Our Story
Fiction Attic Press has been publishing flash fiction, personal essays, and author interviews since 2005. Early contributors include Gloria Frym, Thaisa Frank, Michelle Tea, Vanessa Hua, Steve Almond, Stephen Elliott, Stephen Graham Jones, and many other people not named Steve.
Fiction Attic was founded in San Francisco in 2005. TYou can find stuff from our early issues in the Wayback Machine.
What we publish
Fiction Attic publishes weird, wonderful, thought-provoking work online, in print, and occasionally in ebook format. We seek flash fiction, flash memoir, personal essays, novellas, novellas-in-flash, and sketchbook stories. We have published debut novels by Magdalena Waz and Karen Guzman. We have also published two print flash fiction anthologies and the collected stories of “Albania’s second greatest living writer,” Jiri Kajane.
In early 2022, at the urging of our editorial assistant, we launched the Teen Voices program, which seeks to discover new writing by teens and to provide creative writing scholarships to teenagers from underserved communities. Teen submissions never have a reading fee. If you are a high school student with a (very short) story to tell, you can submit your flash fiction or flash memoir here.
Where we publish
We publish work here on our website. As of May, 2022, we also publish on Substack.
Payment
For online publication, we pay $15 for flash fiction (1,000 words or fewer), $20 for stories and essays over 1,500 words, $20 for sketchbook stories, and $10 for a group of micro fictions (stories of 150 words or fewer). The author retains the right to publish your work elsewhere after it has appeared online or in print at Fiction Attic.
Who We Are
Editor and publisher: Michelle Richmond
Editorial Assistant / Teen Voices Scholarship Coordinator : Oscar Phelan
Readers who have generously donated their time in the past are: Neal Allen, Luke Allis, Rhea Dangwal, Heather Hasselle, Dan Keating, Casey Mancino, and Olivia Pena.
How long will it take you to read my submission?
As we note on our submission page, it may take us a long time to read your submission. That’s why we encourage simultaneous submissions. Just let us know if your story is accepted elsewhere; we’ll be happy for you!
Learn with Fiction Attic
We offer online master classes in novel writing to help writers develop their craft and thrive. Our flagship course, Novel in 9, guides participants through the process of drafting a novel in nine months.
Follow to Show Your Love, Subscribe to Help Us Thrive
Please subscribe to Fiction Attic on Substack to get new flash fictions delivered to your inbox twice a month. And, of course, we hope you’ll make generous use of the like, recommend, and share buttons.
If you’d like to help Fiction Attic fulfill our mission of publishing exciting, innovative, thoughtful fiction and nonfiction by new and emerging writers, please consider a one-time donation.
Fiction Attic is funded in three ways: through small fees for certain submission categories, through book sales, and out-of-pocket by the editor, for whom this press is a labor of love.
If like what you see here, please consider a one-time donation to help us continue to publish great fiction and memoir by new and emerging writers.
Every little bit helps! Thank you.
A Note on Funding
We charge small entry fees for some (but not all) submission categories. We never charge fees for Teen Voices submissions.
Entry fees and book sales do not cover but do help defray the costs of contributors’ payments, cover design, interior design, title setup at Ingram Spark (which makes our books available to bookstores), and the purchase of ISBN numbers for our titles.
If you like what you see at Fiction Attic and believe in the importance of small presses, I encourage you to support the press with your or one-time donation.
History
Fiction Attic: The Journal of Elegant Wit, was founded in 2005 as an online magazine whose mission was to publish unusual works of literary merit.
Early issues of the journal featured the work of Steve Almond, Stephen Elliott, Gloria Frym, Katia Noyes, Vanessa Hua, Michelle Tea, Bill U’Ren, and Anita Garner, among others, as well as interviews with such literary luminaries as Kate Braverman and fiction in translation by the critically acclaimed Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern (translated by Elizabeth Harris).
A Minor Reinvention
In 2011, Fiction Attic recalibrated. In addition to the online literary journal, we established a small, independent press, with a mission to distribute works of exceptional literary merit through the ebook and print-on-demand formats. The goal of Fiction Attic, as always, is to promote well-written, thought-provoking fiction with a fair dose of “elegant wit.”
Join Our Mission to Publish Great Fiction
You can support Fiction Attic by purchasing our titles. If you like what you see here, we hope you will make generous use of the share buttons, follow us on twitter, like us on facebook, and tell your writing and reading friends.
Indie Love
If you are an independent bookstore, we would love to partner with you in any way possible–through your Espresso Book Machine, in-store events, and more. Our print books and ebooks are available through Ingram Spark at a standard discount.
Our goal in 2016 is not necessarily to make Fiction Attic bigger, because small is good. Our goal is to make it better.