Taking Submissions: BAM! Magazine Fall 2025 Window

Submission Window: October 21st – November 21st, 2025
Payment: $50
Theme: Pulpy short stories with punch! Most Speculative fiction is welcome if it’s pulpy!

Bam! Wants your stories with PUNCH! Send us up to 3000 – 7500 words of your pulpy short fiction. Genre really doesn’t matter but we are more likely to pick up an adventurous space opera, or gritty crime story, or gun slinging western over something like a teen romance, but that doesn’t mean we’ll turn down a punchy, pulpy teen romance. Don’t know if you should send it? Fuck it, send it anyway. The worst that’ll happen is you’ll get a reply that says “no.” No big whoop. But there’s a chance you’ll get a “we can work with you on this” or even a “we’ll take it here’s some money!” We buy first Print Rights. After your story is published in BAM! your rights revert to you, but we will own the digital and print versions within BAM! Magazine in perpetuity. If you resell a story that BAM! published first tag it as “first appearing in BAM! Magazine volume/issue/date”

Short fiction is an art in decline and here at Bam! we feel that specialization has made it worse. We know this because the editorial staff of Bam! are writers who’ve tried and often failed to land stories in the short fiction market that has segmented into micro-silos by genre and other factors not related to the writing itself. Bam! isn’t here to change your mind about people from somewhere else or orientations that you don’t understand. There are other anthologies and magazines that specialize in that. We don’t care! To be completely honest we don’t give a shit if you’re white, black, green, plaid, or a disembodied hand possessed by the ghost of a long dead Voodoo priest, we don’t care if you’re straight, gay, trans, or furry or — I dunno — whatever. We don’t care. However if you use your story to punch down, you won’t get in, ever.

What we care about is stories with PUNCH! We want to be flipping the pages so fast because we can’t wait to see where the story is going that it eclipses everything else. We want to go back and reread it because we were so caught up we think we missed stuff, good stuff! We want to message our friends and tell them, “hey I just read something crazy good!” and that’s writing with PUNCH!

Have something longer and more intricate than 7500 words? We’ll look at your longer work up to 15000 words if it can be cut into serialized chapters, but it’s got to have PUNCH! We want the readers to be smiling when they finish your story, energized, exhausted even, from the ride you’ve just taken them on. And we want them salivating at the thought of the next installment.

Do you need to be a pro? Nope! Do you need previous sales? Nope! Do you need to understand that spell checking and grammar checking are your friends during the drafting stage? Yes! We will edit with you but we won’t teach you the basics.

We probably can’t save short fiction, but we can fight to keep it alive, and the only way to do that is to throw a PUNCH!

Now, go write me a story.

Bam!

Oh, one other thing. If you want to get to the front of the line with your submission. Every issue of Bam! has a Secret Word hidden within. Send me your submission with the correct Secret Word from the previous issue and I’ll read your work and respond with feedback pretty much as soon as I receive it. This isn’t just a way to get you to send us money, though more on that in a minute, but it’s a way for you to get a feel for the stories that we take. The money angle is important too, we are a paying market — $50 flat fee for a short story sold to Bam! so anything we raise goes towards the costs of creating Bam! and paying the authors who appear in it. And, we want to pay more than $50, lots more, and the best way to do that is to buy a copy of the magazine. It’s pretty cheap, go on, you know you want to.

Oh, and about AI…

Here’s the deal. If you submit something and we realize it’s AI generated you will be mercilessly mocked by name in the pages of BAM! That doesn’t mean you can’t use AI to do a spelling and grammar pass over your story before submitting. These are tools after all. But full on AI generation will be met with scorn and ridicule. Don’t test me. This goes for artists as well.

Via: BAM! Magazine (This link will be active on the 21st!).