This monthly column is published on the fourth Thursday of every month, and is an opportunity for me to share information that doesn’t fit anywhere else in our publication. This includes a wide range of opportunities for writers, news and information, and subscriber’s recent success stories.
Opportunities:
Procrastinating Writers United (PWU) is open to multimedia submissions open for a 2026 print anthology . They are seeking prose, poetry, illustration, comics, and multimedia work for their anthology entitled I Haven’t Made It Home Yet. They say they are looking for pieces about the search for belong, particularly:
“returning to a familiar place and finding it changed or unrecognizable;
being displaced or out of place, feeling like a stranger;
memories and how they warp over time;
nostalgia, and missing something irretrievable.”
They close to submissions on January 11th, 2026. You can learn more here.
MetaStellar is open to submissions of original flash fiction from the 1st through the 31st of October. They pay 8 cents a work for accepted work during this submission period. You can see more details here. Successful submissions are eligible for their annual anthology.
Blanket Gravity Magazine is a journal for fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. They look for writing and art that explores explore mental health or emotional life. For their second issue they welcome fiction and nonfiction the explore the optional theme of “Technology and Love.” There will be a special collection focused on that theme within the issue. They pay $40 per chosen piece. To see their complete submission guidelines, go here. They close to submissions on January 10th.
Wordrunner eChapbooks‘ micro-prose feature closes to submissions on October 31st. You can read their full guidelines here. They only pay one author $25 for being the editor’s choice. You can read the previous collection here.
The 2026 Jason Reynolds / Simon & Schuster Travel Grant offered through The American Library Association is now open to applications from Black/African American youth or teen services librarians or school librarians/media specialists who work in either public or school libraries. Recipients will receive up to $3,000 (and not less than $1,500) to pay for expenses related to attending the ALA Annual Conference including but not limited to travel, housing, registration, and a ticket to the Coretta Scott King Award Breakfast. Five winners will be selected. The deadline for applications is December 15, 2025. Learn more here.
This November, Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) has decided to step into the space that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), left when it closed. They are creating and hosting WriteOn! November which is a free, month-long invitation to write in community.
Best of the Net is seeking a volunteer assistant editor, as well as volunteer readers. You can learn more here. The deadline for applying to these positions is November 1st.
News:
After years of listing journals without issue, we’ve encountered four new journals recently that did have major issues. The first two we were able to spot before hand and not review, the second two we only discovered after reviewing them.
I’m going to focus on one of the journals first, in detail, and then cover the others.
In our October 5 Paying Journals list we included a newer journal called Faun By Moonlight. I’m not linking to them because I am not recommending that anyone submit to this journal. Before twenty-four hours had passed we received emails from subscribers sharing that they had received the following email from Faun by Moonlight:
“Thank you for submitting your work to Faun by Moonlight. We appreciate your interest in our magazine and the time you’ve invested in sharing your story with us.
We’re writing to you today because your submission was received before we implemented our temporary $5 reading fee. We want to be transparent about where things currently stand.
Since being featured in several publications, we’ve been overwhelmed by the response–our submission volume has increased exponentially. As a small team passionate about giving each piece the careful consideration it deserves, we’ve found ourselves unable to maintain our commitment to thoughtful, individualized reading at this scale.
The temporary reading fee was introduced to help us manage this volume and ensure we can dedicate proper attention to each submission. While we recognize that you submitted in good faith before this policy change, we find ourselves in the difficult position of needing to prioritize fee-supported submissions to maintain our reading quality and response times.
We’d like to offer you three options:
Withdraw your submission and resubmit once we’ve resumed free submissions (we cannot guarantee when this will be)
Submit the $5 reading fee at buymeacoffee.com/faunbymoonlight (please include your story title as a private note) to move your submission into our priority reading queue. All fee-supported submissions receive detailed, personalized feedback on your work—whether accepted or not.
Wait for our response as we work through our backlog—though we cannot guarantee a timeline for free submissions at this time”
They also during this time updated their website to charge for all submissions temporarily, due to the influx of submission.
To be completely transparent, a journal reaching out and asking to be paid by writers who have already submitted has never happened before in the thirteen years that we’ve run Authors Publish, and this is unacceptable and unprofessional behaviour. They are also asking for higher than standard fees.
While it is perfectly understandable (albeit frustrating) for a journal to temporary close to submissions or reach out to us and ask to be de-listed (lots of journals like to be listed, just to be clear), this behaviour is different than that.
This takes the bait and switch approach, offering one thing, and then changing the parameters. They are not just changing the rules for those that haven’t submitted yet (which is a little more understandable, but still not ideal), but for those who already did. We are only highlighting and focusing in on this issue, because we believe they crossed an ethical line here.
When we emailed with the editor of Faun by Moonlight and it seemed clear that he made the offer not out of malice but out of inexperience, but it still really crossed an ethical line for me, and impacted an unprecedented amount of our subscribers.
We also had email exchanges with two other journal editors. These exchanges ended similarly. While their actions as editors were outside of the standards of literary journals, the editors were not behaving that way out of malice or ill intention, but simply because they did not understand the standards most literary journals operate under. For this reason if you are considering starting a literary journal I really encourage you to do both of the following things:
1. Become a reader or a guest editor for an already established literary journal.
2. Send me an email with any questions you have to support@authorspublish.com. I have extensive experience with literary journals, as a submitter, a reader, an editor, and as the editor of Authors Publish where I interact with about a hundred literary journal editors every year.
