Down in the Dirt
(revealing all your dirty little secrets)
Scars Publications
http://scars.tv
Guidelines
E-mail AlexRand@scars.tv with submissions of short stories, poetry, essays and art work. The majority of the material we currently accept comes to us in electronic form only (so we recommend you e-mailing submissions to us, either as an attachment or better yet placing it directly in the letter). For samples of what we’ve printed in the past, visit the website: http://scars.tv
Authors are not paid for work. Currently accepted writings get their own web page at http://scars.tv, and samples of accepted writings are placed into a semi-regular collection book Scars Publications produces. If you submit a large body of work, we may also choose to publish parts of all of the large submission as an online chapbook (a PDF file), that anyone can download (visible in the "chapbooks" section of http://scars.tv).
We have no specific preferences, but we appreciate work that is related to issues such as politics, sexism, society, and the like, but are definitely not limited to such. We publish good work that makes you think, that makes you feel like you’ve lived through a scene instead of merely reading it. If we had to use two words to describe what we want, they would have to be intelligent and powerful. Keep that in mind.
Poetry:
We accept work of almost any genre, but were not keen on rhyme for rhymes sake, and we’re definitely not keen on religion poems. We do accept longer works, any length is appreciated. Simultaneous submissions and previously published work is fine. The rights to all pieces we accept for publication are yours, and will always be yours.
Prose
Our advice is to keep it under ten pages, if you can, but nothing is set in stone. We like prose (because everyone sends us primarily poetry), so please feel free to send it in to us. What should the prose/fiction/essay be about?, you ask... Well, it really is open, but if it relates to how the world fits into a person’s life (political story, a day in the life, coping with issues that people face), it will probably win us over faster. Please tell the story like it actually happened -- what makes a story believable is the detail given in it that pulls the reader in. Make our reader see the scene, smell the food, feel the wind on their face. They’ll remember the story more when they read something and they feel like they lived the story instead of merely reading it. They can take something from it -- and when they do you know you’ve done something right.
Art Work
Do not send originals (this should not be a problem when e-mailing submissions to us). We don’t go for humorous illustrations or comics... Photography and drawings are usually your best bet, ones easily reproduced by photocopiers. But we have to admit, we have seen some really cool art work generated from computers, so the field is yours to explore. We’d love to see your work. Artwork can go into an art page on our web site, if you are interested in getting your art work on to the Internet. If you send us cool art we run on line, we may ask for it at a higher resolution for printing in a book. We’d let you know if this were the case.
Everyone: Read This Submission Advice
As a rule, we are not accepting much in the way of snail-mail submissions. You can e-mail us at AlexRand@scars.tv; it’s a lot faster, you don’t need a SASE, so it is more economical.
Boring, Stupid Crap:
We don’t go for racist, sexist (therefore we’re not into pornography either), or homophobic stuff. And about copyrights -- the work is yours, and we don’t want to ever claim it for ourselves. Simultaneous submissions are cool, previously published or concurrently published works are cool, and the work is always yours. You’re only giving us the right to publish it.
We may want to run your work again in a collection volume in the future, but that only means you’re published again, the collection books/calendars/whatnot will be posted on our web site as well (possibly as both a web page and as an e-book/PDF file) and you can still do whatever you want with your work.
If you need anything else, please feel free to contact us at AlexRand@scars.tv - and thanks.