Submission Guidelines
What We Publish
Gothic fiction. Mood and imagery are more important to us than genre distinctions.1 We’re open to contemporary, historical, and secondary-world settings.
We don’t have firm length requirements, but most of what we publish is between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Stories at the upper end of this range may be serialized across two issues. We don’t publish graphic sexual content.
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.
Submission Process
Submit via Duosuma. You will be asked to provide a brief third-person biographical note. If your story has been previously published, include publication details in the cover letter field.
Please send only one story at a time. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please withdraw your work immediately upon its acceptance elsewhere. Please do not resubmit previously rejected works unless asked to do so.
The submission form now includes a “tip jar” option. This is not a mandatory submission fee. The editor who reviews your work will not see whether you left a tip.
We encourage you to report submissions and responses to The Submission Grinder or Chill Subs and to check those sites or Duotrope for information about our current response times.
Publication and Payment
We ask for non-exclusive digital rights. 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 is posted every Saturday. Most stories will be behind a paywall (except for a few teaser paragraphs). Published stories remain available in the archive indefinitely, but reasonable requests for removal will be honored.
Contributors receive a minimum payment of $10 for each issue their work appears in; in some cases we pay more, depending on revenues. Payment is sent the month after publication, usually on or around the 15th. PayPal is our default method, but other arrangements can be made on a case-by-case basis. In addition, contributors receive a complimentary six-month subscription to the magazine.
Previously published works receive the same rate as original fiction. We strongly prefer reprints that are not currently available for free online, though we consider this on a case-by-case basis.
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 authors of a co-authored work.
AI Policy
We will not knowingly publish works authored or co-authored by generative AI.
However, this is not a blanket prohibition on AI assistance.
We draw the line according to a common-sense definition of “authorship”: If Alice asks Bob to beta read, proofread, create short writing prompts, assist with research, draw up a list of possible character names, or listen and give feedback as she works out her ideas, Bob doesn’t become an “author” of the resulting work. Even if a few of Bob’s words or thoughts are present in the final version, Alice remains responsible for the work as a whole.
But if Carol asks Dan to compose a full plot outline, create a central character from scratch, write paragraphs of prose, or rewrite the entire piece in a new style, Dan plainly is an author of the work. In this situation, Carol can’t claim full responsibility even if her contributions were also significant; Dan must share credit.
The same principles apply regardless of whether Bob and Dan are human beings or AI tools—and the one category of work we do not want to see is work written with an “AI Dan.”
On our end, HLS never uses AI to make acceptance or rejection decisions. While writing a story involves a myriad of small decisions, some of which can be responsibly made using AI tools, curating a story (even when it involves discussion between editors) ultimately hinges on a single binary decision over whether to accept a work or not. This decision cannot be responsibly delegated to any tool. We view the editor’s role, like the author’s, as a matter of human ownership and responsibility, and we promise to take full accountability for the works we choose to publish.
In order to uphold our authors’ right to determine where and in what form their words appear, we have taken steps to prevent our published issues from being used to train AIs.
Contact Us
Questions and feedback about these guidelines or other aspects of HLS can be sent to HLS.editors@gmail.com. We will do our best to respond within five business days.
Please note: This address is not for story submissions—use Duosuma for that. Unsolicited submissions sent via email will be deleted unread.
Last updated April 16th, 2026.
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).