The fourth literary journal issue was with Neon and Smoke and was less a clear cut problem, but it was disconcerting, as I have never encountered a similar issue before. They shared a stock image of people on their about page, implying those people were on staff, and not disclosing that it was a stock image. I used TinEye to confirm that it was indeed a stock image, as were many of the others on the site. I’m not sure what the goal is here, but something certainly feels off about it to me.
There has been a recent victory, in terms of authors rights in the era of AI, with the Anthropic lawsuit. The Authors Guild has a great article about the settlement and what authors need to know about it here. There’s also a great article by Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware about publishers failing to copyright work on behalf of authors, and the impact of that in the context of this lawsuit and potentially other future lawsuits.
Baker & Taylor, a distributor who primarily focused on libraries, is closing down after 200 years. This is an ongoing situation but you can read this recent article about it here.
Subscriber Success Stories:
Ignatius Fernandez’s story A visit to the cemetery was published by Chewers.
F.I. Goldhaber‘s poems Morning at the Feeders and Mid Night were published by Four Tulips.
Lance Mazmanian’s short screenplay The McShane Dimension short was published by Unlikely Stories.
Michael Waterson’s poem Owed to Truth and Beauty won first prize in the traditional sonnet category of the 2025 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest sponsored by Poets & Patrons.
Debra Lee‘s novel Pullman was published by Histria Books.
Nicole Cremean’s short story, What a Doll, was published in The Writers’ Journal.
Julie Novak McSweeney’s poem Optik/The Optician appeared in the online magazine Fish Barrel Review.
Lisa Kusel‘s book Long Way Down was published by Crooked Lane.
Xauri’EL Zwaan‘s short story With Interest was published in the anthology Saskatchewan Screams by Burnt Horizon Press.
Laura Sturza‘s article Six Minute Dates for Older Singles, was published in The Beacon.
Victoria Jurgen‘s book Silisia Dances Toward Her Dream, won a Bronze Medal for Children’s Inspirational Books and Gold Medal for Teen & Young Adult – Body, Mind & Spirit at the Global Book Awards.
Elisabeth Frischauf‘s poem At First Avenue and 97th Street was published by The Five-Two, and her poem will appear in Plant People Volume Five, from Plants & Poetry.
Katrina Irene Gould had a flash piece called Slow Leak published in Sudden Flash, and another called Farmed Out published in Flash the Court.
Cithara Patra’s flash, Scritch, was published by Flash Phantoms and their story My Tree was published by Academy of the Heart and Mind
Jack Maconaghy’s book The Power to Corrupt, was released by Aethon Books.
Sam Rosewilde‘s short story Skin Deep was published in the anthology Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror by Renaissance Press.
Lia Tjokro‘s story, The Messenger of Light, was published by Writing Disorder.
Shantell Powell’s short story All That Came From Our Lips Were Lilies was published in the anthology Silk and Foxglove, by Hedone Books. Her poems Raspberry Elegy and Honey in the End Times were published in ALOCASIA. She was Zoetic Press‘s contributor of the month for her personal essay The Silent Madness of Whales.
Lora J. Chilton‘s poem, My Front Door : An Altar was published by Certain Age Magazine
Cindy Kluck-Nygren’s story Becoming Perennial: As Told by a Child Ghost was published in Möbius Blvd.
John Ryland’s novel A Meeting of Consequence was published by World Castle Publishing.
Roy A. Barnes’s poem Long Exit out of Eden was published by Breath & Shadow.
Lory Widmer Hess‘s essay The Unraveling was published in The Awakenings Review.
Rebecca Petersen’s nonfiction, Discovering My Great Uncle-in-Law, was published by Ariel Chart.
Louisa Prince’s flash Finding what matters was published by Sudden Flash.
Mike Sluchinski was gratefully nominated for a Pushcart Prize for the poem, sappho meets the beats at the beach by the Ekphrastic Review.
John A. Tures had his short story Lista de Sentaciados accepted by Pistol Jim Press.
Diana Morley’s poem A torn edge between was published in Memento: an anthology of poems about grief published by Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press.
R.P. Ferguson‘s story Woman of Stone has been published in Unseen Agreements: A Speculative Fiction Anthology from Beaches and Trails Publishing.
Rudy Vener‘s short story No Better Friend was published in The Saturday Evening Post.
Duane Hermann’s short story Jonas Joined a Cult was published in Harvest of Words, an anthology from the Kansas Writer’s Association. He also had a piece called When It’s Dark published at Feed the Holy and a piece called Facebook Target published at Chewers by Masticadores
Nancy Huggett‘s poem Joy was published in Feral Poetry, and their flash piece Contrafabula was published in American Literary Review as part of their Flash Prose Contest.
Rebecca Petersen’s hybrid lyric essay Noticing Ick “R” Us was published by The Remington Review.
Please send us an email at success.stories@authorspublish.com if you have a publication success you want to share in our next update. You must include a link to the publication. You can also include a link to your website (if you have one), and the publisher/journals main landing page. To be featured in the November update your work must be published no earlier than September. Work available for pre-order can be shared. Please note that we are only listing work that has been traditionally published by literary journals, magazines, or traditional presses. We are not covering vanity presses or self-published books.
Bio: Caitlin Jans has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-founder of Authors Publish and The Poetry Marathon. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Literary Review of Canada, The Fiddlehead, Jelly Bucket, The Penn Review, The Adroit Journal, and Killer Verse. Her prose and poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, BILiNE, The Best Small Fictions Anthology, and The Best of the Net. You can learn more at her website or follow her on Facebook,
