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Submission Guidelines |
The Freak Nation is open to submissions from anyone in the freak community — indeed, we not only welcome submissions, we need them. Without them, we’ve got nothing to publish. We’re interested in anything that’s of interest to freaks, meaning anything that will interest people from at least one of the seven freak tribes. If it will interest two or more, so much the better!
The only other thing we ask is that it be reasonably good quality stuff. There’s enough mediocre crud on the Web that we don’t need to add to it.
We expect that most submissions will be written material of one sort or another — stories, essays, poems, reviews, and so on. You can submit these via email (to the site’s webmaster) in pretty much any format — plain text, RTF, MS Word... Just don’t try sending us a PDF; extracting the text would be basically impossible.
You must include an author bio with your submission! This should be some description of yourself, roughly 50 to 100 words, which will go at the bottom of your article, review, or whatever other masterpiece you’re sending in. We will not accept your submission without a bio.
Written submissions do not need to be in HTML; we will provide layout and markup. While it’s certainly nice if your submission’s been spell-checked or proofed before you send it in, it’s not critical; we have copyeditors on staff, and can provide editing and tweaking as necessary.
Specific notes on what we’re looking for in various categories of written material are as follows:
There’s an awful lot to be said about reviews, since there are so many different types. Please read our review guidelines for a complete writeup — or, if you’ve never written a review before, our complete guide on how to write a review may be more helpful. If you already know how to write reviews, you may be able to skip that document; you should know that our general word-count preference for reviews is around 900-1000 words, with 600 words being a bare minimum. The upper limit is maybe 1500.
Articles should also be at least 500 words, and can run as long as needed. Hey, if you just wrote a 50,000-word paper on portrayals of alternative sexuality in science fiction novels, we’ll be happy to run it — it’s not like we’re about to run out of ink or paper.
We’ll take artwork in any standard Web format (GIF, JPEG, or PNG), or a PSD if needed. We may need to crop or scale the images to fit into our layout, so sending your submission at a slightly larger scale than you’d normally find on a Web page is fine. (It’s much easier to scale something down than to scale it up.)
Artwork can also be emailed to the webmaster, but please try not to make any single email larger than about a megabyte.
If you have some artwork that’s intended to go with a written submission, you can send the artwork and the text all in the same email.
Freak Nation is devoted to serving the whole width (and depth and breadth) of the freak community. The goth-punks, the medieval recreationists, the Neopagans and ceremonial mages, the sci-fi/fantasy/animé/comics fans, the hackers and cyberpunks, the BDSM/kink/alt-sex community, and the role-playing/live-action/computer gamers — all of these are within our scope.
If you want to do something that concerns or would be of interest to any of the groups listed above, we’re interested in putting it on this site. If it interests or is about more than one of these groups, so much the better! And we aren’t limited to static text pieces (such as essays and stories); we’re also happy to host mailing lists, web-comics, and other ongoing, multimedia, and interactive types of content.
So: Want to start a mailing list for punk magicians, or one that discusses polyamory in the SCAdian community? Or even just an announcement list for your regional Net.Goth event? How about a web-comic about (or for) the kink community? Want to review comics, movies, clubs, games, books, or something else? Contact us and let us know your idea!
Or maybe you’ve just got something you want to get off your chest. A rant about how gamers are still discriminating against women? An essay on why more cyberpunks should check out medieval recreation? An article about why Paganism makes sense as a religion for goths? We'd love to publish it!
Send all submissions to webmaster@freaknation.com. Make sure your submission includes your name, as you want it printed on the site, and an author bio of at least 50 words. Without such things, your submission will simply be ignored. Thank you.