A Work of Fiction Submission Guidelines

Last Updated December 31, 2020

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Thanks for your interest in A Work of Fiction. One thing you have to understand about this process is that we are a highly curated fiction-only publication. We don’t care about followers, following, and follow-for-follow. We care about stories, ideas, words, people, imagination, journeys, and we care about our writers.

We want to write next to the best fiction writers, not the masses. If you don’t read all the way to the bottom of this post, we will know and we will not respond to your request. We take this very seriously and if you don’t, that tells us all we need to know about you.

What is A Work of Fiction?

A fiction publication brought to you by Assemblage that focuses on creative narratives spun by captivating minds.

The Vision

Fiction is a wholly undervalued genre on Medium. A Work of Fiction has been trying to make a small creative dent in a listicle world. Our focus is on works of fiction of 2,500 words or less (moved up from 2,000 on December 31, 2020). Why?

We think it’s hard enough to scale up a fiction-only publication on this platform, but it would be even harder if it was full of 20-minute reads. Personally, we love long-form fiction, but we don’t think it’s the best fit for getting the most reads on a site like this. We aren’t saying we won’t publish it, or series’, but we will take a longer look for your own good.

In everything we do at Assemblage, we strive to help our writers achieve maximum growth while being supported by our community, collaboration, and creativity.

The Backstory

Assemblage was originally created as an alternative multi-author blog to Medium, on its own website created using Squarespace. The submission and publishing process was much more time consuming than on Medium and in the end, the determination was made that writers would be better served with the publication on Medium. So, we came back to Medium on August 21, 2019.

Since we’ve been back on Medium, our growth has been steady and very promising. In response to that, as well as feedback from our writers and readers, Assemblage created sub-publications to further our mission. A Work of Fiction was the first publication created specifically with that in mind.

Assemblage is the continuation of the now-defunct Medium publications, Redoubtable and Uncalendared. We created this publication on March 17, 2020.

In 2020, we published 67 stories on Medium from 21 different writers. Our most-read stories had 376 views and 122 reads. We had two stories with more than 20 fans. These numbers can be seen as disappointing, but we don’t write for the numbers. We write because we have to.

In 2020, we also had to remove our submission requirements and shut down intake because of the digital barrage occurring on Medium, as well as the widespread plagiarism and encouragement to apply everywhere. You can educate yourself on why we did it below. Really, if you want to write here, you should read about why we stopped adding writers.

Why Assemblage Had To Remove Its Submission Requirements

Photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash

Do you want to write for A Work of Fiction?

Submission Guidelines

By submitting work to A Work of Fiction, you are agreeing to all of the following conditions:

• We only accept unpublished drafts. We do not accept works already published on Medium or anywhere else, including personal blogs. We want your best work. Your fresh work. Not something that was never good enough to send anywhere else. If it was only published in a small, paper publication, we will consider that.
• We don’t accept sloppy seconds. If you submitted your piece to another publication and it got rejected, we don’t want to be your backup. We want you to write personal essays or poems just for A Work of Fiction. Period.
• Submissions must be properly tagged with at least one of the following: Creative Writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Story, or Storytelling. We encourage you to use just one (or two) of these and then (three or) four that match your content.
• Submissions may be edited for spelling, grammar, and format. We will never adjust your content. If we have comments we will send you a private note.
• Submissions must be made through Medium. Here’s how.
• All submissions must include a featured image with proper attribution. If you aren’t going to use Unsplash through Medium, make sure your attribution is correct.
• We don’t publish everything. All poems that are not a good fit will be returned with a private note.
• Once a story has been published in A Work of Fiction, we expect it to remain there. If a story is removed, without prior notice, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. If you want to remove the piece, just ask first. It’s your work. We would just want to know why, but we aren’t trying to hold the work against its will.
• We do not support the removal of works for republishing to get better metrics. This will result in immediate removal as a contributor. We aren’t a testing zone to see what works and what doesn’t.
• We will publish only one piece per writer per day.
• We will accept only one submission per writer per day.
• Our turnaround time is quick, always within 24 hours. If you have an intended publication date and time in the future, please include it in a private note on the title. We publish every day of the year, between 10 AM EST and 12 PM EST. If your submission comes in after our publishing run for the day, it will be published the next day.
• If we add you as a writer and you don’t produce a draft in the first week, we reserve the right to discontinue our relationship immediately. We want writers who are excited to write for us, not to add us to their list of publications.

Read This Before Submitting

1. Read this whole thing before submitting the form. There are easy signs to know when you have not read every word. If you fail to read the whole form and we can tell, based on your responses or your profile, we will not respond to your request.
2. If you are including A Work of Fiction in a spam sham of applying to as many publications as possible, please don’t waste your time or ours. We can tell and we won’t respond.
3. If you want to write for A Work of Fiction to grow your following first, we are not a good fit for you.
4. If you don’t have a favorite Medium writer and/or do not read other people’s fiction on Medium, you don’t have the commitment to the community that we are looking for.
5. If you haven’t been writing on Medium consistently for the past 3 months, please check back after you have at least 10 published works (they don’t all have to be fiction) before applying to contribute. We like writers new to Medium, but a lot of people leave. We want writers who have already adjusted to how Medium works.
6. If you are worried about how many followers we have, how often our stories get curated, or are interested in pulling works from the publication if they don’t “do well,” we are not the publication for you.
7. If you write for any of the following Medium publications, or any publication that is similar to these and their practices, you will not be added as a writer here. There will be no crossover writers. You do not have to remove any old works published there, but you will need 30 days clean before being reviewed for inclusion here. There is no guarantee that if you stop writing there, you will be added here.

• ILLUMINATION
• ILLUMINATION-Curated
• The Innovation
• Never Fear
• An Idea
• Data-Driven Investor
• Paper Poetry
• Be Unique
• About Me Stories
• Passive Asset

If you don’t understand why, read these:

How To Identify An Online Writing Pyramid Scheme

How To Identify An Online Writing Cult

Request to Write for A Work of Fiction

We are different than many publications. We don’t want to have 100+ writers so all of your stories get lost in the shuffle. We direct-recruit many writers by reading them on Medium. That is our preferred method of adding fiction writers. However, we are always open to new writers.

Writers who have not been asked to write for A Work of Fiction will need to fill out the embedded form below. By requesting to be a contributor to A Work of Fiction you are agreeing to all of the above Submission Guidelines. New writers are added on a rolling basis.

We do not want an open stable of writers who don’t produce. We want a small group of dependable and honest writers who are willing to produce stories weekly to monthly.

Please fill out the form below or click here.

Questions?

Feel free to email Jonathan Greene at jonathan@trustgreene.com with any questions.

This is not an invitation to add him to your email list.