Inner Workings

We publish at least 52 stories and 52 poems each year. Subscriptions and issues can be purchased in our store.

Not anymore. As of March 2023, we reserve the majority of our content for paying subscribers and patrons. You can become a subscriber, supporter, or both here.

Prior to using generated art, we used free stock photos, and our stories almost never broke 100 unique views. On average, a post might see around 70 total hits.

Immediately after we began using generated artwork, unique views increased by a factor of ten. We now see well over 1,000 unique views on each story, with over 70% of our traffic coming from Twitter clicks and shares. This change is not statistically insignificant, and it is not a coincidence.

Professional artists charge $400+ per digital painting, which can take weeks to produce. We publish content online twice per week, so original, human-created art would cost us over $40,000 per year. Obviously, we don’t have the financial means or the production timeline to support that. Our cover artist has offered to do the work, but allowing artists to work for free or below their rates to avoid using generated art is not how you support human artists.

We understand the objections to generated art, and we’ve done our best to use Midjourney as ethically as possible. Here’s how:

• We have always been fully transparent about our use of generated art. The Dread Machine has used generated images long before Midjourney, eons before the rest of humanity realized the technology existed—and we have always made it clear that our art is machine generated.
• We never use images or artist names in our prompts. These functionalities are abhorrent and should be disabled. To see our prompts, you’re welcome to check out our Midjourney profile, but essentially, we use basic descriptive terms (“a female cyberpunk hacker typing on a keyboard in front of a glowing purple screen”) plus “semi-abstract,” “digital painting,” and “brushstrokes.” This tends to result in the messy, dreamlike style we’re known for.
• We only use generated art for clickbait. Every issue and anthology we’ve ever published was produced by humans, including our covers, which have always been entirely original creations. Few magazines commission original work for covers, choosing instead to license already created works for a fraction of the cost. At The Dread Machine, we’re paying artists to produce wholly original works at professional rates.
• We are not displacing a single human artist. This position doesn’t exist at The Dread Machine and—unless we win the lottery at some point—it never will.

We fully support the mission to change the way these tools learn and iterate. However, The Dread Machine’s mission is to publish, pay, and promote writers to the best of our ability, and the metrics speak for themselves. Discarding this technology would be a tremendous mistake that would put the publication and our writers at a major disadvantage. We encourage writers who strongly object to our use of Midjourney to hold off on submitting until we find a solution with a more responsible approach to data sourcing.

We recently gained beta access to Adobe Firefly, which has been trained on authorized imagery. We’re hopeful this will be a step in the right direction.

Learn about our submission evaluation protocol here.

Yep. And submitting rape fantasies (or anything else that would put you or us on a federal watch list) is a great way to get your name on it.

To keep response times prompt (and because we don’t have the capacity), we do not send personal rejections.

Our submission management system (Moksha) allows us to easily send our standard rejection form at the push of a button. Once it becomes clear that a submission isn’t a good fit for us, we hit that button, notifying the writer and removing the story from our queue.

Our standard rejection form reads:

Dear Writer,

Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept “Your Submission” for publication, but thank you so much for submitting to The Dread Machine.

We exist to serve dark speculative fiction writers and elevate the genre. If you haven’t yet, you’re welcome to join our free Discord community where you can meet other writers and publishing professionals. We’ve also pulled together a Resources page where you can find similar markets that might be interested in picking up “Your Submission.”

Please don’t hesitate to submit to us in the future!

Sincerely,
The Dread Machine Editors

The closest you will ever get to receiving a personal rejection is receiving our Highest-Tier Form. (Capitalized here as a proper noun because we consider it a big deal.) These forms are rarely ever sent, and they come directly from our Executive Editor. This form reads:

Dear Writer,

Thank you for submitting “Your Submission” to The Dread Machine. We won’t be accepting this one, but we liked it a lot, and we want to read more from you.

To process submissions efficiently, we don’t send personals, so this is a form. (Nobody loves a form.) But you should know that your story made it all the way to the Executive Editor’s desk. Very few stories get that far, so receiving one of these forms is an accomplishment and we hope you consider it one.

Thanks again for sending us your story. We hope to see another from you soon.

Sincerely,

Alin Walker
Executive Editor
The Dread Machine

We have an active community of kind, supportive, friendly, and inclusive writers and editors who generously share their experience, advice, and encouragement. The majority of them joined us after seeing the invite in a form rejection. We like meeting cool new people, so we extend the invitation in all our forms. It’s also in our email signatures.

Those who are offended by the invitation probably shouldn’t join. (We’re sorry we annoyed you with our friendship.)