Olit
There are presently no open calls for submissions.
While we prefer writers with a connection to Orlando or the greater Central Florida area, Olit will accept quality writing meeting our aesthetic and criteria from writers anywhere around the world. What do we mean by aesthetic and criteria? We’re glad you asked.
Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Hybrid, Artwork, Photography. Send us all kinds of stuff. We love the artfully weird.
We aim to focus primarily on publishing marginalized voices. LGBTQIA+ is a big plus with us. BIPOC voices will always be uplifted here. Disabled? Incarcerated? Low income? Other marginalized voices? Please send us your work. If you do not consider yourself marginalized, your submission is still welcome at Olit if it meets our other criteria.
Our aesthetic is best defined as gritty with grace, fast food parking lots in the middle of the night, the underbelly of a tourist city the locals know by memories. We want quality writing with heart and teeth. Give us words that bite back, stories full of verve, and the poems you wouldn’t let Grandma read. We are not the Academy/highbrow lit scene. We are indie and intellectual, raw yet polished. Send us only your best.
We welcome simultaneous submissions. We would never ask you not to submit your work to more than one place at a time. Any lit journal still doing that should be banished and left behind. Please send us only previously unpublished works.
We welcome multiple submissions. Have a short story perfect for us? Looking to publish some poems at the same time? That is fine with us, but please submit them as separate submissions. Please only send one submission per genre until you hear back from us on your existing submissions.
We do not believe in charging reading fees. It’s hard enough to be a writer without being nickel and dimed. Reading fees also create a barrier to publication for many marginalized voices, which is why Olit will never charge writers to submit.
We believe writers deserve monetary compensation for their hard work. As a small literary startup, we are unable to offer a big fancy bankroll. We are only able to pay contributors $10 (PayPal) for publication at this time. If nothing else, 10 bucks will get you a few days of coffee drinking/loitering at your favorite coffee shop or a Chipotle burrito. We hope to offer a more substantial payment in the future.
Submission Length: Olit will consider fiction and creative nonfiction of up to 5,000 words. We also like flash pieces in these genres. When submitting, please send only 1 long piece or up to 3 flash pieces of up to 700 words each. For poetry, please send us up to 5 poems of any length.
If your work is selected for publication, Olit retains the first North American serial rights to publish, produce, reproduce, distribute, and market your accepted submission. All other remaining rights revert to the author upon publication. If the work is published again, we ask for a credit line indicating that the work first appeared in Olit.