Shutterstock / Inside Creative House©We’ve got plenty of top tips for fiction submissions to the “Friend” here on our website. All you need to do is have a look around!
Since we introduced our new process for unpublished authors submitting their stories, though, we thought it was time to share some more advice.
It’s been a few months since we launched the new process, it’s been a great success so far. So, first of all, thank you!
We’ve been thrilled to welcome a number of debut authors to the “Friend” family.
The place to email your stories if you’re unpublished is friendfiction@dctmedia.co.uk.
Our known authors also submit to their own editor by email now, too.
The Fiction team had a chat yesterday just to see if there was any way that the system could be improved, and we came up with these top tips:
Your manuscript know-how!
When you email your manuscript to us, please put your full name, address and email at the top.
If any of the fiction team are off, it means another member of staff can get in touch about an acceptance, put your payment through straight away and get your story into the system.
Please do not put headers, footers or page numbers on your manuscript. Page numbers were needed when we accepted hard copy manuscripts, but we don’t need them on Word documents — and we only accept Word documents.
Do not use any formatting. You can get advice on that here.
Why don’t we want formatting? Well, if you’re story is successful then the document you submit will be document that goes through all the way to print!
Our Production team are incredibly busy, and it takes time to strip away the formatting and the extra things like headers and footers.
Other bits of advice
If your story is set before the year 2000, please put the year or the era at the top.
Pay attention to our word counts and general guidelines. The highest word count we accept is 9500 for our Long Read cosy crime stories. The next highest word count is 4000 words, and that’s for our Specials.
There is nothing in between. For more information on our story templates, click here.
Please don’t send multiple stories at once as the system thinks they’re spam.
Serials are written by our known authors who have built up a great deal of experience, and we work with them on an instalment by instalment basis. So if you’re an unpublished author please do not send in serials.
We don’t publish children’s stories or sci-fi, and we simply don’t have time to answer questions via the Friend Fiction email address.
If you’re still unsure about why we rejected your story there is more advice here.
There are lots of writing questions answered in our Writing Hour Roundups here.
To subscribe to “The People’s Friend” and get your first 13 issues for just £8, click here.
Tracey Steel Having worked on a number of magazines over the years, I have found my perfect place on the “Friend” as I’m obsessed with reading and never go anywhere without a book! I read all of our stories with a mug of tea close by and usually a bit of strong cheese too!
