The magazine’s theme of environmental justice and what we say in our main submission guidelines very much apply to what we’re seeking in artwork. We’re interested in the surreal, subversive and political, not so much in the pulpy or abstract. We prefer a certain amount of directness: if your work requires explanatory text for us to perceive its connection to the theme, we’re less likely to be interested. It might also help to look through this archive of (nearly) all the art we’ve featured in Reckoning so far.
We buy only one or two covers a year. We prefer cover art to suit the form factor of our print edition, which is 9 x 6 inch trade paper with 1/8 inch bleeds; dimensions for the full wraparound are in the area of 9.25 x 13 inches. Our covers are printed in full color, and we need 300 DPI minimum. For cover artwork, we pay $250 (US) or as negotiated.
We’d love to be able to feature at least a half dozen pieces of interior art per issue. Interior art will appear online, in the ebook and in print, so if it’s not in black and white, it should at least translate to black and white reasonably well. The printable area for an interior page is 7.125 x 4 inches, 300 DPI minimum, and on the website images are displayed at up to 1152 pixels in width. We do our best to adapt your work to all formats! For interior art we pay $50 (US) per piece or as negotiated.
We have not yet had occasion to formulate an art-specific contract; general sample contract is here.
Moksha, our submissions manager, will accept artwork in any common web-ready format (.jpeg, .jpg, .png, .bmp, .gif, or .svg), but only one at a time. If you’d like to submit multiple pieces, please compile them into a PDF or Word document or include a link to an online gallery. There is an upper limit on submission size of 10MB, so you may want to compress images; we’ll ask for higher-resolution versions later if needed.
We’re no longer accepting submissions by email; please submit your work via our Moksha submission portal.