Q: Describe what you publish in 25 characters or less.
A: flash, artistic, modern
Q: What other current publications (or publishers) do you admire most?
A: Writers Digest, WriterMag, Poets & Writers, American Short Fiction
Q: If you publish writing, who are your favorite writers? If you publish art, who are your favorite artists?
A: My favorite writers to publish are upcoming, innovative, and unique in their style and content. Writers who format and edit well get special attention because they put the extra effort. Flora Fiction publishes writers and poets of all ages and background. As for artists, we love publishing all types of painters, illustrators, and photographers. Art is subjective and so it's hard to pick favorites, but we always enjoy those who push the boundaries of their abilities.
Q: What sets your publication apart from others that publish similar material?
A: Flora Fiction is not only a literary magazine of fiction, poetry, illustration, and photography, it's also a platform for artists to come together and share their work. We publish some that we're unable to accept in our magazine to our website and others who specifically prefer website publication. It's a great way to reach a broader audience and add to your repertoire of publications.
Q: What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?
A: Read previous issues, submission guidelines, and formatting standards. Stay within word count and on theme. Keep content relevant, nonoffensive, and avoid derogatory language. Most of all, formatting is a huge deciding factor in your acceptance.
Q: Describe the ideal submission.
A: Show don't tell. Give us vivid imagery and storytelling. An ideal submission follows the guidelines on the website and brings a fresh new voice to our publication. We seek upcoming artists who haven't been published before but do not discourage others who have been.
Q: What do submitters most often get wrong about your submissions process?
A: Submitters often go wrong when they exceed word count and do not read previous issues. We can always tell when you haven't done either, and will most likely result in your work being unacceptable.
Q: How much do you want to know about the person submitting to you?
A: When submitting, we ask for a short bio and social media links. This has no factor in your acceptance as our editors edit without this information. We only ask for publication purposes so we can share with others who you are and where to find you.
Q: If you publish writing, how much of a piece do you read before making the decision to reject it?
A: We read every piece sent to us at least three times. First, your work goes to our editors for initial reaction, then submissions are divvied up and redistributed among the staff to edit some more. After this, I, the Editor-in-Chief, go through the submissions again before sending out a full draft of the magazine for final edits.
Q: What additional evaluations, if any, does a piece go through before it is accepted?
A: Before being accepted, your work has been seen by at least three sets of eyeballs that work for Flora Fiction. Final evaluations depend on applicability to the issue theme and cohesion with other works.
Q: What is a day in the life of an editor like for you?
A: My daily consists of answering and sending emails, reviewing submissions to publish on the website, delgating tasks, creating content for social media, spreading awareness of the publication, and managing the website backend. For a while, I thought I could be a one-woman show, but once we started to include other editors, Flora Fiction truly began to blossom. It's with the help of our editorial staff that makes this possible.
Q: How important do you feel it is for publishers to embrace modern technologies?
A: Modern technology is so important that we are primarily a digital publication. Although we have a few printed copies ordered, less than 1% of our readers actually purchase it. Almost all of our readers are on mobile devices or desktop, and we've had over 30,000 impressions on a single issue. Technology is the path for the present and the future.
Q: How much do you edit an accepted piece prior to publication?
A: We prefered to do basic edits such as spellcheck and grammatical errors. We tend to avoid rearranging sentence and story structure as it takes too much of our time to do this substantial editing.
Q: Do you nominate work you've published for any national or international awards?
A: We are considering some sort of nominating and/or award at the end of the year. Please stay tuned!