Lightspeed is an established monthly electronic publisher of science fiction and fantasy writing. Many of the works that have been published there have gone on to be nominated for prestigious genre awards, including the Hugo and Nebulla awards.
They pay their authors 8 cents a word and publish stories of up to 7,500 words in length, although their general preference is for stories that are around 5,000 words. They do not publish stories under 1,500 words in length. They do occasionally publish unsolicited reprints, but in those situations they pay 2 cents per word.
Lightspeed is open to submissions of short stories that fall within the boundaries of science fiction or fantasy, including speculative fiction. No subject within these genres is considered off limits.
Lightspeed accepts less than 1% of the work submitted to them. They also reply to all submissions within a week. They request that all authors wait a week before submitting another short story if their work is rejected.
An important thing to take into consideration when submitting is that they also have specially themed issues that you have to submit to via a separate system because it is curated by different editors. The current themed issue is open only to women who write science fiction.
Their main submission system and their secondary submission system are both easy to use. They do not often send personalized responses to authors, but if their rejection includes the phrase “send more” they do mean exactly that. They do not accept simultaneous submissions. To learn more please visit their website at: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/about/guidelines/
