Submissions Guidelines

Hardluck Stories closed to submissions when the zine ended its run in 2008. This page preserves the final call for submissions as a historical document — the announcement that gave the zine its send-off issue — along with notes on how the zine read and selected work during its five years.

One Last Call for Hardluck Stories

After a five-year run, Hardluck Stories announced it would be shutting down — but going out with a bang, with one final issue. The theme was 30s Pulp Noir. The editors were Ed Gorman and Dave Zeltserman, and the illustrations would be by the incomparable Jean-Pierre Jacquet. Maximum story length was 4,000 words; the deadline was May 1st, 2008.

The call itself laid out the territory. Pulp fiction was a major form of entertainment in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties of the last century. Its stories ranged from the gothic heroics of The Shadow to the street realism of Sam Spade, and from pulp fiction evolved many of the stories and tropes that crime writers read and write today. The issue would publish stories honoring the traditions of those great and sometimes not-so-great magazines that once numbered more than three hundred.

Stories could reflect the whole range of pulp fiction, from costumed heroes in the Phantom Detective vein to hardboiled crime in the Black Mask tradition — as long as they were noir at heart. The editors ruled out camp and spoof, and decided against private-eye stories, simply to avoid being inundated with one type of submission. The closing line of the call summed up the spirit of the whole enterprise: help us celebrate our ancestors, and make the Pulp Noir issue a tribute to a vital and entertaining past — as well as a hell of an issue for Hardluck to go out on.

How Hardluck Read Submissions

Through its run, the zine's submission process followed the guest-editor model. Each issue's editor announced a theme and read every submission personally — working writers reading other writers, with no first-reader buffer. The bar was consistent even as taste rotated: clean prose, real stakes, and an ending the story had actually earned. Word limits stayed modest (typically a few thousand words), which kept the zine fast to read and forced contributors to cut to the bone. Many issues turned away strong work for space; the final issue's editors noted they had to do exactly that one last time.

What the Guidelines Reveal

Read as a historical document, the final call also explains why the zine's fiction holds up. The 4,000-word ceiling enforced economy. The theme-first model forced invention — a writer couldn't recycle a trunk story for an issue about 1930s pulps or femme fatales. And the explicit exclusions (no camp, no spoof, no private eyes this time) show editors thinking about the issue as a whole rather than as a pile of individual acceptances. Every working guideline the zine published carried the same fingerprints: clarity about what was wanted, honesty about what wasn't, and respect for the writer's time.

For Writers Today

Hardluck Stories is no longer a market, but the kind of fiction it championed still has homes. Writers seeking current paying markets for short crime fiction should consult up-to-date listings of literary magazines and contests maintained by organizations such as Poets & Writers, and study the active digests and anthologies in the mystery field. The lessons embedded in Hardluck's old guidelines transfer directly: read the publication first, respect the theme, keep it tight, and remember that noir is a trajectory, not a costume. For a deeper look at what the zine's editors considered the heart of the form, read Lessons in Noir, and browse the Archives to see what actually made the cut across thirteen-plus issues.