Whisper House Press will open for submissions in February and March 2026. We’re aiming to publish Doom Scroll in late October, 2026.
The Window: February 1st – March 31st, 2026. (Extended to April 15th for writers from diaspora communities, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and/or Autistic writers).
The Work: Social media horror, 200–2,000 words.
The Policy: We have a strict “Humans-Only” policy with specific Google Doc requirements. Read the details below before you start writing.
submission guidelines:
DO use the Shunn modern manuscript format for formatting.
DO write between approximately 200 to 2,000 words.
DON’T kill the dog to show us a bad thing is happening or that an entity is evil; we will summarily reject such lazy writing.
DO NOT write sexual violence plots. We don’t want to read and will not publish it.
DO NOT use AI to produce your work. (See below for detailed guidelines we require submitters follow for consideration. Do this BEFORE you write for the call.)
DO Submit only original (brand new and unpublished) stories; DO NOT send previously published material. Please note that online publication—including personal blogs, substacks, etc—counts as publication. If a random person could (forget about would ) read it, that’s public enough to count.
DO write on theme: Our theme for Doom Scroll is “social media horror.” We think of social media as any photo-, text-, and video-sharing platform that encourages its users either to broadcast a version of themselves or to receive broadcasts in para-social relationships with others.
DO feel free to submit simultaneously elsewhere. Writing is a tough business, and we don’t need an exclusive relationship at this early stage. If your work is accepted elsewhere, though, please let us know immediately with a retraction note.
DO submit only your best, single story. No multiple submissions, please.
Need an idea?
The Vibe: We love dread-inducing psychological and social horror like the films Bring Her Back (2025, A24), Knocking (Yellow Veil Pictures), and The Mill (2023, Hulu) or the books A House With Good Bones (2023, Kingfisher), The October Film Haunt (2025, Wehunt) and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (2025, Chapman). We want stories where the horror is rooted in social dynamics, absurdism, and mundanity.
The Platforms: Think of the influencer grind forced on (or volunteered into?) creators for video apps, the performative nightmare of business-oriented sites, the curated perfection of photo-sharing sites, the niche obsession of sub-reddits, or the high-stakes world of dating apps. (If you wish, go ahead and use the names of companies inspiring your tale in your story draft; we may ask for a renaming to avoid upsetting anyone’s legal team.)
The Mechanics: Algorithms that know too much, notifications that won’t stop, the “unboxing” of something that should have stayed closed, or the horror of being “witnessed” by thousands of strangers.
The Connection: Parasocial obsessions, the loneliness inherent in online-online connections, and the veil between online vs IRL personas and persons.
Further: We think of horror as anything that unsettles, and the horror genre is a big tent. That said, there are some kinds of horror we’re not interested in reading.
A Note on Authenticity: We are committed to lifting diverse voices, but we want to be clear: We do not expect you to mine your personal traumas or share your own experiences with injustice to get genuine-feeling stories. We value your craft and your imagination above all else.
To get a vibe for what we produce, check out our free stories published monthly in the featured stories section of our website and check out our “about us” page. You can also pick up Costs of Living or Dread Mondays for our first two anthologies.
How to Submit:
Send your work with a simple cover note to editor [at] whisperhousepress [dot] com with the subject line “DOOM SCROLL SUBMISSION” so we don’t miss it. We get dozens of junk emails per day or per week and will be sorting using this subject line. If you don’t use it, we probably won’t see it. Don’t do that to yourself.
In your cover letter, you don’t have to be overly formal. Say hello. Tell us who you are, and include a sub-100-word author bio and a one- or two-sentence description of your story—in other words, give us a logline (as with screenwriting).
Submit your work between 0001 hrs (that’s 12:01 AM) February 1st, 2026 and 2359 hrs (mountain time) at the expiration of TUESDAY, MARCH 31st, 2026. Submissions arriving before or after these dates will be deleted unread.
