We are BarBar.
And we are a genre fluid platform. We publish everything from the standards to the experimental, and every genre bending type in between. Just write it, tag it, and submit it. The only thing important to us is your voice. We want the ideas from left-field, the flash of inspiration at 3am, the flicker of inspiration on the highway you had to pull over onto the shoulder to scribble down, a slice-of-life, the story you’ve passed around to friends, neighbors, and strangers you’ve passed on the street (regardless of if they liked the story or not), and those chapter excerpts from that epic fantasy masterpiece you’ve been working on for years.
We accept many types of submissions, including: poetry, fiction, flash fiction, plays, musicals, lyrics, essays, nonfiction, novel excerpts, photography, and art.
Our goal is to offer as many avenues as possible for you to have your voice heard.
This has been brewing behind the scenes at BarBar for quite some time. We are expanding our reach from poetry and prose to now include art as well. And we would love to welcome you into our BarBar family.
What We Are Looking For - Everything! From your sketches to your masterworks. All styles and mediums are welcomed. Give us your best painting of a fruit basket, your newest digital art creation, your most surrealistic hallucinatory self-portrait. We want it all - conceptual, classical, contemporary, collage, color field painting - all of it!
We are currently accepting individual pieces and collections. You are welcome to submit a single piece, or multiple pieces to be considered individually. If you would like to submit multiple pieces to be considered as a singular collection, please indicate that in your submission.
Submission Guidelines:
Simultaneous submissions are fine but please let us know as soon as possible if it is accepted elsewhere.
Artists are free to submit multiple times. In fact, we encourage it. We would love to help you build a fanbase!
We accept previously published work as long as you hold the rights to the work. By signing our publishing agreement you are ensuring that you are legally allowed to give us the rights to publish your work.
Format Instructions:
We accept the follow file types: pdf, jpg, jpeg, png. If you are submitting multiple pieces to be considered, please upload each artwork as an individual file. Thank you.
After Submission Guide:
All pieces accepted will be published on our free to access website www.bebarbar.com. Some will be selected for inclusion in our Virtual Gallery - a unique digital experience provided to our Patreon subscribers.
Unfortunately, we are unable to provide monetary compensation at the time. We encourage submitters to view us as a promotional service, like the best friend your work has ever had. We will promote your work, connect you with a large viewership base, and link your work to any social media accounts you would like to provide as well as any personal pages where our readers can come and purchase your work.
Expect a response turnaround time of a month. Sometimes we are faster.
In the event we do not accept your submission, please do not be discouraged. Keep working, submit again, submit elsewhere, or opt in for our personalized feedback.
Welcome!
This is our general submissions. All submitted work is considered for our monthly online publication, shared with our 700+ subscribers and our quarterly Submit Magazine (digital and physical). We are a genre-fluid platform. We accept work that displays vulnerability, imagination, and the best of liars. We're a platform for inspiration. We don't like gatekeepers. We don't mind discomfort. Most of all, we want writing that makes you tick.
We charge a reading fee to cover the cost of our operation and pay our writers (read below to see how it works). Our Editors donate their time. The best way to keep track of our free submission windows (or participate in our upcoming themes) is to subscribe to our free (monthly) newsletter. You can do that here.
How it works:
We don’t pay for all published work, but all works published online qualify for our annual BarBe Awards. We nominate works in January, we join our readers in voting in February, and announce winners in March. Winners receive a portion of our “writers fund” and are published in the summer edition of Submit Magazine. To qualify, you must be published on the site in the preceding year. For example, 2024 awards will go to 2023 online publications.
In 2023 we paid our 5 winners $50 each.
In 2024 we are paying our 5 winners $75 each.
In 2025 we project to pay our 5 winners $130 each.
In addition to the BarBe awards, we choose six nominations for the Pushcart Prize every fall.
After Submission:
Our response time varies from 1 to 5 months. We are quickest to decline work but sometimes we hang on to a submission for future projects. We accept simultaneous submissions. If your work is selected for publication elsewhere, withdraw via submittable and please consider us again in the future. We do not read withdrawn work.
Suggested Format:
We have a soft cap on word count: 5000 words for prose, 10 pages for poetry.
We do not accept previously published work. (Publication on your personal website is fine.)
Please adhere to standard formatting when submitting prose. 12pt font, Times Roman or similar, double spaced. Poetry or Prose with unconventional paragraph structure is encouraged, but if accepted, we cannot guarantee our website can duplicate non-standard spacing.