Submission Guidelines

Unless otherwise notes on a specific project, we are requesting non-exclusive, perpetual rights to publish your story or art in print and digital formats in the assigned project. In most cases, once a project is published, it remains available for sale forever. We won't unpublish a work to remove a story because nine months down the road you decided to self-publish it exclusively with Amazon. Please keep this in mind when submitting work.

You will be asked to sign a publishing agreement. This must be signed and returned before we can publish your work.

Bards and Sages Publishing does not accept AI generated art or stories for publication. The publishing agreement includes a declaration clause that you affirm that the work submitted by you was created exclusively by you and is not the product of AI programs.

A.I. Programs can be fun, but they are legally problematic for publishers. If you are interested in more regarding our position, you can visit my blog for details.

For purposes of this policy, we are defining AI programs as those that produce finished work based on entered prompts, regardless of the amount of editing the individual performs after-the-fact on the finished work. We are not including writing aid programs like Grammarly and similar programs that provide help with grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.

Unless otherwise noted on a specific project, payments are always made upon publication. We pay by either PayPal or Google Pay.

How We Make Decisions

Though we no longer offer feedback on stories that are rejected, we still employ the same scoring system we always have. To help authors understand the type of stories we publish and how we rate stories, visit the following pages:

Publishing Decisions

What the Numbers Mean

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All story submissions must be electronic format only in Word.doc, .docx, or RTF format. We work in Microsoft Word. Most major word processing programs can output your file to one of these formats without issue.

We do not accept PDFs, zip files, or links to download your submission from a third-party site. Such submissions will be rejected unread.

We do not accept submissions submitted in the body of the email. Such submissions will be rejected unread.

We have a strong preference for scene breaks instead of chapters in short stories. In most cases, a short story submitted with chapter headings will be edited to instead use scene breaks unless there is a strong reason otherwise.

Do not use headers, footers, watermarks, custom fonts, embedded fonts, or custom icons in story submissions.

Art submissions may include watermarks when submitted, with the understanding that, upon acceptance, files will be provided without watermarks.

We have no interest in cover letters, long lists of previous publication credits, awards, or lengthy bios. This information is not forwarded to reviewers and will have no bearing on our review process. If a story is accepted, we will request all of that information then.

In the body of the email, please include the following information that we DO want:

• Author Name
• Title of Story
• Primary Genre of the story: this helps us route stories to the reviewer most favorable to the genre to give your story the best attention
• Estimated word count: so that we can manage the reviewers' work loads
• A short summary or blurb about the story: this helps us get an idea of what to expect in the story and route it to the reviewer who would be most favorable to the topic
• If the story has been previously published, please include publishing information
• Any trigger warnings: if the story involves child abuse, animal abuse, sexual assault, or other content that may be objectionable or problematic, please note this so that the story can be routed to the reviewer who can best assess the content. Our goal with this request is not to weed out potentially problematic content, but to make sure your story gets a fair review.
• Representation: if your story features traditionally underrepresented groups, please include that information, either as part of the summary or separately. This helps us route the stories to the reviewer best suited to assess the story.