Tips for Black Library Open Submission 2025 (and More)

On January 15, 2025, Black Library invited open submissions "for a short window between the 22nd of February and the 9th of March." As described in the invitation, the requirements for all submissions are listed below:

• Entries must be in English

• The scene must not exceed 500 words 

• Your scene must only feature the two characters you have chosen

• Both characters must have had a miniature made by Games Workshop at some point

• No crossovers: both characters must be from the same universe

• The scene must take place in one of the following settings: Vigilus, Commorragh, or Armageddon (Warhammer 40,000), and Hammerhal Aqsha, the Eightpoints, or Shadespire (Warhammer Age of Sigmar) 

• There is to be only one entry per person, so make it a good one!

Some folks have reached out to me looking for recommendations for the open submissions. I've never made the cut during open submissions — I actually got my foot in the door another way. Regardless, I had some choice advice I wanted to share in case anyone finds it useful. Keep in mind I'm not an official spokesperson for Black Library or Games Workshop; everything in this post is personal opinion based on my experience working as a freelance writer of tie-in fiction.

The Only Goal Is to Make It Good

You read that right. You need good ideas and good writing. To use the words of comedy legend Steve Martin: "Be so good they can't ignore you."

Frustrating, I know. Naturally, "be good" is vague. What does that mean in practical terms? What does it mean in this specific context? Fortunately, it's easier than it sounds — you just have to be methodical about what you're trying to do.

First, let's assess what Black Library's desired outcome likely is, and by extension, how that shapes your task. The submissions invitation suggests that Black Library is seeking new authors to work with. It seems obvious, but it's still worth verbalizing. That means they're probably looking for... well... a writer they can work with.

What qualifies a writer that a publisher can work with? Someone with good ideas, I'd reckon. Someone who writes well. Someone who understands the Warhammer IP, whose work is polished, who is conscientious in their craft. And perhaps most importantly of all (as Gav Thorpe highlighted in his own blog), someone who can write "to a brief." The folks reading your submission want to know that when you're given instructions, you can execute on them.

This submission must show all of these things. That frames your task: Convince Black Library you are a good writer with your submission. But what about actual content? Any tricks?

In my opinion? No. Do whatever works. And whatever works, works! As I said in an interview with The Mortal Realms, a good idea is gold. Therefore, write the story you want to read — the one you ache for. And don't be afraid to make it as cool as you dream of it being. Let your passion bleed onto the page. Anything goes — so long as it's interesting. You'll know in your gut when you've got something good, because even you will be excited about it.

Just for giggles, I've thrown together some wild ideas below:

• Abaddon and Guilliman must work together to invade Commoragh and obliterate the drukharii — if they can find a way to trust each other.

• The drone intelligence of Aun'Va contacts the Silent King through machine language via communications buoys near Vigilus before meeting in person, curious if they can use each other — or betray each other for the good of their faction.

• Trapped in Shadespire, Archaon and Nagash clash before they realize they must work together to escape an eldritch horror seeking to parasitize their godhood.

These almost certainly would not fly for a book pitch, right? Each of them essentially breaks the settings. Nevertheless, I feel they could be suitable for the parameters of this open submissions call, for reasons I'll expand upon below.

The bigger point: Don't shackle yourself to what you think is allowed. My sense is that your only goal here is for your reader to see your story ideas and writing skills and make them want more. Everything else comes later, so just focus on the task at hand.

And here's one specific recommendation: With your 500 words of fury, stay away from combat scenes, unless your craft is strong enough that you can tell a story through them. Better to focus on a tense moment certain to lead to combat — or a consequential moment that follows battle. (Notably, this is a slight departure from Gav Thorpe's advice on his blog.)

How Do You Make It Good?

