Many genres. No limits. Just great stories.

Fireside Fiction Company started in 2012 as a Kickstarter-funded short-story magazine. We have two goals: to find and publish great stories regardless of genre, and to pay our writers and artists well.

We’ve published dozens of writers over 24 issues since then, from established authors like Mary Robinette Kowal, Daniel José Older, Elizabeth Bear, Ken Liu, Lilith Saintcrow, and Chuck Wendig to authors who made their very first sale to us. We published our first book too, Revision by Andrea Phillips.

Now as we approach Year 4, we're making a big push to get Fireside sustainably funded. Patreon is a huge part of that. Having a stable, regular source of income helps us to plan confidently for the future. 

Fireside costs about $1,750 an issue, of which 85% goes to our writers, artists, and designers. The rest covers fees for things like Paypal and Patreon, web hosting and online storage. We hope to make a profit someday, but we’re dedicated to the idea of great storytelling and fair pay, and we’re in this for the long haul.

Our plan for Year 4 is simple: publish 10,000 words a month, plus an illustration by Galen Dara (who created the image at the top of this page). This will include a mix of flash fiction (1,000 words or less) and short stories, most chosen through our quarterly submissions process. We're committed to both new and established voices, as well as reflecting the endless diversity of the world. We're raising money here and through Year 4 subscription sales. If we don't get to full funding, we'll publish as many words as we can.


Great Storytelling: We don’t think great stories are confined to any one genre, so we look for them everywhere. We’ve had terrific pieces seen through the lenses of sci-fi, romance, crime, Western, non-genre, and horror, among many others. Every issue has a different mix and feel, and that’s been a lot of fun. Our only criteria is that the stories, as Neil Gaiman put it in the introduction to the Stories anthology, keep readers saying “… and then what happened?”

Fair Pay: We also think that writers deserve to be paid well for their work and to be able to make a living from it. Fireside pays 12.5 cents a word, which is well above rates that are considered professional. (For example, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America qualifying rate is 6 cents a word.) Our rate translates to $500 for a 4,000-word story, which we think is fair considering the amount of time storytellers put into writing and revising their work. That's money they can use to pay their rent, buy food for their kids, or heat their home this winter.