Islet Submission guidelines
What is Islet?
Islet is a new, free, online literary publishing space. It is an initiative of Island magazine, providing a space to promote and support emerging writers and visual artists.
Islet is published quarterly, and each issue features the work of one visual artist, alongside approximately two reviews, six poems, and seven works of fiction. Islet has a particular interest in publishing micro writing, so please take careful note of maximum lengths for submissions (below).
Definitions:
Emerging Writers: Islet defines emerging writers as those who are at an early stage in their career and have not yet had a full-length work or collection of their work commercially published.
Emerging Visual Artists: Islet defines emerging visual artists as those who are at an early stage in their career, and who have not had more than one solo exhibition at a commercial or major gallery.
Please ensure that you have thoroughly read the submission guidelines below before submitting work.
Writers
• We accept unsolicited submissions.
• Submissions should be made electronically to the editor at islet.online@utas.edu.au .
• Do not include your work within the email itself, but send it as an attachment, preferably a Word document. (Please don’t submit PDFs.)
• In your short cover email, include your contact details (phone, email, postal) and a very brief biographical note (a few sentences will do).
• You may send us works in a variety of genres, but don’t bombard us with too many pieces of work at a time.
• Maximum lengths are:
- 600 words for fiction;
- 400 words for reviews; and
- 25 lines for poetry.
• Our pay rates are: $75 for prose (fiction or review) and $50 for a poem.
• We do not accept simultaneous submissions.
• While Islet retains copyright over the collection, authors retain copyright over their individual works. Islet requests acknowledgement with any reproduction of the work.
• We do not have fixed deadlines for submissions but welcome work whenever you feel it is ready for consideration. Islet is published quarterly, so even if we accept your work it may not be published immediately.
• A generic 'receipt of submission' email will be sent on receipt of your submission, but please allow up to three months for a decision on your work.
Visual artists
• We accept unsolicited submissions of visual art works.
• Submissions should be made by post to the editor at Islet, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania, 7006, Australia. If you have posted a submission, please let us know by email, at islet.online@utas.edu.au .
• If you have a website of your work that you would like us to look at, please email us a link (making sure you include your name and that you let us know if you have also sent a postal submission).
• Please send your visual images on a disc, clearly labelled with your name and phone number.
• Include a short cover letter with your work (or a cover email if you are referring us to your website), including your contact details (phone, email, postal) and a very brief biographical note.
• Make sure that the images are of high quality and in a standard format. If we do select your work, we may resize it. But for the selection process, we need to be able to see your work at its best, so please do not send small or low resolution images.
• Please include multiple examples of your work (either a series, or disparate works), as we will use multiple images in Islet. But please select carefully – we won’t have time to trawl through a disc with hundreds of files on it to try to find your best work. (More than about 30 images is probably too many.)
• We accept work in a range of visual art forms, but remember that the work will be exhibited in an online format, so there are some forms which will be more suitable than others. (We’re probably not going to publish static images from a dynamic installation work, for example.)
• We pay $250 to the visual artist featured in each issue.
• While Islet retains copyright over the collection, individual artists retain copyright over their works. However, Islet requests acknowledgement in any reproduction of the work.
• We do not have fixed deadlines for submissions but welcome work whenever you feel it is ready for consideration. Islet is published quarterly, so even if we accept your work it may not be published immediately.
• A generic 'receipt of submission' email will be sent on receipt of your submission, but please allow up to three months for a decision on your work.
A general note on “acceptance” and “rejection”
The editor’s decision on which works to publish will be final and will not normally be accompanied by any critique or feedback due to time constraints.
However, if we do not choose to publish your work, it doesn’t necessarily mean we think you should go back to your day job. It’s possible that your work just didn’t suit our context. Or that we simply had too much work for the next few issues. Or maybe that your work just happened to be the seventeenth submission on the same theme and our editor had simply had enough.
Don’t take it personally; if you know you are producing strong work, then submit it somewhere else and keep at it.
Please contact the editor at islet.online@utas.edu.au for more information.