#4. Reprints Acceptable

There are few literary magazines out there which accept reprints. In our opinion this is a non-issue about exclusivity and it limits how much writers can make off their work. Publishers should not be forcing writers into a corner financially with this issue.

Combined with WSR this means writers will be able to reprint a short story in Amazonia and set whatever rate they want to ask for when they submit it.

What we like about reprints is that they should already be heavily edited and require zero editing on our part. So accepting reprints is a win-win for us as the writers typically are not asking for a large amount to reprint it and we don't have to do much work on our part beyond paying for the non-exclusive rights and formatting the work to fit within the magazine's layout.

#5. Our Staff Writers

We have a team of three staff writers so far which are involved in this project, who will share the burden of writing regular articles on topics related to fantasy publishing, as well as contributing to the fictional stories contained within Amazonia. These articles may include:

1. Interviews with professional authors.
2. Fantasy book reviews of recent releases.
3. Retro Reviews of older books and films.
4. Articles about the fantasy genre and its various subgenres, including its role in pop culture.
5. Observations on the world of fantasy publishing.

Our staff include:

1. Editor-in-Chief - Suzanne MacNevin.
2. Managing Editor - Victoria Van Dyke.
3. Formatting Editor & Advertising Director - Charles Moffat.

Our staff writers are paid a percentage of any profits from sales or advertising, so in the beginning we will be paid nothing until we start to see a return on our time investment and the investments we make in purchasing publishing rights from individual writers. That is the risk we are taking. We fully expect to be losing money during the first two years. But this is more of an endurance competition. The goal is to make it to year three and by then be profitable enough to be able to reward those authors who were loyal to us in the beginning by paying higher WSRs.

Note - While we are not currently looking for more staff writers, we are not opposed to the idea of more people joining our team and sharing the workload / profits. Email contact@amazonia.lilithpress.ca to get more info.

#6. A Balance of Feminine and Masculine Heroes

As the name Amazonia suggests this is a place where female heroes (and female writers) will be treated with equal respect as their male counterparts. One of our goals is to lift up more female writers (and their fictional heroes) and to give them equal attention. When you open the pages of Amazonia and begin to read you will see both genders represented equally as heroes, victims, bystanders, neutral third parties, villains, monsters, gods/goddesses, and cosmic beings devoid of gender.

And to keep true to this goal we are spending half of our acquisitions budget on female writers. Any remainder from a particular issue will rollover to the next issue to allow for a periodically larger budget for both genders.

Note - You do not need to have a female heroine to submit to Amazonia. Nor do you need to be female. We simply have equal distribution of our per issue budget when it comes to purchasing stories. If anything male writers might find it is easier to publish in Amazonia simply because few male writers may end up doing so, creating a shortage and less competition, and consequently we might have a higher budget during a particular publishing cycle to buy their work.

#7. Supplemental Advertising

We have a number of ways we are hoping to generate additional income via advertising. These include:

1. Novel Excerpts from published authors. eg. The Prologue or Chapter One. We do however want to limit this to 1 novel excerpt per issue. We don't want to be publishing an issue of the magazine and half the stories in there are novel excerpts. Novel excerpts should be between 2,500 and 15,000 words. The fee is $0.01 per word.
2. Book Advertising, full page or half page options: $45 USD or $30 USD. The more authors who advertise with us the more we can pay our writers.
3. Link Advertising on amazonia.lilithpress.ca. You can also potentially advertise in the Books section of the main Lilith Press website.
4. Novel Excerpts on amazonia.lilithpress.ca, with links to where readers can purchase your book.

Note I - In theory we could also offer "paid book reviews", but the very concept seems icky and dishonest to us. We don't want to be writing book reviews about books that we might think are actually horrible, because then we might feel compelled to lie and we don't want to do that. You can always tell when a review is fake when the writer is struggling to say something nice. Instead our recommendation is that authors use the Novel Excerpts route instead and let readers decide whether they want to continue reading.

Note II - "But what if someone else wrote the book review?" Okay, good point reader. We didn't think of that. Yes, we suppose we could still post that. But we still recommend posting said "3rd party book review" with the novel excerpt and the original reviewer would need to sign documents releasing the rights to their written book review. This could potentially be a more time consuming process.

#8. Canadian Eh?

We would like to see more Canadian fantasy authors getting attention, but at the same time we understand that authors in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, England, the USA and fantasy writers from around the globe* deserve attention too.

* We don't care which country you call home. We are all citizens of Earth.

We have noted that some literary magazines only accept American or British authors. This to us is a silly practice and it puts authors from less populous countries at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. As fantasy writers who use English as our medium we feel we should endeavour to have authors from a variety of backgrounds. (Although, yes, we still process all payments and receipts in USD.)

#9. We don't mind you submitting to other literary magazines.

Simultaneous Submissions. Go ahead. Do it. We actively encourage it. We are even making a Ranked List of other fantasy magazines you can potentially submit to in addition to us. This way you can submit to both us and our compatriots at other magazines and hopefully get the best possible price for your work.

We also have a message to our compatriots who don't allow Simultaneous Submissions. Boooooo! Shame! Shame! Shame!

It is bad enough trying to make a living as a writer, but to undergo waiting weeks or months for a literary magazine to respond and tell you they rejected your work is both torture and unfair to the writer who could have been submitting their work to other locations. Also, according to our anecdotal sources the chances of being accepted by a particular literary magazine is less than 10%. So the chances that two different magazine simultaneously accept the same person's work is less than 1%. Probably about 0.8%. So this really should be a non-issue as it happens so rarely that publishers should really not be worried about it.

However, and here is the beauty of our situation, if you do get accepted and published by another literary magazine, please let us know and we will put your short story in a list of people to contact regarding Future Reprints and/or Anthologies (see #10 below). A year or two later, we contact you and offer to reprint your short story in Amazonia (or possibly an anthology book).

#10. Anthology Collections.

Some publishers of literary magazines also operate a side business of publishing anthologies of short stories which are on similar themes. It is a potential extra source of income for both the writer and the publisher.

Imagine receiving for example 15 different short stories with the same theme (eg. Amazons). Some of them you publish in the magazine. Others stories might get published via other literary magazines thanks to a competitive market and Simultaneous Submissions. But eventually when the time comes you can reprint those stories in an Anthology. A second payday for the writer. Or a third payday if it is eventually featured in multiple anthologies.

Short Stories and Anthologies should be the gift that keeps paying for writers. Not the short story that they struggle to get published in the first place.

Ready to Submit?

Please read our Submission Guidelines before submitting your work to submission@amazonia.lilithpress.ca. Submissions must be accompanied by a completed Submission Form, otherwise we won't even bother reading your work.