Fearless She Wrote: Submission Guidelines
A comprehensive guide to writing for the Fearless publication.
Last Updated: September 3, 2021
Welcome to Fearless She Wrote!
We’re excited to have you as part of our writing team, and can’t wait to read and publish your work! To ensure the publishing process moves as smoothly and quickly as possible, please read through the following guidelines.
Turnaround Time
We will do our best to review all submissions within 48–72 hours, Monday through Friday. (We do not review submissions over the weekend, though you’re still welcome to submit during that time and we will review during the workweek.) We’re three editors with full-time jobs, so please allow us a full 72 hours before following up.
If edits are required, the clock starts again, due to the number of submissions we receive.
Submission quantity
Please only submit one draft to us at a time. We have many writers who are waiting for us to review their work and want to make sure that every piece gets the attention it deserves. As soon as we’ve reviewed your draft, feel welcome to submit another.
Notes about editing
We reserve the right to make changes to any draft submitted to our publication (title/subtitle changes, picture changes, etc.), and will leave you a private note on your piece should we deem any large edits necessary.
Smaller edits may include grammatical and/or spelling corrections, or the rewording of any sentences or phrases that are unclear. If we leave you a note about larger changes (title, subtitle, etc.) and we’ve not received a response from you after 7 days of our original editing note, the piece will be rejected.
*We ask all of our writers to keep their Private Note Settings On. Our editors leave notes for every single essay we receive, whether it’s accepted or rejected. If you’ve received a rejection without a note, you may want to check your Medium settings.
Story genres
We are looking for stories written as personal essays, with actionable messages and takeaways for our readers. We want to hear about your experiences, your opinions, the lessons that these things have taught you, and the lessons that your readers can learn from reading your story.
We are also interested in pieces written as social justice commentaries, that highlight the problematic behaviour of high-profile individuals. However, we are not interested in articles that would be classified as “celebrity gossip/updates”. For a social justice commentary to qualify, it must use the high-profile incident as an example of a wider societal issue. Much like the Harvey Winestein / Brock Turner cases were used to highlight the global plight of sexual assault survivors, so should your article use a high-profile incident to highlight a larger societal problem, educate the reader with relevant data/science, and facilitate actionable dialogue and conversation among readers.
We do not publish poetry, fiction, open letters, or stories that read as journal/diary entries.
Story topics
We’re interested in powerful stories related to womanhood, empowerment, feminism, social justice, and life experience. The drafts we publish will be well-edited, and without grammar or spelling mistakes.
Titles & subtitles
Make sure your title and subtitle in your article match the display title/subtitle and are written in title case format.
Proper tags
Please review your tags before submitting your piece. We cannot stress this enough. We frequently receive amazing drafts that are not tagged in any of our categories — this delays the publication process for all.
Your story must be tagged in at least one of the following categories:
- Feminism
- Culture
- Relationships
- Sexuality
- Women
Removal of content from Fearless
When work is approved and published by the Fearless team, we expect that work will remain in the publication, or be deleted from Medium entirely.
Our editorial team works hard to offer editing support to writers who are submitting work to the Fearless She Wrote publication. That time and support are not meant to be offered to writers who then later relocate their work outside of our publication.
The relocation of work initially published in Fearless to a personal profile or publication is grounds for immediate removal from the Fearless writing team.
“Tone” consideration
Please be conscious of the tone through which your piece will be viewed by your readers. Any work that may be deemed by our editors to be victim shaming, group stereotyping, or otherwise offensive may be rejected.
Self-promotion
You are welcome to link other published pieces at the end of your piece, even if they are housed in other publications. We also permit other self-promotion such as marketing a newsletter, Patreon, Substack, etc. However, we do not allow for direct self-promotion of your personally-owned Medium publications as a professional courtesy to our editorial team.
This is not a place for hateful work
We want to hear about your experiences, but we will not publish any hateful or slanderous work. After all, we’re giving a voice to those who have been faced with hate and/or slander, and this will not be a place for any such negativity.
Though you may receive negative comments, or have arguments with other writers on the Medium platform, we will not publish any work in which you tag another writer and then speak negatively about them.
We will not be silenced. We will be fearless. And we will write.
