'These darkly comic tales place the author snugly between Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Be sure: Chris Fielden is one funny feller.' Allen Ashley, British Fantasy Award winner.
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Submission Guidelines

If you are interested in writing a post for my blog, please take the time to read this page before contacting me.

I accept submissions for 2 sections of the site:

You can also submit to the short story competition and flash fiction writing challenges I run. For rules and details on how to submit to those, please see:

On this page, you will find general guidelines for all blog submissions and details on how to submit. Please read the whole page before getting in touch.

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Short Story Submissions

If you’ve had a short story published through a competition, magazine or anthology, or have had a story you've written performed on radio or TV, then you could write a post for my blog.

I do not accept posts about self-published stories – your story has to have been previously published by someone independent.

What I Need

I'm looking for previously published short stories only. I need to be able to publish your story on my website in the short stories section.

I'll need you to accompany your story with details of how you went about getting it published. So, if you were published through a competition, I’ll ask you to write about your experiences with that competition (same with magazines, anthologies… however the story was published):

  • What market research did you undertake?
  • How did you go about writing your story?
  • Why do you think it won or was selected for publication?
  • Do you have any correspondence with the judges or editors that you can share? (I’ll be happy to include their bios and/or details of their competitions and magazines.)
  • What advice can you offer other writers based on your experience?
  • How can they use that advice to improve their own writing and chances of being published?

The key is to give readers something they can take away and put into practice to help them become published, win a competition etc. Clearly show the reader how your story and accompanying advice give them a better chance of experiencing success with their own writing, particularly via the publication that accepted your story.

I will also need a biography and photograph (a clear mugshot, nothing abstract) to accompany the post.

The copyright of any stories I publish remain with the author.

Examples

Here are some example posts that are already on the site, clearly showing the format I require. Please review them so you understand the preferred style.

  • Gabriel's Halo, by Rhiannon Lewis - this story won the Writers' Forum short story competition and was published in the magazine
  • The In-Between Days, by Cameron Dunham - this story was published by Fictive Dream
  • Traffic, by Nick Sweeney - this story came runner-up in the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, run by The Royal Society of Literature

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Writing Advice Submissions

I'm looking for highly informative posts containing lots of practical writing advice, written by authors that are qualified/have the relevant experience to talk with authority about their chosen subject matter.

What I Need

Posts that contain advice backed up with real-life experience. I ask all writers to clearly show how they have used any tips they give in practice to generate success. These posts will appear in the Writing Advice section of my website.

I welcome the following blog post formats:

  • Case studies
  • Expert editorial tips
  • Expert writing advice
  • 'How to' tutorials

I'll need your biography and a photograph of you to accompany the post.

Examples

Here are some example posts so you can see the style I prefer.

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General Submission Guidelines

How Long Should My Post Be?

There is no strict word limit - I'm open to posts of any length. As an example, some of the resources on this site are in excess of 50,000 words, so there really is no upper word limit.

In contrast, some of the short posts are about 200 words. How Long is a Short Story? is a good example of a short post. It's short because the subject matter doesn't require a lot of words to answer the question.

I prefer highly informative posts, so they don't tend to be short. All the posts I've accepted to date are in excess of 1,000 words. Most are between 2,000 and 5,000 words. If you're submitting a short story, this would NOT include the word count of the story itself, just the post that accompanies the story.

What Style Of Post Should I Write?

Posts should be written in an informative but casual, conversational style, in your own voice. I like humour, so feel free to be entertaining, but give the reader takeaway pieces of advice which they can then:

  • Apply to their own writing to improve their stories
  • Use to give them a better chance of being published
  • Use to sell more books
  • etc.

Any advice given must be backed up by real-life examples. So, if you provide writing tips, I will ask you to share a story you've had published that shows how you used the tips in practice.

Be sure to review the posts linked to above so you can clearly see the style I prefer.

Plagiarism

I only accept original guest posts. All submitted posts are checked for plagiarism. Any posts containing advice that is already published elsewhere on the internet will be rejected.

If you are submitting a post that contains a short story that has already been published on the internet, just mention it when you contact me. The plagiarism checks mentioned above are for the advice that accompanies a story, not the story itself.

What Will I Get Paid?

Sweet FA.

Hmm, while my frank honesty should be commended, maybe I should be more PC and put this into context...

At the present time I’m unable to offer monetary recompense for guest posts (yes, that wording is probably more appealing…). I hope to be able to offer payments in the future, but at present the site doesn't generate enough money to make offering payments to guest writers viable.

So What’s In It For You?

You’ll be required to provide a biography and an author photo as part of your post. You can also include a link to your website.

You’ll enjoy exposure to a large audience by having your marvellous words published on my website. The site currently receives from 25,000 to 35,000 visits a month.

You’ll be featured in my emails. My email list has over 5,000 subscribers.

And I'll share the post on social media.

If you submit a short story, your post will also be linked to from my short story competition or short story magazines lists – whatever is most relevant. The aim is to give other writers information about the competitions and magazines in the lists, so they can learn about them and have a better chance of being published through them.

If a competition you’ve won or a magazine that has published your work does not appear in the lists, don’t worry – I’ll add them to it.

If you’ve been published by some other medium that I don’t currently mention on the site, don’t be put off. I’m happy to create new resources that other writers might find useful.

What I Don't Want

I do not accept:

  • Advertorial posts, telling readers how amazing your books, products or services are
  • Generic guest posts by digital agency writers who have no expertise or direct experience with writing and publishing fiction
  • Paid posts, where you offer me money to host content for you so you can get a link
  • Posts that have nothing to do with writing

How to Submit - Get In Touch

Before writing anything, please send an email to me at providing details of your fiction writing experience, including links to examples of your published stories.

If you're not a fiction writer, please clearly outline why you're qualified to write for a website focussed on fiction writing.

Please also outline what you would like to write about and why you think it would be appropriate for my readers.

For more details, please see my contact page.

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Leave your comments

Please use the form below to leave your comments. All comments will be reviewed so won't appear on the page instantly. I will not share your details with anyone else. Most recent comments appear at the bottom of the page, oldest at the top.

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Comments:

Your comments:

Srijaya NC
I am an educator by profession retired in 2008 as the Joint Director of Academy and Administration. I would like to send you a short story for the competition. Where do I send it?

Chris Fielden
Hi Srijaya, all the details on how to enter my competition can be found here.

I'll look forward to reading your entry :-)

Maris M
That was interesting, Christopher, and thank you for it.  At present I'm doing just what Shirley Muir did; editing, polishing, and sending out stories hither and yon. There are around 20 of them out there at the moment. I've also won a couple of competitions here in Australia and been placed in others - and even published. I have had two novels published too - one of them a prize winner. I love writing stories and hope that I'll eventually get enough positive feedback to justify keeping on with it - and maybe finish the next novel.

PS, I'd like to earn some money, too!

Dave M
Hi Chris, I think that your idea of having guests' stories featured on your site is a really good one. Having spent most of my life in marketing and advertising, what a great way financially for a writer to get their story out there without spending cash, as I know how much professional marketing can cost. The rest of my working life was spent in the Law. Hells bells, need I say more. Once again thank you so much for your excellent site and your assistance.

Chris Fielden
Maris - good luck with the editing, polishing and sending out. Which competitions have you won? Are they running currently?

Dave - thank you very much :-)

Agnes M
Hi, I am sending you this message on behalf of my fifteen year old daughter because I want her to pursue writing when she goes to college. 

She recently won the highest reads in wattpad (a writing platform for teens).  Does this qualify her on your posts?  Actually, she was just writing and posting and getting tons of followers and was most surprised to be informed that she had won the highest reads. 

She has been asked to get into commercial writing but refuses because she says she just wants to write because she loves doing it.  But I do want her to get good mentors which I cant do because I am her mom.

Chris Fielden
Hi Agnes. Yes, it sounds like that would qualify her to write a post for my blog if she wanted to. I would need to be able to use her story too - you'd have to check with wattpad to see if they'd be OK with it.

There are links on the page above to some blogs written by other writers so your daughter can see the preferred format.

Let me know if she's interested. It would be good to feature a young writer as I haven't done that yet :-)

Hugh S
Hello Chris. I am an established author of 'faction' - with six commissioned books - Westholme LLC, and a paid hack for  a number of magazines - UK, US, and Continental - writing on the niche subject of historic traditional archery.

Although I have written short stories 'creatively' purely for my own interest and amusement for years and will continue doing so, I would be curious to know whether my talents - such as they are - were commercial in the wider scheme of things. How would I go about this?

Chris Fielden
Hi Hugh. If you're referring to your stories and making money from them, then the best bet is to either have them critiqued or just enter some competitions or submit to magazines and see how they are received. That's how I do it. I have the stories critiqued by my writing group and then edit them to make sure they're at their best before submitting them to competitions and magazines. I always listening to feedback if any is given if I'm rejected.

Does that answer your question?

Hugh S
Hello Chris, thanks for the helpful comments. I belong to a U3A Creative Writing Group (in Bath) and my stuff does appear in their anthologies, so in a sense I am already critiqued I suppose. I would not expect to make much from story writing if anything at all, but it would be interesting to know if I had the right 'commercial spark', so to speak.

At present I am familiar only with the niche subject about which I write; I get a reasonable return for articles of 1,000/1,500 words from each of the magazines, and there are book royalties from time to time so I suppose I should be content with that. Thanks anyway for the advice.

Chris Fielden
Hi Hugh. No problem. Being part of a supportive writing group really helps. I think the ‘commercial spark’ is probably subjective, so the best bet is to keep writing and submitting and hope I guess :-)

Alison W
Hi Chris, I am currently studying creative writing the the Open University. One of my assignments includes researching magazines that publish short stories of 2000 words and then producing a short story to the magazines criteria. During my research I found your website. I would like to compliment you on your great website which is truly a useful tool for student writers like myself. Many thanks.

Chris Fielden
Thanks very much, Alison. It's always great to hear that people find the site useful.

If you're successful and write a story for a specific market and it's accepted for publication, please get in touch - I'd be interested in you writing about your experiences for my blog :-)

I wish you the best of luck with your assignment.

Linda T
How about an anthology of ghost stories or paranormal, supernatural, psychic phenomena?

Chris Fielden
Hi Linda. Thanks for the suggestion.

If this is a suggestion for the writing challenges, I'm afraid I'm not planning to launch anymore challenges in the foreseeable future, so I am not currently accepting suggestions for new challenges. This is because they are so time consuming to run. It's also worth noting that all the challenges have an educational angle. So simple 'genre' challenges wouldn't work unless there was something educational about them (EG, don't use too many adverbs in your writing, place prepositions in the correct place, learn how to edit your work so it is exactly 81 words long).

If this is a general submission suggestion, I don't undertake general publications. I only publish books via To Hull And Back (my short story competition) and the writing challenges.

Ifeoma S
Good day. I hope you are staying safe. l am from Nigeria. l am a young, upcoming, talented writer and l write about nature. My writings captivate the minds of the reader. l am looking for a way to see my story writing expand and be published in magazines and other places. I was searching and came across Writers' Forum. How can l be part of this and see my writing published so readers see an African writer's Spirit and passionate heart?

Chris Fielden
Hi Ifeoma. Thank you for your message. It's great to hear you're writing and looking for opportunities. Writers' Forum run a short story competition, but they also accept articles. However, their focus is on writing advice, not nature. I'd recommend ordering a copy of the magazine so you can see what it's all about. Then you will be able to find out how to approach them, should you want to write something for them about writing.

The same approach should be applied to any magazine or competition you submit your work to. Read the magazine first and see if your writing would be a good fit.

The Nan Shepherd Prize is specifically for nature writing, so you could try looking at that too.

If you are successful in getting your work published, please let me know. It would be great to have a guest post about your journey to publication :)

Ajay PS
Sir, kindly let me know if the entries to the writing contests you mention on your website are for anyone, from any country, and any age-group?

Thanks and regards.

Chris Fielden
Hi Ajay. Thank you for your message.

Most of the contests listed on my site are open to writers living anywhere in the world. Age limits vary, although many are open to any age group. You will have to check the rules / terms and conditions of each competition to see if you can enter.

Good luck with your submissions :-)

Xerxes P
Can you send me your competition info?

Xerxes P, [address removed for privacy reasons] Illinois.

I'd like to know how to submit online and where - the street address of your location.

Chris Fielden
Hi Xerxes. Thank you for your message.

I don't accept postal entries, I'm afraid, or post out details - everything is online.

You can find out how to enter my short story competition here.

You can find out how to submit to my writing challenges here.

You can find my contact details here.

If you have any other questions, please let me know :-)

Onuchi D
I would like to send to you a book of short stories for publication.

Chris Fielden
Hi Onuchi, thanks for your message.

I'm not a publisher so I can't help you I'm afraid. I'd recommend looking at the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook or Mslexia's Indie Press Guide to find publishers to submit your work to.

I wish you the very best with your writing.

Rathin B
Hi, Mr. Christopher Fielden, I would just like to thank you for all that you have done for unknown or little-known authors like me, through your posts and emails.

Please continue to inspire hundreds and thousands of writers like me. Stay happy and blessed.
With regards and best wishes,

Sincerely, Rathin B

Chris Fielden
Thank you for your kind comments, Rathin - very much appreciated :)

All the best to you.