Submission Guidelines

How do you submit?

We accept submissions through the online Submittable platform.  We do not accept submissions sent any other way, whether by email or in hard copy. 

What is our response time?

We aim to respond within a week after receiving your submission on whether we accept it for publication.  We will also add a brief note, either way, on our thoughts in relation to the work.  If accepted for publication, your writing will be posted on the website within another week. 

We reserve the right to edit the work to fit in with our style including but not limited to our aversion for profanity, our being sticklers for grammatical convention (within reason) and simply because we can. 

What type of writing are we looking for?

Did we mention that we focus on African, African-American and Afro-Caribbean themes?  Oh, good.  We also have the following requirements.

For fiction, we want stories where something happens.  We are not interested in bland commentary on a passage in time, the type of storytelling beloved of writing prizes that often leaves us wondering, “what was that all about?”  Our stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  A conundrum presents and is resolved.  We love wit, humor, plot twists, surprises, pacey and edgy dialogue, authentic voice, and innovation in style and prose.

For poetry, we want good, old-fashioned rhyming.  Rhyme, rhyme and rhyme again.  Poetry might mean micro-prose (without rhyme or, sometimes, reason) to some but not to us.  Give us the type of rhyming that rendered classical poetry so memorable.  Make us cry or laugh but do it please in verse. 

Please note that we generally (but not always) avoid using the names of real people, companies and brands in the stories and poems we publish. 

Do we pay you for your work that we publish?

Sorry, no, we do not, at least not ordinarily.  From time to time, we may run competitions that have specific cash prizes, which we will announce on the inception of each competition, payable to winning entries.  Otherwise, we do not pay for writers for their work published on Akikiro

What documentary formats do we accept for submissions?

Please submit your work in doc, docx, or rtf.  We do not do PDFs. 

What are our word limits?

We expect our short fiction to run between 1,000 and 5,000 words.  We also accept flash fiction of less than 1,000 words.

Our poems run up to five verses at the most. 

How many stories or poems can you submit at a time?

Please submit only one story at a time.  You can submit up to five poems at a time.  Please do not submit stories and poems together.  

Do we accept simultaneous submissions?

Yes, we do, but please do tell us before we publish your work if it has been accepted for publication elsewhere.

Who gets the copyright in the work we publish?

Your work is yours.  The copyright remains with you.  Your submission to us however is your agreement granting us “first world rights” – the right to publish the work first – but you can still withdraw the submission at any time before we publish.  After we publish, you are free to publish it elsewhere.

Please note that by contributing content which is published on Akikiro, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and worldwide license to use that content in connection with Akikiro and the operation of our website, including but not limited to the license rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, edit, translate and reformat your content.  We may also, from time to time, use excerpts from your content to promote your work and Akikiro.  Please see our Terms of Use.

Do we accept reprints?

No, we only publish work that has not been published before.