The rest of this post is going to assume you're at a high stage of writing development. That is, you can write, you know the IP, and you can execute on instructions. You don't need substantial proofreads just for your writing to be comprehensible. You're organized, you pay attention to detail. If you're not at this stage, you should still feel free to submit if you so desire — you owe that to yourself. But ensure that you're also working on developing your long-term writing craft. That way, even if you don't make the cut this time, you will learn from the experience and improve your odds for next time. (I address long-term writing craft development in Working on Long-Term Craft below.)

Right now, we understand the situation. We know the mission, too. But how do we execute? We only have 500 words, which is about two pages in a mass market paperback. That's almost nothing, so your words have to sing.

To execute, allow me to recommend two specific techniques that I learned were useful while chasing upvotes on r/WritingPrompts, which is a subreddit that allows redditors to respond to other users' writing prompts:

• An unforgettable opening

• A cliffhanger ending

An Unforgettable Opening

Why do your first words have to be unforgettable? I'd bet that whoever is reading these submissions is going through hundreds of them — or possibly thousands. (This assumption is based on my understanding of the traditional publishing industry, so take it with a grain of salt.)

By extension, I think it's highly likely that the submission readers will know within the first sentence whether a given submission is going to make the cut or not. That means that your first sentence has to set up everything else you write for success. If your reader is drowsy and your first line doesn't make them blink and wake up, you're in a bad place.

You want to be in a good place. A place where the reader takes their first look, opens their eyes wide, and says: This person knows what they are doing, and this is a submission worth focusing on. Put your best foot forward, you know?

There are a few tricks to crafting a striking line that pulls folks in. Opening with a question is always strong, especially if you're offering an unusual answer to that question. Sensory detail or introspection that jars the reader from their comfort zone (in a good way) can also be effective. Ideally, your opening line should be drenched with character, style, and aplomb, illustrating precisely the kernel of character that makes your protagonist — or in this case, either of the two characters in your submission — so awesome. To do all of this, write fearlessly and honestly from the very first word.

Below are some examples of my attempts to open with something unforgettable for my published work, followed by some commentary:

"A riddle. How do people become enforcers?"

This is from No Third Chance, my short story in the Warhammer Crime anthology Broken City. The opening is a question, and it gives my main character, Tal Noran, a chance to share his thoughts on the world. Questions are effective because they are paired with answers. (Obviously.) That means questions are a guaranteed way to make your reader think, What's the answer? and want to read onward.

Note that my tactic with this opening was to pull in readers through sheer character appeal; this question basically gives Tal a soapbox to do that.

"If I sleep, I will die."

This is from Nadir, my novella in the Warhammer: Age of Sigmar anthology Harrowdeep. It's jarring introspection — and in a good way — but it's also an implied question. Why will the protagonist Calthia Xandire die if she sleeps? That question should draw any reader into the next sentence. They won't find the answer yet, but at the very least, the momentum from this opening is strong enough that a reader would trust me with a few more pages, by which time they're hopefully already entranced by the story premise.

The lesson here is to ensure your opening isn't a false promise: Continue building on your opening's momentum, and prove to the reader that you deserve their trust.

"Sentence the principal. Sentence the accessories. Report."

I consider this a weaker opening, but it shows what my enforcer wants unambiguously in his namesake story, Vova's Climb, which appeared in an Inferno! collection. The style of the opening also provides some insight into how Vova's thought processes look: ordered, sequential, hierarchical, all perfect for his background as a rigid enforcer.

This opening was for my first Black Library short, and it represents an earlier phase of my writing development, when I was obsessed with "getting story on the page" as quickly as possible. (For more information on that approach, see Working on Long-Term Craft below.) What that means is don't chase perfection. You need a good-enough opening, not a flawless opening. Once you're there, you're there.

Take a look at these openings. Analyze them. In the comments, share your thoughts for others. Do they work for you? Do they satisfy the requirements I listed above? Would they be enough to pull you to the next sentence? Ultimately, that's all good writing is: One good sentence that pulls you to the next, over and over again. Remember, though: You only have 500 words, so make each of them atomic.

