Issue 35 Submission Guidelines

The Broken City is currently accepting submissions for its winter 2024 edition: "Greetings, Starfighter."

For those who weren't alive yet and/or watching movies in the mid 1980s, that means the magazine is running a video game issue. We want to hear about anything game related, from the C64 to the N64 and into the present. Esports! Tron! Minecraft! We dare you to write something interesting about Pong.

Send your poetry, fiction, essays, illustrations and photography to thebrokencitymag@yahoo.com.

Deadline is: December 1, 2024. Submitters will be contacted after that date, with news of acceptance or rejection.

 

General Submission Guidelines

1. The Broken City will—at least briefly—consider any type of submission, the most common being: poetry, fiction, essays, comics, illustrations, photography, music/book reviews.

2. The Broken City is currently a non-paying publication. It is primarily a venue for new writers in search of exposure, publishing credits and glory, but does not discriminate against established submitters.

3. The Broken City retains one-time publication rights to accepted submissions. Future rights to individual works published in The Broken City remain with the author.

4. Written Submissions: Prose (fiction, essay, etc.) submissions must not exceed 3,000 words. Poetry submissions should contain no more than five poems.

Text submissions should be attached to an e-mail as a document that has the extension .doc, .docx, .rtf or .txt. Please, no archaic or oddball extensions like .wpd. If there's absolutely no way you can produce a .doc, .docx, .rtf or .txt file, paste your submission into the body of your e-mail.

Place your name at the top of the first page of the document. Also, use a single, common, easy-to-read font for the entirety of the document—no Comic Sans or Lisboa Light. Fancy fonts do not make your submission look cool; they make it unreadable.

5. Visual Submissions: Photos, illustrations, artwork, etc. should be high-quality and in either .jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp, .pdf or .tif format. Multiple, large files should be sent in multiple e-mails (maximum 10 MB per e-mail). Photo series are preferred but individual shots will be considered as well.

6. Previously published work and simultaneous submissions are permitted. Please notify The Broken City if your work is accepted elsewhere after you submit.

7. Accepted work will be edited to correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and word use errors. The Broken City will consult authors before making changes that would significantly alter the content of a submission, but it should be expected that minor revisions will be made unilaterally. Poetry will not be edited without consent, except to replace frustratingly odd combinations of dashes with an em dash.

8. After submitting, add thebrokencitymag@yahoo.com to the contacts or safe-senders list of your e-mail account to ensure that future e-mails from The Broken City don't end up in your spam folder.

9. Do not add The Broken City to your group mailing lists. The magazine does not want to receive news about your upcoming events or announcements that your blog has been updated.

10. The Broken City receives hundreds of submissions per issue. The magazine is therefore unable to provide individualized feedback. If your submission is not accepted, you will be sent a curt but polite rejection letter.

11. Please read these educational essays from Taddle Creek magazine:

Spaces after periods... one: good, two: bad

Proper apostrophe use