What is Fireside?
Fireside Fiction Company started in 2012 with a Kickstarter-funded short-story magazine. We began with the goals of finding and publishing great stories regardless of genre, and paying our writers well. Fireside grew to have two branches for doing so: Fireside Magazine and Fireside Books. After a 10-year run, Fireside Magazine stopped publishing in 2022.
Fair pay for everyone
Fair pay is a big deal for us. We think creative people should be able to make a living from their work. This is one of our core values.
Fireside Magazine paid USD 12.5 cents per word, well above the 8 cents currently considered to be the minimum professional rate at the time of the magazine’s clsure in 2022. In fact, we paid better than almost every other SFWA-qualifying market. For poems, we paid a flat USD $100; for illustrations, we paid USD $400 for a full-color piece.
Fireside is brought to you by:
Brian White — Executive Editor and Owner
Brian started Fireside Fiction Company in 2012 as an experiment in crowdfunding and paying speculative fiction writers well above the accepted professional rate at the time. He took that experiment through five Kickstarters (and did not die!) and into a subscription model. During his tenure, Fireside published 150 stories, five novels, and one novella, and also published the first #BlackSpecFic report, which examined the massive under-representation of Black short-story writers in the field, prompting conversation, reflection, and change in the speculative fiction community. It remains one of the most important things he has worked on in his adult life. Brian was a 2017 World Fantasy Award finalist in the Special Award, Non-Professional category for Fireside, and Fireside has been nominated for multiple Hugo Awards.
Facing the burnout that is all too common among people who work at small presses, Brian stepped down as editor and publisher in 2017 to regroup and recharge mentally. He returned as interim editorial director in 2020 and resumed full ownership of the company in June 2021.
And many more!
Please see our Contributors Index for a full list of all of the editors, authors, illustrators, narrators, and translators who have made Fireside possible.
Content Notes
Fireside provides content notes for books and stories to guide readers who may wish to seek out or avoid particular story elements. These content notes may contain spoilers.
Content notes are not the same as the ratings found on movies, TV shows, and video games. The intent is to help trauma survivors avoid being surprised by story elements that may trigger pain or emotional distress, so we don’t offer warnings about general violence, profanity, sex, or other things one sees in a movie rating.
We welcome suggestions for elements to include or exclude. You can email us at [email protected]. (Please do not send submissions here. Any stories sent to this address will be deleted unread.)
Here are a few of the elements we currently offer notes for:
- Drug or alcohol abuse
- Animal abuse
- Abuse of, harm to, or death of a child
- Domestic violence
- Gender-Bias Violence
- LGBTQIA-Bias Violence
- Racial/Ethnic-Bias Violence
- Self-Harm or Suicide
- Sexual Assault
- Torture