Submission Page and Guidelines
What We Are Looking For
World of Dogs is a monthly zine looking for fictional stories of all genres (ideally completely original works although we will accept Twilight style ‘I can’t believe it’s not actually them’ substitutes) in the form of intentionally incomplete 800 to 3000 word Vignettes or ‘Excerpts’.
Send us the WIPs that you keep rewriting because it’s ‘unreadable’, the first two chapters of that dusty old novel in your drive that you keep intending to come back to ‘whenever your life settles down again’, or a snippet set in that one world you came up with that you never really did anything with because the scope of what you’d need to write just keeps on expanding.
But dear God, just give us something, anything that can make us want to keep turning the page, all the while feeling a mild sense of dread about how little is left to resolve all of this in, and then leave us all frustrated when it doesn’t, or it all just leads naturally into the next in a long line of adventures.
Essentially, we at World of Dogs want you to pretend that you’re writing for a Penny Dreadful or modern Light Novel, whether you choose to submit any further chapters/stories in the same world to our zine, publish it directly into your own sites, or not to write any more at all is fine by us, just as long as your initial work at least pretends that it’ll have a continuation it can fit in here just fine.
Of course, stylistic considerations aside, all written Submissions must be in English or Indonesian. Are ideally previously unpublished (although I will not count social media accounts and DeviantArt as publications for these purposes), and written in standard manuscript format (doubled spaced, times new roman, 12 size).
We would prefer submissions that already have a cursory pass at least to correct obvious grammatical/spelling errors, and please don’t use coloured fonts or unique fonts to denote which character is speaking as that will not be reflected in the Zine if your submission is accepted.
And please attach your submission to the Google form in the form of a Doc or PDF file with the following format for the name "Name - Author - Genre - Month".
What We Don’t Want
We’ll make it quick, outside of a ban on explicitly erotic/pornographic works as said works fall outside of the scope of this Zine, we will not be accepting works that implicitly or explicitly endorses bigoted views of any form.
That is not to say that a character in your work can never have or express bigoted views, we understand nuance here, but there is a big difference between ‘platforming’ and ‘endorsing’ so to speak, and our editor reserves the right to immediately bin any submissions that cross the line.
AI Stance
We would prefer if you don’t use AI to generate your submission or otherwise aid in it beyond what can be expected out of a normal spell checker for writing or background removal tool if you are submitting art.
Publication Rights
World of Dogs asks for First Internet/Online Publication Rights and Non Exclusive Archival Rights, this is overall a non profit/non commercial enterprise as is, but it is an online publication by nature, and we would also prefer to reserve the right to keep each issue up on our substack without any problems down the line. We’d also like to ask for Anthology rights in the future, but that’s contingent on us getting the capital and interest to publish printed and thus saleable issues.
Outside of that, it’s your work still, feel free to submit it to other magazines that accept already published works or to post it on your blog or some other website. We'd prefer it if you waited until a few months after publication though, but that’s just a common courtesy.
On The Matter of Payment
As an entirely free Zine headlined by a third world writer operating off of free linktree and substack we cannot currently promise any form of payment or honorarium at this moment in time.
Current Submission Status
We are currently open for submissions for our April issue until the 28th of March!
We envision this as a monthly Zine released at the 7th of each month, but our initial run may be delayed by a few months depending on the volume of submissions we receive as we are still new to the scene and can’t promise that we’ll meet our target of publishing >4 minimal stories from outside submitters each month.
You can submit for the April issue using the following link: