The Fiction Shelf

Please read these guidelines carefully (as well as the technical guidelines below) before you submit a work. Failing to follow these guidelines may lead to your work being rejected unnecessarily.

We are currently looking for short stories and poetry of any type and in any genre. There is no hard word limit, but as a rough guide around 12,000 words should be considered the maximum – anything above this and your chances of being accepted will start to fall dramatically. We will only review complete works, any incomplete submissions will be rejected.

Submitted works will be reviewed by our editors to ensure quality for our readers. All works will be judged individually and on the quality of the piece submitted alone; we believe in freedom of expression, and will never reject a work because we disagree with its point of view. If a piece infringes on the law it can not be accepted.

We may help correct minor errors, but submissions with major errors of spelling, punctuation, formatting etc. will be rejected. This is not a proofreading service, so please ensure you have checked your work thoroughly before submitting. Remember that spell checkers are useful, but they are not a substitute for careful proofreading.

Plagiarism is unacceptable, if we find that any work is the result of plagiarism it will be removed from the site immediately, and this may prejudice your chances of having any further works accepted.

You will be informed by e‐mail as to whether your work has been accepted. It is our aim to respond to each submission within 28 days – please do not contact us about your submission unless you have not received a response within this time.

If you require any assistance or clarifications then please feel free to contact us prior to submission at editors@thefictionshelf.com.

Technical Guidelines

• All submissions should be sent to submit@thefictionshelf.com.
• Please submit a single work per e‐mail. If you have a large number of works you would like us to consider please send one or two representative pieces and let us know you have more.
• Ensure you include in your e-mail AND within the attachment:
  • Your name (specifically the name you want to put to your work).

  • The title of your piece.

  • A brief summary of your piece.

  • Any suggestions on genre classification.

  • Whether you are submitting any other works.

  • (optional) A contact phone number.

  • The work itself, as an attachment.

• Currently we only accept works in English. British and American spelling variants are fine, but please try to be consistent.

• Submissions must be in plain text (.txt), rich text (.rtf) or word document (.doc) format and must be sent as an attachment. If you do not require any advanced formatting we prefer submissions in plain text (this will not affect your chances of acceptance).

• If submitting in plain text you must leave a blank line between each paragraph.

• If submitting in rich text or word document format you may use italics and bold text, but other formatting will not be preserved. You may include footnotes and block quotations. If you have any special formatting requirements please let us know, we may be able to arrange exceptions.

• To indicate a scene break place a single asterisk (*) in a paragraph by itself.

• If your work is divided into sections (or chapters) please make sure it is very clear where each section begins and ends, and, if the sections are named, what they are each called.

• Please place the text ‘[END OF SUBMISSION]’ at the end of your work. This helps us ensure that nothing has been lost in transmission.

• We are currently unable to accept works with embedded images, or any other media.