Submissions

At Astrolabe, we’re looking for work about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection. Into the woods. Across a line. Beneath the ocean. Along a seam. Into the branches of an alternate present or the crevasse of an alternate future. Across the rifts between one another.

And then, once we find one another, the myths we make.

We’re excited to see as many interpretations of this broad theme as there are stars in the night sky.

We’re open to work of all genres, with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit.

Read about Astrolabe for details on our mission and what we’re doing with the Universe.

Work from Astrolabe has been anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three, and others.

The details

We pay a $50 honorarium upon publication of one or more pieces from your submission.

We open for submissions when we’re ready to read more work, and keep the window open until we reach 150 submissions. We’ll announce our next open submission window here and on Bluesky or Instagram when we’re ready.

A few more points of order:

• We currently accept fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and photography/art. See below for genre-specific instructions.
• We do accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work was accepted for publication elsewhere—we’ll be thrilled for your good news!
• Submit only once per submission window, across all genres. If you have poetry and fiction to share, bundle them into a single email—don’t send separate submissions. If we don’t accept your work, please wait until our next submission window before trying again unless we specifically ask for more.
• We consider only unpublished work.
• We don’t consider work created with assistance from or wholly by large language models (AI).

Fiction & creative nonfiction

Send us up to three pieces, of no more than 3,000 words in total, in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format.

We’ll happily consider fiction and CNF in all prose forms—prose poetry, micro, flash, and beyond.

Poetry

Send us up to five pieces in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format.

Photography & art

Send us up to five pieces in .jpg, .png, or .pdf format.

If your artwork doesn’t work in one of those formats—for example, if you’ve built something dynamic or interactive—send a link to where we can view it online, or just ask!

Time to submit!

Track your submissions on Duotrope, Chill Subs, or The Submission Grinder!

Your rights

Astrolabe asks for first North American serial rights (FNASR) to your work, which ensures that we’re the first place this work appears. Once your work is published on Astrolabe, all electronic and print rights revert back to you—you can republish the piece as you see fit. We also ask for non-exclusive anthology and print rights. This allows us to use your work in a possible future anthology, but doesn’t prevent you from pursuing other anthology or print opportunities in the meantime.

The copyright to your work remains yours at all times.

Questions?

Email us at editors@astrolabe.ooo.