If you’re a writer who’s a member of a diaspora community, are BIPOC or LGBTQ+ writer, or if are on the Autism spectrum, you have an extra 15 days: April 15th, Tax Day is your deadline. (Is this a joke? Maybe the chosen deadline, but not the extension.)
A Note on Fairness: We will not begin reading submissions until the final deadlines have passed. Once the window is closed, stories will be read at random. This ensures that the extended deadline isn’t a hamstringing of those already at a structural disadvantage; every story has the same chance of being selected regardless of when it hits our inbox.
Our promises to you:
We will not run your story through AI for summary, evaluation, or any other purposes. We will not sell anything we produce for the purposes of training AI systems. While we are not a 100% AI-free company (we use it for coding advice, contract analysis, marketing tips, etc.), we do not create using AI (we hire non-AI-assisted artists for our covers, we do not write our published text or website copy using AI, etc.). We are committed to celebrating human creativity.
We’ll pay $30 per accepted story, electronically, prior to publication. Payments to authors will be scheduled to be transacted between March and October, delivered in order of story acceptance. (This will help us keep the doors open while paying you what we feel is the minimum acceptable rate for your story; we will pay more when we reach profitability.)
All accepted stories will be considered for the publisher’s Pushcart Prize nominations (we submitted the maximum of six for 2025), and the anthologies will be submitted to “best of” collections (ed. Datlow, etc.) as well as the appropriate Bram Stoker Award jury (category: anthology). We’ll seek opportunities on podcasts and for interviews on channels and sites that do that sort of thing. Other publicity and award opportunities will be sought but cannot be promised.
Other Info:
We expect this book to top out at 60,000 words. (Each of our last two major anthologies included 35 or more stories. This will be similar, though specifics will be determined by the stories we curate for the anthology.)
We buy first rights (worldwide) to publish your story in electronic, print, and audio formats, and all rights will revert to you a few months following publication. If you want to see a draft of our contract for this volume, check it out here. (It’s subject to change, but it won’t likely change much.)
Due to the volume of submissions, we won’t be able to provide editorial feedback to all submitters; we do try to say what triggered our “no thank you” response where it feels like there’s more than just a subjective taste thing going on with the piece.
We aim to respond to all submitters within 60-90 days of close. After that, we’ll move swiftly. We’ll take a break for StokerCon in early June, but then we expect edits to be done by the start of July 2026.
Absolutely Critical AI Policy Notes that you should not skip reading if you plan to submit your story to whisper house press:
*We are committed to publishing human-created work. To that effect, we’re establishing what we believe are the first rules in publishing that do not rely on bullshit (read: lagging behind, faulty, failing, and false-flagging) AI-detection software.
You following these expectations will take the AI conversation off the table and eliminate a lot of concern on our part. Apart from a signed contract promising you haven’t used AI to develop your story, for your work to be considered, you must do the following:
(A) Produce your work (all of it) either in longhand or on a google doc.
If you produce your work in longhand, contact us directly for next steps. If you produce your work in a google doc…
(1) Complete the full project in a single google document. This means: Do not copy and paste your work from anywhere else: develop it right there in that one document. When I look at version history, I should see the story appearing a minute at a time, an hour at a time, a day at a time… you get the idea.
(2) At the top of your document (in the literal document), insert a link to the self-same document in which you’re working and submitting. The link to this document should give complete editorial access (this is the only way we can verify version history; we won’t actually edit your document) to your file to anyone with the link. If you don’t know how to do this, click here for a how-to video.
(3) Save your document as a PDF. Submit that. (I should be able to click on your link in the PDF to view the version history of your document. If you’ve done the above two steps, this’ll be the case.)
If you have any questions about this new and complicated-sounding policy, please reach out to Steve at editor [at] whisperhousepress [dot] com.
Is there anything missing from this announcement? Can I do something to make the call for submissions more accessible to those whose needs I haven’t anticipated? Please let me know. Editor [at] whisperhousepress [dot] com.
Whisper House Press 