Submission Guidelines
What We Publish
Gothic fiction and art. Mood and imagery are more important to us than genre distinctions.1 We’re still developing our aesthetic, so feel free to take chances.
How to Submit Fiction
We’re open to contemporary, historical, and secondary-world settings, but futuristic settings are likely to be a hard sell. We don’t have firm length requirements, but most of what we publish is between 2,000 and 10,000 words. We don’t publish graphic sexual content, and we prefer to avoid obscene language.
We consider works translated from other languages into English. If the work you are translating is not in the public domain, please secure the author’s consent before submitting.
All submissions should be sent to sara.L.bickley@gmail.com. The subject line must include the letters HLS. Submissions that fail to follow this guideline might not be seen or responded to.
Fiction may be submitted as an attachment in any common file type. We do not have specific manuscript formatting requirements.
Previously published works are considered for publication if the original publication was at least ten years before the date of submission and the story is not available for free online.
Please, no multiple submissions of fiction. Simultaneous submissions are considered; please withdraw your work immediately upon its being accepted elsewhere. Please do not resubmit previously rejected works unless asked to do so.
Include a brief biographical note or be prepared to provide one upon acceptance.
If we fail to send an acknowledgement within 36 hours, please query.
We no longer send personalized rejections.
We encourage you to report submissions and responses to Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, or Chill Subs.
How to Submit Artwork
We present one work of visual art along with each story. These works are selected from various sources.2 They are, for the most part, not specially commissioned.
We’re always in need of art! If your style seems even tangentially relevant to our aesthetic, we strongly encourage you to share your work. We’re open to any medium and a variety of styles.
All submissions should be sent to sara.L.bickley@gmail.com. The subject line must include the letters HLS. Submissions that fail to follow this guideline might not be seen or responded to.
Artwork may be submitted as an attachment in any common file type. Depending on the resolution of the original files, we may ask for higher-resolution images after acceptance.
For artwork only, previously published/posted submissions are considered without restrictions.
Include a brief biographical note or be prepared to provide one upon acceptance.
If we fail to send an acknowledgement within 36 hours, please query.
Letters
We encourage discussion in our comments section, and we also welcome letters to the editor commenting on previously published stories, expressing preferences for future stories, recommending works of interest to our readers, or discussing the general state of Gothic fiction.
Please direct letters to the submissions address, sara.L.bickley@gmail.com; include HLS in the subject line. Selected letters may be reproduced in future issues of House of Long Shadows and/or forwarded to authors for a potential response. No payment is offered to letter-writers.
Publication and Payment
We ask for non-exclusive digital rights for both written work and artwork. As a courtesy, we prefer that authors not make the full text of a story available elsewhere online until after the publication of the HLS issue containing it.
A new story with accompanying artwork is posted every Saturday. There will be four or five posts each month depending on the number of Saturdays. Most stories will be behind a paywall (except for a few teaser paragraphs); artworks will be publicly visible.
Published stories remain available in the archive indefinitely. Reasonable requests for removal will be honored.
We pay a minimum of $10 for artwork, $10 for fiction up to 10,000 words and $20 for fiction more than 10,000 words. Reprints receive the same rate. In some cases we pay more than the minimum; this depends on subscription revenues received during the month your work appears. In addition to monetary payment, contributors also have access to a complementary six-month subscription.
For works translated by someone other than the author, the author and translator are each paid the full rate; it is not split. The same applies to all the authors of a co-authored work.
Payment will be sent the month after your work appears, usually on or around the 15th of the month. We prefer to pay via PayPal, but can arrange other methods on a case-by-case basis.
AI Policy
We will not knowingly publish computer-generated works that lack a human author. If prompt engineering is the only human activity involved in your story or artwork, it isn’t for us.
However, we recognize that generative AI can be used in ways that support, rather than supplant, human creativity and judgment. We have no prejudice against the use of AI tools for discrete writing steps like research, brainstorming, grammar or continuity checking, simulated reader feedback, or Seventh Sanctum-style generation tasks. We do not require contributors to disclose their use of (or abstention from) any tool, including AI tools.
HLS never uses AI to make editorial decisions.
We have taken steps to prevent our publication from being used to train AIs.
Updated 21 August 2025.
Some things we’d like to see more of: Gothic romance. Sympathetic vampires. Horror mysteries with non-supernatural solutions (but think John Dickson Carr, not Scooby-Doo).
Some things we receive a lot of, but only rarely publish: Straightforward haunted house stories. Reproductive horror. Wacky humor. Creepypastas.
Including, but no limited to, unsolicited submissions