A Cliffhanger Ending

Why end on a cliffhanger? Well, at the risk of sounding patronizing, I will belabor the point: you only have 500 words! These 500 words have a lot of weight to lift. You essentially want to addict the reader to your story idea and your writing in the span of two pages.

To addict a reader in these circumstances, you don't actually want to craft a satisfying, 500-word story. Satisfying plot design comes later. For now, you want to leave readers wanting more, which is what cliffhangers are meant for.

For a good cliffhanger, you'll need three ingredients:

• An unexpected situation

• An uncertain outcome

• Stakes that matter

Here's an example of what I have in mind, which I wrote for r/WritingPrompts a few years ago. Note that this excerpt is 681 words, so your writing is going to have to be tighter than mine here.

[Writing Prompt] The most dangerous super villains are not locked up, instead they are turned into children and sent to a childless farmer couple in rural Kansas to be fostered and turned into productive members of society. This is the Kent Rehab Program. You can’t be such a joker all the time, my father told me.

All the kids are laughing at you, my mother said.

I remember when I realized they were both right. Kids at school, they made fun of me. They didn’t like the way I walked. Teased me for the way I talked. And when I found my corner and played my games, they called me a weirdo.

What could I say? I had a feeling I knew what was going through their heads. They were pouring themselves into these molds, becoming the people they thought they had to be.

I was crying, one day, when Bruce from math class called me a freak. I didn’t even care about what he called me. His name was what got me upset. His name, why his name?

Bruce. It needled through me like heat through ice.

“Just be yourself,” my mother told me later, when I regaled her with my story, sniffling. She didn’t understand. I don’t think I did yet, either.

But when I saw the old news article about what had happened to the Clown Prince of Crime in Gotham, I began to realize something. People only tell us to be ourselves when they think it will benefit them. No one wants a terrorist to just be themself. No one encourages a rapist to just be themself.

I wasn’t, either, not at all. But something told me that whoever I really was, no one could ever want me to be.

My older brother, much older than me, came back to visit my parents one summer.

“So. How’s he doing?” Clark sat across from me in the living room, not moving his eyes. He was a reporter in the city and I hardly knew him. He stared, and I had the feeling he was watching my heart beat, watching for anything.

I was perfectly calm.

“Oh, you know.” My mother’s lips bend into a tense smile. “Like normal. Almost like normal. Growing pains.”

But she wasn’t my mother, was she? And Clark, he wasn’t my brother. Not really.

I figured it all out one day, at school, at lunch. Bruce had led this little uprising and started a chant. Kids were throwing food at me, saying my name wrong, trying to wheedle their ways into my ego. I wondered: do their mothers tell them what mine tells me? To just be themselves? Because who they were was terrible.

I had brought my father's screwdriver to school that day. I walked to Bruce and slammed it through his ribs. The laughter became screams, and I wondered if my mother and father would be proud. The other kids weren’t laughing anymore. Wasn't that what they wanted?

Bruce crawled on his elbows away from me, on his back. I heard a gurgle when he breathed. “No,” he said, as I sauntered closer. “No!”

I looked at him and just couldn’t understand. Was this what he was supposed to be? Was this the mold that had been made for him? Maybe everyone did this. Maybe everyone begged when they thought they were going to die.

Then, it clicked. None of them understood. I didn’t understand, but I at least knew that.

Because there was nothing to understand. Nothing! Nothing, but what we make. The rules, they’re nonsense. The world is just an empty hole.

All that matters is we fill it.

All that matters is to have a bit of fun.

Grinning from ear to ear, I bowed before Bruce and canted my head. This isn't the real Bruce, something whispers inside me—or someone. This isn't my Bruce.

I frowned and bopped him on the nose with the tip of my bloodied screwdriver. “Why so serious?” I asked.

Brucie wept as I slow-danced from the cafeteria. I knew, then, a thing or two about who I wanted to be.

