About

Marginal Boundaries is a quarterly e-zine which specializes in speculative fiction. We focus on short fiction in the English language, although our staff and contributors are a varied group of individuals who live in all corners of this planet we call Earth.

Marginal Boundaries is a digital publication. What does that mean? First and foremost it means we only interact with people via the digital world. Our publication is only available in digital form.

At Marginal Boundaries, we want to provide a place where you, the author, can submit your work and know within mere weeks whether or not it’s going to be published. One of our goals is to help authors get their work into the spotlight as quickly as possible, so that people can be reading it, giving feedback on it, and becoming fans. After all, that’s why you wrote it in the first place. You didn’t write it so that you could spend hours waiting in line at the post office so you could turn around and spend half a year (or more) waiting to hear back from a publication only to get a form letter rejection. You didn’t write your story so that it could spend 1-2 years circulating  the slush piles before it finally gets read. You wrote it so that it could be published and enjoyed.

We don’t want your paper trail. We don’t want to deal with postage. We refuse to stand in line at the post office. We don’t want to have to deal with storage space and inventory. We want streamlined. We want digital. We want to get your fiction a split second after you send it, and we want to get you a reply back as fast as humanly possible.

At Marginal Boundaries you will always receive a personal response, even if your story is rejected. Another of the reasons we founded this magazine was because we are tired of the way many “professional” speculative fiction market works. Form letter rejections don’t teach you anything. They don’t help better you as a writer. They don’t acknowledge your hard work. We understand why form letters are required, we just choose to operate in a different manner.

Marginal Boundaries has no desire to be a major publisher whose primary concern is sales. We know we are an indy press, and we are fine with that. It allows us to keep it personal, privileged, and focused on quality, not quantity. Our goal is to find those stories that fall through the cracks of the professional publishing world, those diamonds in the rough, those treasured gems that someone else missed because they were too busy worrying about what the committee on current reading trends was telling them is the hot topic of the week that’s selling.

In closing, Marginal Boundaries is a publication that is all about the stories and the authors behind them. Our goals are simply to publish the best possible fiction that we can while providing an intimate editor/author/reader relationship that you won’t find anywhere else on the Internet. No form letters, no mass-produced copy, just good, clean, speculative fiction.

Enjoy!