In order to allay confusion, there now follows a brief guide on what constitutes a suitable submission to the Fiction Forum.
First of all, your submission should be a piece of fiction. Sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised. If you're interested in submitting a discursive essay, an opinion piece, or a rant (so long as it's a
well structured rant), then do so in the
Articles and Columns forum. Separate guidelines will be posted there, eventually.
Secondly, it should be a story. Precise definitions are hard to pin down, but simply put a story should follow some form of narrative structure. It needn't be anything as basic as the "beginning–middle–end" that gets hammered into you in high school, but a plot of some sort is a minimum requirement.
No one is demanding a professional quality of writing. Your work will be edited for technical errors, and if there are structural problems which are fixable, it might be returned with some suggested improvements rather than posted as-is. Constructive criticism is one of the main ways in which your writing can be improved.
It's rare that we have to turn away a piece outright. If we do, don't be discouraged—it's not necessarily an indictment on the quality of your work. It may well be that it just doesn't fit, structurally, with what we're looking to publish.
Things we will not publish:
Fan Fiction: There's a place for this, and Alternative Nation is not that place. Your work will be much better received elsewhere.
"Erotica": Sex within a work of fiction is fine. Work based prominently around sex, or going into extremely explicit details of sex acts, might be more gainfully submitted to another site.
Serialised Fiction: After experimenting with this, it has become apparent that the format of the Alternative Nation magazine simply isn't suitable for serialised work.
A note on copyright:
All work submitted to Alternative Nation falls under the terms of our
Creative Commons license. This means that your work can be reproduced elsewhere online, so long as Alternative Nation and the author of the piece are credited. The work must be reproduced unchanged, and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
Work which has been published elsewhere may be reproduced on Alternative Nation, provided the licensing rules of the original publisher are followed.
You retain full ownership of any work submitted to Alternative Nation. However, it should be noted that by allowing your work to be published in electronic format you forfeit first electronic publishing rights. This could cause problems if you later attempt to sell your work to an online publisher, as most publishers are unwilling to accept submissions which have been previously published. First electronic publishing rights are
entirely separate from first publishing rights, and publishing work on Alternative Nation will in no way affect anything you choose to do with your work in any non-electronic format.
