Blaze Ward Presents

Theme

Our world has been destroyed, and humanity is trying to survive in the bleak aftermath. Your stories can be either horror or post-apoc (good guys will lose or win in the end, basically) with an expectation of “somebody” external destroying everything. Alien invasion. Kaiju hatching. Dread Gods from outside time and Euclidean geometry awakening. Take your pick.

The scale can be large or small, global or personal, but all takes place in the shadow of powerful beings of inimical intent hunting down the survivors to the last woman and child.

What we are not looking for:

The Face In The Mirror. Humans did not do this to themselves. Stories of nuclear war, random plagues, or some other faceless causes will be ignored because you didn’t read the directions and are wasting everyone’s time.

Reprints. We’re looking for original work, never before published. The editors might make exceptions on inquiry, but the story itself would have to be of exceptional quality. Otherwise you will have to be able to grant us world-wide, first use, English-language license to the work with a six month exclusivity from the date of publication.

Length and Style

The Blaze Ward Presents Special Anthologies are open to just about anything that can be conveyed on paper. We’ve done poetry, lyrics, and song scores as well as literary pursuits. If it can be done in a book or ebook, I’m in. Musical scores would be nice if someone were to also include the appropriate url to the website where readers could listen and even buy the music.

Stories must be under 20,000 words. I have to read all the submissions, and that can be huge. Plus, I’m not paying by the word (see below), so tell the story as it needs to be told, rather than worrying about coming in too short or being a bit much for a short story.

Schedules

Given the nature of the theme, we’re hope to publish approximately Oct 1, 2022, as part of the big push to Halloween in the western world. Working backwards, final drafts of stories must be complete and delivered to the editor no later than June 30, 2022. If your story requires redrafting but comes in tight on the deadline, it will probably not be accepted. Feel free to get your story in early enough that the editor might be able to work with you to better fit the overall emotional journey we are about to undertake.

Payment

As part of the Modern Indie Sensibility (write it, publish it, move on), this anthology will be done via a Royalty-share model, with the house taking 25% of income and all authors in the anthology evenly splitting the remaining 75%, earning income from day one without a reserve. There will be no advance on acceptance nor on publication.

In the case that we are able to recruit a “Big Name Author” to participate, that person may be paid a professional rate up front instead of taking a share off the back. (TBD)

Distribution will be handled via Bundlerabbit, using their collaboration method that the editor has used in the past for his two ongoing series: Boundary Shock Quarterly and Blaze Ward Presents. The anthology will be available via the major distributors (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo) as an ebook and via Amazon as a print book.

Other

Questions can be addressed to the editor at blaze [AT] blazeward [DOT] com

Submissions are to be sent to the same inbox with a subject line of “Anthology: After the Fall” to get past the spam filters. Please make sure to use the .docx file format for your submission, as other formats will not be accepted.

We look forward to hearing from you.