Folly welcomes submissions from around the world.
Submissions are open year round on the Submittable platform, and via the link below. Please do not email submissions to our team directly.
Folly Journal: Publishing twice yearly, we are particularly interested in personal essays and journalistic-style articles, as well as short stories and poetry that explore society, politics, culture and the sensual side of life.
Folly Press: We are actively seeking frank, funny and intelligent essay collections and memoir. We are also open for fiction manuscripts. We encourage you to read a Folly Journal issue ahead of submitting to understand the tone and work we publish. You can find them here.
Folly Anthologies: We hold regular calls for themed anthologies, including erotica. Keep an eye on our socials for details.
Submission guidelines
Submissions to Folly Journal and Anthologies
Individual entries mustn’t exceed 2500 words. Don’t take this as a target, many successful submissions are shorter.
Each submission can include one piece of prose, of up to 2500 words or three poems, or up to two pages of other experimental content.
Submitted work must be in English, with 1.5 spacing and in a standard font. They must be submitted as Word documents and saved as firstname_lastname_title.
We will endeavour to respond to all submissions within two weeks, and all shortlisted submitters within four weeks. Due to the influx of submissions, our response times may vary at times.
Payment Policy
Folly is an independent press operating as a social enterprise to serve beautiful culturally relevant books to the world. We do not receive public grants or funding. Like other international literary publications, the journal and anthologies exist thanks to voluntary support. Our small submission fees enable us to:
Ensure our contracted production team, excluding our founders, receive a stipend or payment for their work. This includes typesetters, contracted editors and designers.
Provides a professional payment to freelance writers who pitch directly to us.
Provide contributor copies or a small payment to all contributors whose works are submitted through the public portal.
FAQs
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Submissions to various Folly publications are open year round.
For our journal, submissions tend to open over February - end April each year. Please keep an eye on our socials and our submission dates in Submittable - which are always up to date.
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If you have been longlisted, you will be notified as soon as possible and usually within a few weeks of submitting.
If your work has not been longlisted, you will usually hear back from us within two weeks of submitting.
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We encourage you to purchase a copy of Folly to familiarise yourself with the tone and content we enjoy.
You can purchase Folly as an e-book through Amazon and other providers, indie bookstores or from our website.
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For the journal and anthologies, we have a small budget to split evenly amongst contributors. The amount paid will depend on the total number of submissions accepted but will be between $25 - $50 per entry.
Manuscripts and sole-author books are negotiated with our authors.
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We appreciate that frankness and honesty in writing requires courage.
For this reason we happily accept stories and poems from writers who wish to use a pseudonym.
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Yes. Events are run as a Friends of Folly Members event. To be invited to a soiree, please join us as patron or member of our community.
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Folly publishes human art. We accept some writers may use AI tools to support the creative process, but we will not publish writing that has been generated by AI.
In terms of how we treat your words, no part of any submission is used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. Submissions are assessed by humans through the Submittable platform. Folly's internally designed operating and editorial system supports our operational processes, and prohibits training on submitted work. Every editorial decision is made by a human.