Contest and Submission Rules

You may download these rules in PDF format.

If you have questions, write to Questions@OnThePremises.com.


No Entry Fees!

There is NO FEE for entering our contests.


 Contest Rules

1. Your story MUST be based on the current contest premise. Please make the connection between your story and the contest premise obvious! The more obvious, the better. Your entry will lose points (seriously!) if we have to work hard to figure out how it uses the premise.

2. Your story MUST NOT have been published elsewhere in any format, not even on a blog. However, it is okay to send us a story that has been posted to an on-line criticism board that requires a password or similar membership mechanism. In fact, we encourage using such boards, as long as they are available only to official members. Getting critiqued is good!

3. Your story’s length MUST be between 1,000 words and 5,000 words. Titles don’t count towards the word limits unless they’re so long we think you’re trying to get away with something. End-of-story markers like [end] also don’t count.

4. Your story MUST be submitted to us via the link provided below (also on the main contest page) within the time period specified for the contest you’re entering.

5. One submission per author per contest. If you submit two entries before a contest deadline, the second one replaces the first.

6. Stories MUST be in English. It’s okay to use non-American spelling (though if your story is published, we’ll Americanize all spellings prior to publishing). Also, it’s okay to have a little bit of non-English, if necessary, but no more than a little.

7. No fan fiction and no pastiches, not even ones using public-domain characters like Dracula, Little Red Riding Hood, Sherlock Holmes, or Tom Sawyer. And certainly, no copyrighted characters like Harry Potter, Goku from Dragonball Z, etc. If you wonder where the line is drawn, read this story and note how Elmer Fudd and other Warner Bros. characters are not really those characters, but impersonators.


How to Submit an Entry

All communication regarding your entry will come from Entries@OnThePremises.com. Please make sure your spam filters don’t block that address.

Use this SubMishMash link to submit your story. (If the link takes you to a page that says we’re not accepting submissions, then we’re between contests and will be starting a new contest soon.)

 You will need a FREE SubMishMash account to submit to our contest. However, many other magazines use SubMishMash too, so if you’re serious about getting your short fiction published, it’s a good idea to have an account anyway.

1. In the space provided for a cover letter, please give us all your contact information. We’d also like to hear that your story is an original, unpublished work and that, as far as you know, you have not committed plagiarism. Here’s a template you can download and use for the body of your cover letter.

2. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not include your name, your e-mail address, your postal address, or any other identifying information anywhere in the story itself! Put your name and contact information only in the cover letter that accompanies your entry. We’re THIS CLOSE to automatically disqualifying people who break this rule, or at least deleting the entry and asking for a re-submittal.
Additional Information

These aren’t rules as much as part of a FAQ that will be built as more questions come up.

1. On The Premises buys HTML and PDF publication rights to your story. All other rights are retained by the author. If we want to purchase additional rights, we will begin new talks with authors at that time.

2. An entry can be written by more than one person. However, one person must act as the official representative of that entry, and On The Premises will communicate only with that representative. If a multi-person team wins a prize, we will send payment to the representative, and the team must decide how to divide the money.

3. On The Premises deletes all stories that it receives and does not publish. We also delete the original e-mails after a contest is over. We DO NOT share e-mail addresses (or your fiction) with any other organization.