Submissions
Thanks for thinking of us as a home for your work! Unsolicited submissions are the fossil fuel that keeps the Barrelhouse moped puttering along on the side of the literary highway.
We're currently working on cleaning up our backlog and will be open for submissions shortly!
Magazine Submission Guidelines
Please read these instructions before you submit. We know we aren’t reinventing the wheel here, but it will make it easier on all of us if you have a general sense for what we’re looking for and how we’d like to get it.
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We accept submissions through the Submittable online submissions manager. That’s the only way we accept submissions.
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No previously published work.
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There is no maximum length, although we tend to publish stuff shorter than 8,000 words
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Please submit only one piece at a time. Except for poetry. You can submit up to five poems. Everybody else — just one!
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We pay $50 to each contributor to our print issues, as well as two contributor copies. So far, online contributors are paid primarily in karma. All contributors are also promised free beer, if we ever run into you in the flesh. If you don’t believe us about the free beer, ask around a little bit. We are frequently tipsy and imprudently generous.
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We accept simultaneous submissions — you would have to be insane to be sending your stuff out to one place at a time, right? Seriously. We hope you’ll tell us as soon as possible if you place the work elsewhere, though.
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It will probably take us two to three months to get back to you. We try to do that faster, but there are few of us and many of you.
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About electronic files: Please only send us word or rich-text (.rtf) files. Seriously. If you send something in a file format that we can’t read, it greatly reduces your chances of publication. For poetry, please submit 3-5 poems as a single document.