Guidelines

Unless otherwise stated, Island welcomes submissions from Australia, New Zealand and Australians living abroad.  

All submissions are via Submittable.

We do not accept work previously published in print or online, including on blogs. We do not accept work previously published. Please don’t send us anything you’ve written, rewritten or otherwise created using AI. AI is destroying writers’ income and future careers, so as an organisation that supports writers we do not support its use. The point of writing is the process: please only send us things you’ve made yourself.

We accept simultaneous submissions; however, if your work is selected for publication elsewhere, please withdraw it from Island Submittable.

Contributor Policy

You do not need to be an Island subscriber to submit or enter any of our prizes. However, we believe that writers ought to be readers of the literary magazines in which their work is published, so for this reason, if your work is published either in print or online, and you not already a subscriber, your total payment will be less the cost of a 4-issue subscription. 

For a small not-for-profit literary magazine, this is a necessary step in a long-term strategy to build circulation. This, in turn, will allow us to increase the amount we can afford to pay our writers. For background information on our contributor fee policy, see here.

Payments

Contributor fees are currently:  

Fiction and nonfiction for print - 40 cents per word, with a minimum of $600 and a maximum of $1500. 

Poetry for print and Island Online - $175 per poem. 

Island Online - $600 for short-form fiction, nonfiction and graphic narratives.

All fees are less the cost of a 4-issue subscription if you are not a current subscriber. For background information on this policy see here.

In additional to core funding from Arts Tasmania, 2025 contributor fees have been supplemented by the Australian Government through the Creative Australia its arts funding and advisory body and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

We continually strive to increase author payment rates through grants and fundraising. 

PROCESSYou will receive an automated acknowledgement of receipt of your submission.

All submissions will be read by at least one member of the editorial team. 

Once decisions are made, you will be contacted (either via Submittable or direct email) regarding the outcome. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to provide individualised feedback on submissions that are not selected.

The expectation is that the selected works will require little editing. However, any editing involved will be undertaken by Island’s editorial team, in discussion with the author. The author will have final approval of the work.

A licensing agreement will be sent to the author prior to publication (see T&Cs below for further details).

TERMS & CONDITIONSA licencing agreement outlining the contributor fee and full terms and conditions will be sent to authors prior to publication. Please be aware of the following:

• Copyright remains with the author; but Island requires an exclusive licence for three months from publication. Following the exclusivity period, authors must continue to license the work to Island on a  non-exclusive basis. Any further reproduction should publicly acknowledge Island as the original publisher.
• Authors must warrant that their work is an original work, that their work does not infringe any copyright and that they are the sole owner of the copyright in the work. They must also warrant that the work contains nothing obscene, indecent or libellous.

A draft of the full licencing agreement is available on request from admin@islandmag.com.