Diabolical Plots was founded by David Steffen in 2008 to serve as some kind of web presence as he started to get his foothold as a writer, publishing a variety of nonfiction content like interviews, reviews, convention reports, and more. Anthony Sullivan joined forces with David in 2009 and helped (among other things) to revamp the website. Diabolical Plots started publishing original fiction in 2015 and continues to publish original fiction. In 2020, Diabolical Plots published “Open House On Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell which was nominated for both the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, among others. See the Staff page for more details on the current staff.
David and Anthony founded the sister website The Submission Grinder in 2013, a donation-supported website to help writers find publishers for their work. which continues to this day under David’s direction with the help of a few volunteers.
The Long List Anthology is an annual anthology published by Diabolical Plots, first published in 2015. The full title of the series is The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List. Every year after the Hugo Award ceremony, the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) publishes a longer list of voting statistics for the award, including stories that were nominated but did not make the final ballot. Each volume of The Long List Anthology contains many stories from this longer list, stories that got a lot of fan votes and got less attention that the ones on the ballot.