I wanted to be me.

As I left the building, police sirens wailed in the parking lot. SWAT helicopters circled overhead.

A little much for a thirteen-year old, I thought, laughing until my sides hurt.

This piece, of course, is not perfect. There is at least one outright error in there: I used the word wheedle when I clearly meant to use weasel. Wheedle doesn't even make sense there — I was just writing quickly. But even with this error, I believe this piece checks the two boxes that would give it a fighting chance in an open submissions pipeline. It reflects good ideas and good writing. Also, it's pretty polished.

If this were a submission, would it be enough to attract the DC Comics tie-in publisher during an open submissions call? Hell, I don't know. But I do feel strongly that the spirit of this excerpt reflects the right approach to take for the Black Library 2025 Open Submissions. If this were a submission, hopefully the reader would take a look at it and think, Here is a writer we can work with.

Working on Long-Term Craft

All the advice that has preceded this section has been focused on what you can do right now to improve the quality of your submission in 2025. However, if you're serious about this writing thing, I invite you to consider what you can do to improve your chances of success for the next open submissions cycle. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint, and many people who read this guide may not get an email moving them on to the next stage of the selection process. That doesn't mean you won't make it next time.

By far, the greatest long-term tip I can offer that helped me develop my craft was to go to r/WritingPrompts subreddit and practice there. I mentioned chasing upvotes on that subreddit, where users post writing prompts and other users respond to them.

It's a good practice. Do that, and you'll learn what people are into, what separates popular responses from less popular responses, and what topics and styles gain traction with your preferred audiences. You'll learn which prompts work for you, and by extension, where your writing strengths and weaknesses lie. You'll learn when to jump on a prompt, and when to post your responses. Not all of these lessons will be applicable for the Black Library Open Submissions, but they will help you refine your attention to detail, which will improve your odds of downstream success with Black Library Open Submissions.

While you're on the subreddit, read other folks' prompts and responses, too. Pay close attention to the ones that make you say, I need more of this story. Analyze why those responses are good, then emulate the methods in your own responses. If you get off to a rough start (as I did), you'll get better. Just don't lose faith, keep making a genuine effort, and remember that this is a journey, not a destination. As they say in the US Marine Corps, Enjoy the Suck.

Another good strategy is to learn how to get story on the page. What that means is learning how to communicate your story within the confines of a pitch format.

To get story on the page, you will want to focus on three things:

• Who are the characters (which must be defined, at least partially, by what they want)

• What's in the characters' way (better known as Conflict)

• What happens if they get — or do not get — what they want (better known as Stakes)

Character, conflict, stakes. At the intersection of it all: Story. Think about stories you like, and analyze them in terms of these criteria. Craft your own pitches in those terms, and voila! You've got story on the page.

If you try this and your pitch absolutely sucks ("Who the hell would read this? Would they even understand the story I'm trying to sell?"), then the problem is either your writing or your story. Don't worry — this is normal and happens to experienced writers all the time. The good news is that both of these things can be fixed. You can improve your writing through practice and reading. You can improve your story through feedback and revision.

Once your writing is tight and your story is tight, your pitch will be tight. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you instinctively know what a good pitch needs and how to improve yours when they seem weak. You'll get story on the page as easily as a longshoreman gets cargo on a boat.

Just so you know, "get story on the page" is an expression that I and many authors learned from the late-great Janet Reid. Janet Reid helped aspiring authors learn how to develop queries on her old blog, Query Shark. (If you know nothing about queries, just know they are basically sales pitches for stories.) Reid has passed away, but her blog was once legendary among aspiring authors, and probably still is. Some of the best tips I ever got for tight writing were from reviewing her blog. If you have time, look over her posts. You'll absorb a lot if you pay attention.

That's all I have today. Above all, take care. If you make it, I wish you good fortune. But if you don't, then don't be discouraged. Rejection makes writers who we are — and there's always next time.