Submissions for our Winter 2025 issue will open on the 1st of November 2024.
Submissions for pitches are open on a rolling basis. You can submit you pitch via email; please send us your pitch at hello@tasavvurnama.com, but please go through this page for information on format and what we’re looking for first!
Minimum is 1,000 words and Maximum is 5,000 words.
Minimum is 250 words while maximum is 500 words. Commissioned pieces are usually around 2,000 words depending on the topic.
We pay 2.5 cents per word for stories up-to 5,000 words.
We pay a flat rate of $100 for commissioned pieces.
Give us your dreamscapes and nightmares, your soaring fantasies, your futuristic miasmas. Give us also your unstructured ramblings, where a story exists at the edges, dripping with lush, brilliant prose. We are not sticklers for the usual 3-act, 5-act structures, because great storytelling is so much more than that. So send us your lores written in reverse, written in verses, written in the form of email exchanges across multiverses, or haphazard POVs. Which is not to say we won’t accept a story with a usual structure. A good hero’s journey is a good hero’s journey. But if you’re doing that, take chances, and twist it!
While we are welcome to any pitches you may have that pertain to South Asian spec fic in any manner, we are particularly interested in publishing the following type of work:
Please follow the manuscript format.
We’re looking to understand the concept behind your piece and see whether it’s a good fit for us, so please give us a clear outline that explains the trajectory of your piece, any sources you may reference, and any other relevant information. If you’re familiar with academic work, think of it as submitting an abstract.
If your pitch is accepted, we will commission you to write your complete piece.
Other things to note:
There’s no topic that’s strictly taboo for us, but anything that contains the following is a hard pass from us.
Our definition of South Asia is not restricted to traditional geographical terms and we welcome authors from neighboring regions and diaspora communities to submit too. We also highly encourage authors from traditionally under-represented communities to submit, such as but not restricted to: Women, LQBTQIA+ identifying, BIPOC, people with disabilities, religious and/0r ethnic minorities. If you are from one or more such community, we encourage you to please mention it in your email.
However, please do not submit to us if you are not from any BIPOC community—Tasavvur is a magazine dedicated to publishing authors of South Asian origin and other BIPOC authors, so we’ll have to turn you down as we’re not the market for you.
If you are unsure of whether you’re eligible to submit, feel free to get touch with us! You can find us on Twitter (@tasavvurnama) or email us (hello@tasavvurnama.com).
How to Submit: We currently only accept submissions through the form on our website. Please do not email us your submission. If you email us your submission, there is a high likelihood we’ll miss your submission or not accept it. Thank you.
Submission Type: Tasavvur only accepts short story submissions for short fiction. Please don’t send us flash fiction, poetry, or longer pieces; we’ll have to reject them even if we read them and love them.
Unpublished Work: We only accept submissions of original content, i.e. never published before, not even on blogs.
Simultaneous Submissions: We accept simultaneous submissions, however if your piece is accepted elsewhere before we get in touch with you, please let us know!
Multiple Submissions: Only one submission per author per submission cycle please.
Resubmissions: Please do not resubmit a previously rejected story unless we have sent you a Revise & Resubmit (R&R).
Please feel free to keep your cover letter brief. Feel free to mention whether you fit into our Diversity statement in any way, or to tell us about past publications (if any), mention any content warnings for your submission. Other than that, please do not explain your submission in your cover letter. Thank you!
Tasavvur aims to reprint a spec-fic story by a South Asian author in every issue. We are especially interested in reprinting stories that may not be available online yet. If you think you have a piece that qualifies, feel free to email us at submit@tasavvurnama.com
When you submit a piece or pitch to us, you will receive an automated confirmation email via Moksha. If you do not receive a confirmation email within a day, please reach out on submit@tasavvurnama.com.
Other than that, we send out decisions roughly three weeks after our submissions close. So if our submissions are closing on June 30th, expect to hear back by July 18th or so (if not earlier). If you submitted a piece to us and didn’t hear back a decision, please reach out to us! Sometimes things get lost in cross-dimensional travel 
Also, since the South Asian spec fic scene is still developing and a lot of the authors who submit to us are fresh writers, we do our best to offer some level of feedback with each rejection.
We did a handy Twitter thread about our submission which you can see here. If you have any further questions about our submissions, feel free to reach out to us via email (hello@tasavvurnama.com) or social media.
Our submission window opens on the 1st of November, 2024