Updated Submission Guidelines and General Policies

Updated March 10, 2020

Welcome to Literally Literary. We are a publication that has been around for a number of years on Medium, but we are constantly updating our policies and procedures to better serve you. With a following of more than 27,000 people, we want to make sure that what we deliver to our readers is always the best it can be.

How to Become a Writer for Literally Literary:

New Writer requests are closed at this time, but will reopen soon! We will announce this in a future Newsletter.

Submission Guidelines:

*NEW* Literally Literary now only accepts drafts. We do not accept any works that have been previously published. If we find that we are hosting a piece that is being hosted somewhere else, we will remove it from Literally Literary.
Please note that if you submit an already published work (not in draft form), it will appear in the order it was originally published and therefore may not appear at the front of the page as new drafts do.
If you are already a writer for Literally Literary with a draft, click the “…” next to Publish, then choose ‘Add to publication’. You should see us as an option.
We can’t always publish immediately. We have quickened the publishing time, but there are only a couple of us back there doing the work. Please feel free to contact us using the contact information at the bottom of this document if you haven’t seen your story published in a few days.
Important: Please be on the lookout for private notes from our editors. This is how we alert you of potential changes you may want to make, suggestions, and advice. If we do not hear back from you on our private note within 72 hours, we will send the story back and wait for you to resubmit it.
Yes, we absolutely do publish stories locked for Medium members.

General Publishing Policies

Rule Numero Uno, the big one: Absolutely, under no circumstances, will we publish pieces focused on racism, sexism, politics, proselytizing, or those that are gratuitously offensive.
The first tag must correlate with the correct navigation tab (Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, or Prompts). This is for your benefit, as much as ours, as lacking a tag that corresponds to this can cause your piece to land in limbo (blame Medium).
If you are publishing poetry, please do not also tag your story fiction or nonfiction as it makes it harder for us to organize and sort on the back end.
Each post must have an image to follow the layout on the main pages. These should be credited to the photographer or open domain. Medium has Unsplash built-in and it is very easy to use.

Images

Nearly anything that it shows should be usable without hindrance. Two exceptions are images found on Pinterest and Maxpixel. Images obtained from Pinterest are not acceptable. If the image appears elsewhere on a Creative Commons site, you’re good to go, but any images attributed solely to “Pinterest” will not be accepted.

Once you’ve found an image you want to use you must include a link to the image in your piece, either somewhere in the body, or, preferably, right under the image.

If it is your own image, please indicate that.

Images must be at least 1000px wide.

Quality Guidelines and Notes

(Written by Jonathan Greene, former Poetry Editor for LL) Poetry is an art form. We have no interest in touching your art without permission. With that said, our job is to help you publish the best piece of poetry possible. To that end, we will leave you private notes to help. Some of these are suggestions. Some of these are notifications of word choices or potential typos. Some of these are spacing or footer issues. But the goal is always to help you.

Please respond to the private notes and do not dismiss them until we have published the piece. This way we can be sure of the adjustments made. LL respect all poets' styles, spacing, and general cadence. When we see something unusual that we haven’t seen before with your work, we will ask you before publishing it. This usually relates to spacing or line breaks.

The more we work together, the more LL will come to understand your poetic style and the easier it will be for us to publish. Please never take offense to the private notes, they are only sent to help you. Sometimes the piece will be sent back to complete the notes, sometimes it will remain until complete.

Some Extra Tips

Please proofread your piece multiple times before sending it in. It will make our process much smoother and will also help with time spent as we receive many submissions each day. If you have something in your poem that is intentionally spelled differently or may be unexpected, leave a private note to let us know on the way in so we don’t have to ask you about it.
Please use images that complement your poem. This is a bigger deal than you may think. Don’t just use what comes up on the first page of images. Find an image that truly represents what your poem is about. People are so visual these days and a compelling image can make or break your words below it, whether we like it or not.
Don’t send us your ok poetry. Send us your best. We have more than 27,000 potential readers and we want them to get your top effort. This is not a publication to send your rejects to. We want quality work.
Feel free to send multiple submissions in, within reason, but realize we will never publish two works by you on the same day. If we get to it on the same day, one will be scheduled for the following day.
Check your tags. Your first tag should be representative of your submission. The rest can be whatever you want but know that when we share your work on Twitter we look to your tags to create hashtags on Twitter.

Some Formatting Tips

Your title is a title. In most cases, it should never have a period at the end.
Your subtitle is also a title, a complement to your title. For poets on Medium, we often use this as a spot to declare it a poem, or a free verse, etc. This is totally fine. But please use the Medium buttons to format your subtitle to the correct size.
Please do not use the subtitle section as a personal classification section. If you really need to, make sure to delete it from the subtitle menu on the right so it doesn’t show up on the homepage and when shared.
Please use standard single spacing in your poetry and not paragraph spacing. The default on Medium is paragraph spacing and you can use Shift+Enter after each line to adjust to single spacing when writing poetry. We understand this is not possible if you write on your phone, but it will reduce our editing time if you correct it on a desktop before submitting it. If, however, you have a reason for paragraph spacing, please leave a private note as to your reasons. We respect your style, but also want your poem to look the best to our readers. We will adjust paragraph spacing on a limited basis, for smaller poems. Others will be returned for proper formatting.
Please do not overuse the formatting features in your poem. While I appreciate that Medium is a bit limited in terms of formatting, too much of it can detract from your words. Full use of large quotes for a poem should only be done for micropoetry or shorter verses as it can be too distracting for longer pieces and unnecessary. If you have specific reasons for extra formatting, please leave a private note. The more we know about your process, the better.
Please limit your links at the end to 3 at maximum. Personally, we feel 1 is always best as 3 makes the reader choose from too many options — but it’s up to you. We will ask you to remove any more than 3 links to your other stories.
If you want to link to social media or your mailing list, please make sure it is small and visually pleasing. We suggest only using text such as, Follow me on Facebook (linked word), etc. To read beautiful poetry and then get a big block asking for a follow or a sign-up takes away from the aesthetic value of your words.

Prose addendums from your Fiction and Nonfiction Editor, Indira Reddy

Many of the points above hold true for fiction and nonfiction as well, but here are a few more things:

We are always looking for great fiction — stories that make our emotions sing, that make us laugh and snort, that can wring tears from the most botoxed face, that make hearts pound with fear — we want it all!

Now let’s sail to the vast ocean of nonfiction. Literally Literary, being primarily a literary publication, is interested in memoirs, creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, essays on literature, writing or history.

Please note: Earlier, we have hosted pieces that don’t exactly meet the above criteria, but in our constant endeavor to provide our readers with beautiful, literary content, we are trying to remain true to our focus on Literature.

Contact Information:

Please note, these are the only ways we can guarantee we’ll see your note/message/request.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @Literally_Lit0

Welcome — share, love, create.

Your editors, Heath ዟ Indira Reddy Jess Kaisk

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