• Send in work using our new hi-tech submissions manager, courtesy of SubmishMash. Submissions sent using the former method before April 2, 2010 will be read as usual, but after that you are out of luck using classic methods. Time marches on.

• No poetry ever.
• Keep it between about 7,000 words on the upper end and about three words on the lower end. If you think that your two words constitute a story, you are wasting your time and ours, buddy. You are wasting a very small amount of our time.
• Submissions should be sent in pre-2007 MS Word format (i.e. .doc, not .docx) or just pasted into the text of your email. NO OTHER METHODS ARE ACCEPTABLE.
• Simultaneous submissions are okay, as long as you let us know that your work is being published somewhere else as soon as it's accepted.
• Don't send multiple submissions. It is not cute.
• DON'T SEND MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS.
• We accept fiction submissions on a rolling basis, so we try to respond as quickly as possible to submitted work. Depending on the volume of work we've got at any given time, expect a response one way or another in anywhere from an hour or two to six weeks. If it takes longer than that, please query us again.
• We do accept previously-published submissions.

• We like to publish illustrations along with the stories we accept. If we accept you for publication on fictioncircus.com, we'll ask you if you have any illustrations you'd like to use or any illustrators you'd like to use to illustrate your stories. If not, we can do the illustrations ourselves. This is a bridge that we will cross together if we like your work. Do not worry about it now.
• We also like to offer recordings of the stories we publish. We're willing to record ourselves reading it and provide music for it, but if you'd prefer to do this yourselves, feel free to have someone in mind.

For electronic publication

We'll keep your story online forever, or until you tell us to take it off. If you later publish your story elsewhere, we'd appreciate your mentioning somehow that the Fiction Circus published it first (if we do in fact publish it first.) Ideally you can work that fact into the plot of the story somehow, but if not, just a mention somewhere in your bio is fine.