Submission
Guidelines
These are guidelines for submitting your work to Phano. We buy rights to short stories and essays at two cents per word. We pay for reviews, interviews and art as work-for-hire.
We are currently open for new submissions! Read on to find out how to submit your work.
Exclusive First World English Rights. Phano would have the right to publish your work for the first time in English worldwide.
Non-exclusive Audio Rights. Phano would publish a recorded version of your work (so a listenable version can sit with the readable one).
Non-exclusive Internet Archival Rights. Phano would store and display each version of your work on www.phano.co.
Non-exclusive World Anthology Rights. Phano would republish you work in an anthology of work alongside others (such as a "Best of" collection).
Non-exclusive Rights To Nominate Works for Awards and Prizes. Phano could enter or nominate your work for awards and prizes as it sees fit.
Your warranty that no part of your work contains AI generated content, copyright or trademark infringements, plagiarism or libelous content.
We include rights reversion and time limitation clauses in our contract.
We prefer short stories that…
✔ provoke a sense of wonder
✔ touch an emotional core
✔ sit with us long after reading
✔ invite us to play with big ideas
✔ center on well-developed characters
✔ take tasteful, calculated risks
✔ speculate eloquently about the future
✔ are literary and/or science fictional
We prefer essays that…
✔ look to futures near and far
✔ study past and present signals of emergent change
✔ ponder philosophical themes
✔ expose new frameworks of thinking
✔ are narrative and/or reflective
✔ make facile sense of complexity & change
✔ seek clarity and avoid certainty
✔ avoid sanctimony
We reject…
✗ anything over 5000 words
✗ anything under 1000 words
✗ anything touched by AI
✗ fantasy (including supernatural), poetry or fan fiction
✗ partial submissions
✗ incomplete submissions
✗ unsolicited reprints
✗ unsolicited revisions
✗ previously rejected material
✗ previously withdrawn material
✗ email/postal submissions
✗ multiple submissions
✗ simultaneous submissions
✗ anything not in English (sorry)
✗ filetypes other than RTF, DOC or DOCX
✗ anything not in manuscript format
How To Submit Your Work
We use Moksha to manage your submissions, which we archive as confidential correspondence. We do not, however, guarantee absolute confidentiality, and may, for example, release material containing threats or harassment to legal authorities or to comply with a duly authorized subpoena. By submitting your work to Phano, you represent that you understand and agree to the contents on this page.
How To Query
If you have read and understood our guidelines but you are still unsure if your work fits the criteria, do not query in advance or self-reject. Send us your work via our submission manager.
We send an auto-response to every submission we receive. If you have not received one within 24 hours of your submission, please query us. It may mean that we did not receive your email address properly and are unable to contact you for any reason.
If you have received an auto response, but have not heard from us after sixty days from our submission window's closing date, please check first if your submission meets any criteria in our rejections category above. If it does, please consider your submission as rejected.
Please direct queries to "queries [at] phano [dot] co" (spelled out to avoid spam… note: no "m" at the end). In your email, please type the word "QUERY:" at the beginning of your subject line with a few words following that describing the nature of your query.