Stories That Lift call for submissions, paid

http://www.storiesthatlift.com/STL-routines/submitstories.htm

Stories that lift is paying $5 or more (but less than 20$) for stories between 50 and 7,500 words that are acceptable for adults and children, but more on that later.
Submissions are always being accepted.

Most of the publishers I talk about here are people I think of as kind of cool, and this is no exception. They are accepting stories to post on their website with the intention of making them into audio books, authors are paid an additional $5 when their story is turned into an audio story that can be streamed for free--they appear to pay for the site through their Google text ads.

The audio book thing is very appealing to me, and initially, the idea of a site for family friendly stories put me off--so much that is supposed to be family friendly is really just neutered or neurotic--afraid of saying anything and yet brazen in the disregard for the intelligence of the reader. When I saw the title An Atheist's View I thought I had a chance after all, and I sent in a very short memoir on the irrelevance of identity--perhaps I was thinking of the children's and family entertainment of COSMOS, Carl Sagan frightening children with his elongated consonants and his unrelenting "billions and billions and billions."

Typically I make sure that my work is peer reviewed, and while I certainly read over it a few times, I hadn't shown it to anyone. I had found a paragraph that I had written among a series of rambling, unrelated paragraphs, and I realized that it had an actual setting, beginning, middle and end.

They accepted it and mailed me a check. The story is up there, and I may be getting a check if and when they make an audio story out of it. This sort of blows my mind since this is a family site and my story is essentially about how there's no way of knowing if life has any meaning whatsoever.

It is worth noting the intellectual property agreement is royalty free and non-exclusive. So they can make money off the story forever without giving you any more money, including by selling it in books or CDs for just paying you once--but you can make money off the story too, either through another publisher (although many don't accept previously published work) or in your own self published thing, like a collection of short stories.

Although some might have their hearts set on getting the slow trickle of royalties, this opportunity is still worth while as I see it. They're definitely a small-time startup, so we'll see how they progress from here. In the mean time I'm pretty psyched that I've contributed to some family operation in another state. And if some place insists on my having a publication history, if I really feel like it I can point to this, a story someone bought, small time though it was.