This Project

The Literary Hatchet is an indy online magazine that publishes contemporary short fiction, poetry, prose, photography, cartoons, and humor by established and emerging writers and artists from around the world. Subjects range from mystery, murder, macabre, horror, monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night.

The Literary Hatchet has five issues under its belt and would like the monetary resources to do more. This project is for the next five issues, with issues beyond this number planned for the future. 

Our entire reason for being is to bring new works to the public in stylish and strikingly designed ways. We LOVE authors and artists and want their works to be read by the most people possible, hence our practice of giving away our magazine for free as a downloadable PDF.

Please download the our first five issues and see for yourself!

Our business model will remain the same: 

• We will continue to give the magazine away for free in a PDF format, downloadable from our website. 
• We will continue to pay our authors and artists for their creative contributions, but will increase our compensation rates significantly, as it should be, and as we always wanted to do.
• We will continue our mission and tradition of working with authors to develop their voices as artists, and pledge to continue the policy of never charging anyone for our review or editing of their work.
• We will publish two to three issues a year.
• We will continue to be always open for submissions and publish only new works, no reprints.
• We will continue our Rights Policy, namely, that we only retain first-printing exclusive world rights for a period of 6 months, during which time the work may not appear anywhere else on the Internet, in print, or sold for profit. All rights revert back to the writer/artist at the end of six months.
• We will continue to offer print copies through our print-on-demand partner, making a tiny royalty with each sale.

The monies collected through this Kickstarter appeal will fund the publication of five issues, which includes paying the artists, authors, and editors a professional rate, promotion, developing a better web site, and the cost of web hosting. 

Our Past

The Literary Hatchet has been published since 2008, and conceived of as a bi-annual publication. We have a track record. We have an audience. We have a backlog of submissions. In some ways we are an indy success story. 

Our Present

Where we stand at present, with an email box brimming with submissions and appeals to continue the magazine, is that we are turning to you, our friends, our family, and our new-found friends through Kickstarter, to fund our future as a magazine, the next five issues worth of future. After that, I am confident we will prevail.  

Our Future

We are passionate what we do and always will be. We want to branch out to other formats: ePub, interactive content, live events, podcasts, well, the sky is the limit for people like us who love technology and making art accessible.

We are eager to get re-started. Re-annimate us! Be that Dr. Frankenstein you knew you always wanted to be! Your children will thank you for it. And so will we!

Please consider Kickstarting us today!

The First Five Issues

BTW, the video for this project was created with Keynote and iMovie. The music is titled "A Drop Fall" by MemeProject.com, purchased through AudioJungle.net.