What is Fireside?

Fireside Fiction Company started in 2012 as a Kickstarter-funded short-story magazine. We began with the goals of finding and publishing great stories regardless of genre, and paying our writers well. Since Nov. 8, 2016, we have a third goal: resisting the global rise of fascism and far-right populism, starting with the current occupant of the White House.

For general inquiries, please contact [email protected]. For press requests, please email [email protected].

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Fair pay for everyone

Fair pay is a big deal for us. We think creative people should be able to make a living from their work. This is one of our core values.

Fireside pays USD 12.5 cents per word, well above the 8 cents currently considered to be the minimum professional rate. In fact, we pay better than almost every other SFWA -qualifying market. For illustrations, we pay $400 for a full-color piece.

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Supporting Fireside

Running Fireside isn’t cheap. Most of our revenue goes to pay for our writers and artists. The way we keep doing what we do is with your direct financial support.

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Fireside is brought to you by:

Pablo Defendini — Publisher & Art Director

Pablo Defendini is a designer and developer for hire, with a focus on editorial design for digital media. He helped launch Tor.com, before moving on to work for companies that sit in the overlap between publishing and technology, like Open Road Media and O’Reilly. Pablo was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, lives in New York City, and works with people all over the world.

Brian White — Founding Editor

Brian started Fireside in 2012 with a Kickstarter and a whole lot of love. Over the next five years as editor and publisher – with the help of his amazing team and of Lauren, his wife and partner in crime – he expanded Fireside from a one-off magazine to a monthly publication to its current form, a site with weekly fiction and occasional nonfiction. Fireside published 150 stories under his tenure, as well as five novels and one novella. He is deeply proud to have had a part in bringing those stories into the world. He was gratified to have proved that writers can be paid more for their work than the industry accepted, and perhaps most proud of the #BlackSpecFic report that Fireside published in 2016. He stepped down as editor and publisher in the summer of 2017, but he remains an equity partner in the company.

Please see our Contributors Index for a full list of all of the editors, authors, illustrators, narrators, and translators who make Fireside possible.

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Submissions Guidelines

Please see our Submissions page for information about our open reading periods and our submissions guidelines.

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Content Notes

Fireside provides content notes for books and stories to guide readers who may wish to seek out or avoid particular story elements. These content notes may contain spoilers.

Content notes are not the same as the ratings found on movies, TV shows, and video games. The intent is to help trauma survivors avoid being surprised by story elements that may trigger pain or emotional distress. So we don’t offer warnings about general violence, profanity, sex, or other things one sees in a movie rating.

We welcome suggestions for elements to include or exclude. You can email us at [email protected]. (Please do not send submissions here. Any stories sent to this address will be deleted unread.)

Here is a list of some of the elements we currently offer notes for:

Alcohol Abuse

Animal Abuse

Child Abuse

Child Death

Domestic Violence

Drug Abuse

Emotional Abuse

Gender-Bias Violence

LGBTQ-Bias Violence

Racial/Ethnic-Bias Violence

Self-Harm

Sexual Assault

Suicide

Torture

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