Submission Guidelines
Sparkler Magazine publishes clean, age-appropriate short fiction for our YA-loving audience. We want stories that inspire adventure and imagination, that take the reader out of the norm and into the delightful.
To avoid having your awesome submission rejected, be sure to read through our guidelines. Pretend it’s English class and you’re studying for the final. Note the nitty-gritty details, and your work will shine all the brighter.
Your Story
Keep your well-edited story between 700 and 1,000 words.
Choose any genre that’s a good fit for a young adult audience, ages 12-18 (historical, speculative, suspense, romance, contemporary, etc.)
Flash fiction is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end, characters, and plot.
WE DO NOT PUBLISH:
Previously published flash fiction.
Poetry.
Fan fiction. Be sure your stories comply with copyright and trademark law.
AI-generated text or team efforts. You must be the sole author of your submitted story. You’re creative and talented enough to pull this off. We promise.
Scenes/excerpts/synopses from novels (however, you can use existing characters from your own novels).
Excessive violence, profanity, or erotica in any form. We’re here for the teenage crowd. Keep it PG. The world can be dark enough; we’re here to be a light.
We also don’t want preachy stories, whether political, religious, or otherwise. You only have 1,000 words. Use them well.
Flash Fiction Sample Stories: Check out our current issue to get a feel for the well-written flash fiction we’re looking to publish.
Submission Process
We only accept submissions when the submission window is open. (See our upcoming issues for submission periods.)
We only consider submissions that fit our upcoming issues. If you submit a story that doesn’t fit this issue’s theme, it will be rejected. Hard stop.
Review our FORMATTING GUIDELINES carefully for instructions on how to format your story.
Fill out our SUBMISSION FORM completely and attach your properly formatted story.
We only accept submissions through our SUBMISSION FORM with attached MS Word docs (.doc or .docx file extensions).
Acquisitions & Rejections
If our acquisitions team selects your story, we’ll email you after the submission period ends. However, because we have so many incredible clean YA authors submitting, we won’t be able to respond to every submission. We won’t send rejection emails.
Important: Add sparklermag@gmail.com to your allowed senders list, or our reply may go to your junk/spam email folder.
Tip: If we don’t acquire your story (this time), use it for social media content! Make a quick graphic and post it for your followers. Who doesn’t love a quick story? And be sure to submit to our next issue. The more you write, the more experience you gain!
Fees & Payments
At this time, there is no fee to submit your stories to Sparkler.
While we don’t pay contributors, we love highlighting our authors on social media and giving them a publishing credit. Once a Sparkler, always a Sparkler! You’re helping build this clean YA community, and we are so thankful.
Before You Submit
Take a moment to check that your story follows the guidelines and is formatted properly. If something’s off, just update it and resubmit so we can take a look.
Please see our upcoming issues page for deadlines and themes for the current issue.
Thank you for your interest in Sparkler! If you have additional questions, you may email us here.
