts they have obtained the permission of a parent or guardian with whom Escape Artists, Inc. can enter into a contract on behalf of the author.
9. Entries in the contest will be judged completely anonymously, with all authors on equal footing regardless of whether or not they are already published elsewhere or if they have any association with EA. In the interest of transparency, the following people have access to the submission portal, and can see the names of authors (and therefore are prohibited from participating): Norm Sherman, Nathaniel Lee, Graeme Dunlop, Eytan Zweig. Note that staff on EA's other podcasts, and other forum moderators, have no access to this information and may choose to participate if they wish.
Please blog, tweet, email, send postcards, telephone, upload your conciousness to the matrix, and otherwise get the word out.
