Submission Guidelines
How to submit work as a writer for Trans Erotica.
What work belongs on Trans Erotica?
Trans Erotica takes submissions from trans and nonbinary creators ONLY. If you feel you come under the trans and nonbinary umbrella(s), your work is welcome!
Trans Erotica is a place to publish:
- Erotica
- Erotic romance
- Romance, horror, and other fiction with too many erotic elements for you to put them elsewhere
Works can be about trans characters, but they don’t have to be! So long as you, the writer, are trans, nonbinary, or otherwise genderweird, your characters can be any gender at all.
We accept stories about men, women, nonbinary people, and other genders in any and all combinations.
Works should be over 500 words. There is no upper limit.
Works can be in third-person, second-person, or first-person, and can be in past or present tense. Tense and perspective should be consistent throughout the work.
Works should be drafts, and should not be previously published here on Medium. If you’ve published them elsewhere before, such as on Ao3, Tumblr, Patreon, as part of the Shousetsu Bang Bang or another zine, or similar, that’s fine.
We accept original fiction only — fanfiction should generally be put in other platforms, including fanfiction of public domain works. Non-fiction, including creative non-fiction, memoirs, writing guides or sex guides, should be sent to other publications.
We accept most kinks — please no bestiality (defined as any erotica involving actual animals; your werewolf boyfriend is probably fine), snuff, hard vore, guro, or underage (defined as any erotica involving those under the age of 18).
Works should be tagged according to the formatting guidelines outlined below, with a title, description, header image, and a list of tags and/or applicable warnings for the story.
Clear warnings should be in place particularly for dubious consent and non-consent (including rape play and CNC), and creators should adhere to Medium’s Guidelines.
Submissions should be written in English, completed to a high standard of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. There’s nothing wrong with some typos here and there, it happens to us all, but work should use standard English spelling and punctuation, be formatted in clear paragraphs, follow these technical standards for dialogue formatting, and generally be clear and cohesive.
No plagiarism, including the use of “artificial intelligence” to generate your work or assist in writing it. If you need to use “AI” to write, you don’t have any business writing in the first place.
Feel free to put a short note at the end of your work with a link to one or two similar works, a link to your Patreon, a description of who you are, etc. Try to keep it to three lines or less.
If you’ve never written on Medium before, and you’re not sure how or where to start, there’s a guide here:
Formatting Guidelines
Works should follow the below formatting guidelines for the top of your story:
Title of the Work
Subtitle outlining the rough plot of the work.
You can find public domain images to use as headers from websites such as Unsplash or Pexels, you can include sketches or header images you’ve drawn yourself (please make sure they’re in line with Medium’s guidelines, i.e. that they are non-explicit), or you can include a header image edited like the above, which I made in Canva.
All header images must be credited to their source — ones you’ve made yourself you can say “created by the author” or “credit to the author”. Please include alt text for uploaded images if possible.
A further description of the fiction, if applicable, goes below your header image.
Try to include:
- the genders of those involved, if applicable (e.g. M/M, F/F, F/NB, etc).
- It’s not necessary to include anatomical descriptions of people in the description, but if you do want to describe people’s genitalia up-front, you can do so by saying “a man with a pussy/cunt/vagina/t-dick” or “a woman with a cock”, “nonbinary person with a pussy who’s had a phalloplasty”, etc. You can use whatever physical language or descriptors you feel most comfortable with.
- Refrain from using language such as “AFAB NB person” or “AMAB woman” to describe people’s physical bodies. These descriptions can be intersexist and generally erase a lot of genital diversity, including post-surgical options. “AFAB” and “AMAB” should not be used as a stand-in for “female” or “male”.
- a list of kinks and/or applicable warnings for the work ahead
If you’d ordinarily put it in your Ao3 description or note it in the tags, note it here.
If you would like to post a serialised piece of fiction, include the Chapter or Part number in the title, in the format of Chapter One: Title or Part II: Title.
You can include a general summary for the serial and relevant content warnings for each part. Please ensure you include links to previous chapters at the beginning and end of the text to make it easy for readers to go back and forth.
You don’t need to include every single chapter of your serial on Trans Erotica, but that’s all the more reason to make sure you have links to previous parts immediately available.
You can then use one of these dividers to separate your description and header from your work proper, just press the + button that appears to the left of your Medium text client and select the far-right option:
Making Money on Medium
When you submit your work to this or any other Medium publication, you retain ownership and control over it, and you can remove it from the publication at any time.
It’s generally considered bad etiquette to pull your story from one publication to put it in another, but it’s not against our guidelines or anything.
If you haven’t written anything on Medium before and don’t know where to start, I would recommend checking out this video:
Zulie includes a section about how to start making money from Medium, and I would absolutely encourage people to meter their stories when they submit them so they can make money from them, but you can only do this once you have joined the Medium Partner Program, which requires 100 followers.
You can absolutely submit your first stories before you’ve joined the Partner Program, and then go back and meter your old stories once you’ve got your requisite 100 followers.
If you would prefer not to meter your stories and just publish everything here for free, that’s okay too! Remember that you can add your tip jar, and you do not need to be a member of Medium’s Partner Program to do this.
How To Submit
I (Johannes T. Evans) run this publication alone at the moment, and I do not have time to go through and edit people’s stories or make a lot of formatting changes.
Please make sure that you have Private Notes on, so that if I reject your story for any reason, I can just put a little note on it saying any reason(s) why.
Once you’ve been added as an author, go to your draft link for your work and select “Add to Publication” from the publishing menu with the little ellipsis. I will get to it to publish it as soon as I can — ideally within 5–7 business days.
To be added as an author on this publication, reply below saying you’d like to be added as an author. You don’t have to explain how or why you’re trans, but please say that you’re trans or nonbinary in your reply.