For this year, The Pink Hydra is publishing on a quarterly schedule. We aim to release issues in June, September, and December 2025. Therefore, our open submission periods will be as follows:
The whole of April — for the June issue. Because our fundraiser was slightly delayed, April submissions are being extended until 10 May 2025.
The whole of July — for the September issue
The whole of October — for the December issue
If your story is rejected for the Magazine, please don’t submit it to our Ko-fi or Novella calls.
Submission guidelines for the magazine
Genre: The Pink Hydra publishes tales of unreality. That includes—but is not limited to—all stripes of speculative fiction. It also includes tales where no magic happens. It’s more of a vibe than a genre. Stories need to have a fantasy-feel, to transport the reader to some different world. This can include literary, romance, or even nonfiction memoir.
You can check out our past issues (all free!) or browse our list of authors to see what we’ve accepted in the past, but don’t use these as a form of self-rejection. One of the main things we’re looking for is diversity. We’ve already published a range of tones and styles, from the whimsical to the grimdark, the philosophical to the unapologetically pulp. We’ve published urban romance, sexy smut, space horror, sword-and-sorcery, backpack fantasy, queer fairytales, drug-addled whimsy, an absolute mess of poetry, and more. We try to publish what the higher-profile zines don’t, so if you’ve got something that doesn’t seem to fit, give us a try! Our Head Editor’s favourite stories and poems so far are listed on her website here. (Some of these might be NSFW, depending on where you work.)
Because of our online format, we are not the best venue for unusually formatted poetry (poems that rely on spacing and margins to reproduce a certain shape). We also generally prefer not to publish these types of poems. Other than that, any form of poetry is fine.
Content: We welcome extreme content and do not require content warnings. Sex and bad language are fine. We do publish erotica, and especially queer smut.
Length: Up to 30,000 words for short stories. No line limit for poetry. Flash fiction and microfiction welcome.
Simultaneous submissions: Allowed and welcome. Let us know at the submissions email if you need to withdraw a story.
Multiple submissions: For stories over 5,000 words, only submit one at a time. If you have a bunch of stories below 5,000 words, send any number as long as the total word count is no more than 5,000. For poetry, send up to 10 poems at a time. You may mix poetry and prose as long as the total submission is under 5,000 words or 10 standard letter pages. If you have an epic poem that’s over 10 pages long, we’d love to see it, but again, only one at a time. Send all you want us to consider in a single document attached to a single email.
For this year, we will only consider one submission per writer per open period, so please make sure that you have sent us everything in one email! Whether accepted or rejected, you’re welcome to send us another submission when we reopen.
Reprints: All rights we ask for are non-exclusive, so we accept reprints as well as works that are still available elsewhere. In your submission email, please indicate the publication history of your piece: where it was first published, whether it’s still in print or online, etc. We welcome stories that have been self-pubbed someplace like Tumblr or Medium, but we are a bit less likely to accept work that is available at another free webzine.
Formatting: Send your submission as a document that can be opened and edited in MS Word (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .odt). Do not mark it read-only. No PDFs, no links to your Google Drive, and please do NOT paste the text of your submission into the body of the email. Email all submissions to:
Put ‘Submission’ in the subject line of your email. Use whatever font or line spacing appeals to you, and please indicate your byline (the name you want to publish under).
Cover letter: A formal cover letter is not required, but we’d love to hear who you are and where you’re from. Please treat the editorial team like people, because we are. You should know that a completely blank email comes off as rather rude, and on top of that blank emails are more likely to be dumped into spam folders.
As mentioned above, please tell us if you are sending a reprint. This isn’t so that we can secretly discriminate against your story, but because we look rather silly announcing that something is ‘first published at The Pink Hydra’ when it isn’t.
Submission Confirmation: You should receive an auto-reply from us within 72 hours confirming that we have received and queued your submission. If you haven’t received it, send your submission again. If it’s still not arriving, please urgently contact our Chief Editor at her personal email: emmyktz (at) gmail.com. Do not use this address for submissions; offenders will be demolished, hung, drawn and quartered, sent in pieces to each of the twelve tribes, and ignored.
