Editor Interview: Literally Stories

Diverse short fiction

The Book Folks

Lee Child, Terry Pratchett,

We are very very friendly and very quick to respond

Stop sending us children's stories as we don't publish them!! Read the submission guidelines and as far as possible try to adhere to them - simply because it ensures a quicker response and we don't like to keep writers waiting

An email which gives the title, genre and word count and the story attached as a separate file.

Omitting the title, word count and genre from the email and not setting up the Word file (or equivalent) in accordance with our guidelines. We don't preclude good work because of these things, we realize that not everyone has the requisite software or skill, but it does make our handling of the work much more complicated.

We do like a cover letter but when we accept a piece for publication we do ask authors to submit a short author bio and image if they want to and we include that on our author page and author gallery - we think it helps to make our site a friendly place when we can put a face and a bit of background to a name. Lists of previous publications don't really matter as we hope that we take every story on its own merits.

Unless it is obvious from very very early on that the piece is not going to be accepted and yes, we can usually weed those out quickly, at least three of the editors read all of the story and if there is any doubt we debate and discuss until we reach agreement.

Just three "yes" votes

Because Literally Stories is very much a group venture made up of people with full time "other lives" there is a sharing of the responsibilities, Acknowledgement of submissions are done by any member of the editorial team so that writers don't wait too long to know that their work has been received and this also includes from our end the setting up of the reading process.
Once the stories are read and a decision reached then there is one editor tasked with notification (wherever possible as this gives authors a name to latch on to) and the setting up and posting of the stories on the site is also pretty much the responsibility of one person which we have found works best in order to preclude any doubling up and confusion.

We make small corrections to the text if we are sure that this will not change the way that the author intended the work to be presented. We do not send those changes back to the author. Occasionally when a work is too good to miss but needs more extensive changes we will return this to the author with our suggestions. Then it is up to them whether or not they want to re-submit.

NO