Thankfully, with the assistance of the internet, writers have endless opportunities at the tips of their fingers. In the past, you had to mail query letters, purchase/subscribe to magazines and flip to the fine print in the back on how to submit articles, stories, or poems. Now, you just do a quick online search and get instant results to an entire community that you never knew existed before that moment. That’s what happened to me with Zombie Pirate Publishing. Unfortunately, I discovered them just as their call for a flash fiction anthology had ended, which is one of my favorite forms of short stories. On the bright side, they were just starting a call for a horror-themed short story anthology. I had a rough draft of a story sitting around that I thought could be a good fit, so I dusted it off, polished it up, and submitted it! (Turns out it wasn’t a good fit. Maybe next time!)
What I discovered is that Zombie Pirate Publishing is a small, up-and-coming company who is feverishly collecting submissions and putting out anthologies. Their focus from what I can tell is on quality collections, as well as acknowledging and giving credit to the writers themselves. They don’t currently pay for accepted submissions, but it seems like that’s a short-term goal that they are wanting to change as soon as they are in a position to. In the meantime, it’s always helpful for undiscovered writers to be featured in collections and gain more notoriety with wider ranges of readers, so there’s no question about the perk that comes with being selected for one of their anthologies.
They’ve built quite a community online, with co-founders Adam Bennett and Sam Phillips being both active and supportive on the groups’ Facebook page. They keep their community engaged, and have built a nice base because of it.
I recently reached out to one of the founders, Sam Phillips, for more information, and this is what I found out:
The company started in February 2017 with a couple of old friends from northern NSW, Australia. They appeared in anthologies together and wanted to take their careers further as well as help others along the way. The next logical step for them was to apply what they had learned in order to provide high quality anthologies as well as other services and a home to up-and-coming authors. The name Zombie Pirate Publishing came about from a card game which combines factions based on popular memes. They thought zombie pirates sounded cool, so adopted that as the face of their brand.
They threw themselves into the deep end and have produced regular anthologies since. They are up to seven now that their latest was published earlier this month, with multiple others on the horizon. In addition to the collections, they also produce various merchandise featuring their mascot, Pretty Pete the zombie pirate captain. (Editor’s note: he’s not so pretty. But he is pretty awesome, anyway.)
As already mentioned, through all of these efforts, they’ve created a vibrant community on social media for writers to network and submit to their anthologies with a goal of providing a friendly atmosphere for writers to grow and a place for them to get published.
You might think this would be more than enough to keep them busy, but they still find the time and energy to produce works of their own. Sam is a prolific poet, in addition to working with stream of consciousness and some genre fiction. Adam primarily writes short story fiction of all types and also has some novellas to his credit. Their works have appeared in several dozen anthologies and magazines, but writing isn’t all they know. It turns out they both know how to juggle, and Sam also plays drums in a death metal band.
Hmm, writers. They’re an odd breed, amiright??
Hopefully I’ll be able to make this a recurring feature on my site and be able to discover more communities such as Zombie Pirate Publishing. Have any tips on where else I could look? Leave me a note in the comments below!
Thank you, that is all.
