Zotapine

Submission Guidelines

So you want to submit to Zotapine. Awesome! We'd love to see what you have to offer. Before you submit, please read the relevant guidelines below.


Table of Contents



Technical Guidelines

We accept short fiction and nonfiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, visual art of all types, short films and mixed-media collages, including internet-specific art.

We do not accept editorials, lists, any prose or poetry over 10,000 words or previously published material. Letters to the editor are not published, though credit is given when a factual error is identified.

Contact Instructions

We prefer electronic submissions; send them to submit@zotapine.com. Please put the title of your submission, your full name, and your e-mail address in the first three lines of your e-mail. No attachments.

If we need the permission of a company, distribution center, or other third party to publish your work, please provide the appropriate contact information at the beginning of your piece. Keep in mind that we are not in a position to pay contributors or any third parties.

We accept snail-mail submissions of the following, and only the following:

Here is our mailing address:

Zotapine
2140 Shattuck Avenue
#2030
Berkeley, CA 94704

Prose + Poetry

Include your submission in the body of your e-mail. If the format of your piece is too nontraditional to incorporate in plaintext, please send us a link to a photograph or screencap under the guidelines for Visual Arts submissions. If your story includes html elements such as pop-up windows, moving text, etc., please send us a link to a mock-up or include the details paranthetically.

For interviews and book submissions, see further information below.


Visual Arts

Visual arts include drawings, paintings, photography, comics and all relevant images in any submission (such as pictures that illustrate a story). Send an external link to an image file. If you don't have a website, use such image hosting sites as domaindlx or photobucket.

Jpeg, png and gif files are preferred. We like looking at high resolution images.


Music + Video

Electronic: Send us an unencrypted external link to the file: for music, mp3 and m4a are preferred; for video, avi, mpeg, or mp4 are preferred. Do not send us a link to a webpage with the file embedded in it, such as YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yousendit, etc.

You can also mail us a CD or DVD.


Interviews

Send a short e-mail describing your subject, what's interesting about them and why you'd like to interview them. If you have any previous interview experience, link to some clips.


Book Reviews

Please provide the title, author and publishing house for all books reviewed at the beginning of your article. If you would like you or your client's book to be reviewed, send a copy to the mailing address above.


Other

For submissions such as collaborative projects, web-based programs, interactive stories and anything else that doesn't quite fit the above guidelines, please send a concise, two to five paragraph description of what you have in mind. If you have a mock-up on the web, please send us a link.



Content Guidelines

What, exactly, are we looking for? The answer is the same as for anyone, reader, writer or editor: we are looking for art that appeals to our subjective sensibilities. This section isn't here to tell you what to send: it's to give you an idea of where those sensibilities lie, what catches our attention and how we define catch-all words like "original," "creative" and, our favorite, "evocative."

Nobody wants to eat the same meal at the same restaurant every day, even if it is at Sizzler. For the same reason, nobody wants to read the same story in the same magazine every month: it's boring. This isn't to imply that we only accept "revolutionary" art, or work that goes out of its way to defy convention for its own sake (that too would become repetitive). Art that sets out with only the purpose to "change the way the world thinks about art," though a laudable goal, tends to fall flat and have little depth outside of the creator's ambitions.

We like seeing people take an old or established concept, like the epiphanic short story, zombie movies, cubism, or fanfiction and turning it into something engaging in an unexpected way. We like people combining, inventing, or just plain shirking categories, like The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, Moravagine or Invisible Cities. Most of all, we like seeing something we could never imagine ourselves done very well. (Insert your jokes here.)

We encourage you to submit, even if you think your submission doesn't fit the "house style" or is atypical for what you've seen in the past issues. In your life, you will have many ideas that will only occur to you. You can't implement all of your ideas, but developing, following through and sharing them is one of the most powerful things you can do.



Legal Rights

All rights to the published material revert back to the creator after publication. Zotapine has the right to publish your piece once and all subsequent publications are at the discretion of the author.



Download PDF

Download a pdf version of our guidelines. If you're using windows, right-click and hit "save target as." If you're using a mac, hit the "option" key before clicking on the link.