Today's the day! We've launched the Apex Magazine 2026 Kickstarter.
We've also opened to short fiction submissions again! Check out our submission guidelines and send us your best dark speculative fiction.
Are you ready to fund another year of strange, surreal, shocking and beautiful dark fiction?
Our Kickstarter goal this year is $20,000 which will fully fund four issues. Then, through stretch goals, we hope to unlock issue five and six so Apex can resume a bi-monthly publishing schedule.
To help us reach this goal, editor-in-chief Lesley Conner and managing editor Rebecca E. Treasure have set up some really cool milestone celebrations, including live readings of past stories, early access to stories coming out in 2026, and so much more!
Once we've hit our initial funding goal, we have lots of amazing stretch goals to keep the fun going.
At $22,500, Kai Delmas will be back with a drabble submission period. He will select three drabbles to be published in Apex Magazine in 2026.
At $25,000, we unlock a fifth issue of Apex Magazine! This will be an unpublished authors issue with a special submission period. For this issue, managing editor Rebecca E. Treasure will be stepping up into the chief editor position, running the submission period and selecting all of the short fiction to be published in the fifth issue of 2026.
At $30,000, all six issues of 2026 will be fully funded!
At $31,000, Marissa van Uden will be back with a new installment in her Strange micro-fiction anthology series. Strange Oceans: An Anthology of Dark Seafaring will be filled with stories in the shape of sea logs, coast guard notices, sat-phone messages, and more.
At $33,000, Apex will be able to raise the amount of short fiction in each issue. At the moment, each issue contains 20,000 words of original short fiction. If we hit this stretch goal, we can raise that to 24,000 words, bringing you more fantastic dark speculative fiction!
Anything that we raise above $34,000 will go to our amazing first readers. We have an exceptional team and we would love to be able to compensate them.