Response time: We aim to reply to all submissions within a month of receipt. Because of our new quarterly publication schedule, we have to finalize our seclections for the next issue at the latest two weeks after the submission period closes. If you don’t hear from us by then, please get in touch.
Feedback: At The Pink Hydra, we generally don’t send form rejections. Often we will provide detailed critique on a rejected story, but even if we don’t, we always give a reason for rejection. If you’d rather not know the reason why, or if you’re not interested in feedback on your writing, please tell us.
Editing: All the material we publish at The Pink Hydra is rigorously edited with attention to errors, inconsistencies, language use, and style. We always require the writer’s approval of any changes before publication. Sometimes these edits go beyond simple grammar: we might ask to restructure sentences, change passive conversation to active, or fact-check your terminology. We consider editing to be a dialogue between editor and author, and welcome your input during this process.
Rights and payment: The Pink Hydra asks for worldwide, non-exclusive electronic distribution rights. We pay on acceptance, preferably via Paypal, but alternative arrangements can be made if necessary, especially if you are living in Africa. Our template contract is here.
For 2025, we are compensating writers with a base pay rate of 1 ZAR cent – about 1/18th of a U.S. cent – per word, with a minimum payment per contributor of R50. Payments made by Paypal are rounded up to the nearest dollar, to help cushion fees.
Effectively, this means that all stories and poetry contributions under 5,500 words will receive $3, with longer stories receiving more, up to a maximum of $17.
Re-Submissions: Sometimes, we will ask for rewrites of a story we liked but didn’t think was ready for publication. There are also stories that we would be open to considering at a later date, if substantial revisions are made. If you sent us a story last year and we asked you to re-submit, you are more than welcome to send the revised story again this year.
Illustrations
The Pink Hydra is looking for black-and-white cover art and illustrations, reprint or original. We’re open to any artistic style or genre, including photography, as long as it suits the vibe of the magazine. As with writing, erotic art and taboo subjects are welcome.
Guidelines: Email 1 to 10 art samples to:
In your email, please indicate whether the pieces have been published by another market, and if so, when and where. (We don’t mind if you’ve posted the pieces on your own site or social media.) We are unlikely to purchase a piece which has been used as cover art for another online magazine. We offer R180 per piece for cover art, and R80 for interior art, rounded to the nearest dollar if paid by Paypal (effectively, $10 and $5).
Simultaneous submissions are allowed.
Response: Your art submission will receive an auto-reply, to confirm that we have received it. We’ll get back to you within 60 days. You may submit illustrations and writing at the same time.
Novel excerpts
The Pink Hydra has the space to run a short novel excerpt in every issue. We often use these for self-promotion, but we’d like to feature any book our readers might be interested in. Because this excerpt is intended to function as a free advertisement, there is no payment.
Guidelines: Send an excerpt between 1,500 and 5,000 words to:
In your cover letter, please include your penname and bio, a link for readers to find your novel, and a short blurb describing the overall plot. Excerpts do not have to stand alone – ideally, they should make the reader want to head on over to your book to read the rest! The novel must be available to buy or pre-order – no works-in-progress! Free novels, of course, are welcome too. You’ll receive a response from us within 30 days.
Don’t: send us AI work (ugh) or stuff that you otherwise don’t hold the copyright to, like fanfiction (characters who are in the public domain, like Dracula, Odin, or Alice in Wonderland, don’t count as fanfic). Don’t send us things if you’re under 18.
The Pink Hydra is a proudly nerdy, female-led, sex-positive, queer-friendly, international, young publication. We hate fascism and oppression in all their various forms, and we won’t accept work that we view as imperialist, discriminatory, or anti-sex. Take your Nazi fanfic, MRA manifestos, and rants about the evil Chinese elsewhere. You may also be tempted to send us ‘stories’ that make fun of bullied kids, rape victims, refugees, the mentally ill, or other vulnerable classes of people. Don’t.
The Pink Hydra accepts submissions from all crevices of the globe, from New York to Nairobi, Berlin to Bombay, Mississippi to Maseru. We will consider all submissions on their own merits, but we are particularly interested in stories by and about women (including trans women), stories that take place somewhere that isn’t Everyman City, and all things LGBTQ+ and (gender)queer.
Send us your stuff, your art! Don’t self-reject!
