Submission Guidelines

Click here to find out how to submit a story.

Submit your short story here, and you could be named the Authortrek Writer of the Month!

The rules are very simple -

There is a word limit of 10,000 words, with a minimum of 1000 words (a new minimum word count of 2500 words comes into force on 1st September 2011).  The full story must also be posted to the site (i.e. if only the title of the story is posted to the site, then obviously it won’t be counted, no matter how many votes the title gets!) To be eligible for inclusion in our anthologies, the short stories must be fiction and have the traditional beginning, middle, and end of any tale. So, please do not post any poetry or non-fiction, such as life stories, on the site, or descriptive pieces that do not have a plot. All characters in your story must be of your own devising, so fan fiction is also banned (although you can utilise legendary characters that are out of copyright).

- Here endeth the rules! The stories can be of any genre.

Once you have signed up for the site, you can post your story. Registration is free.  Indeed, access to the whole of Authortrek Short Stories is free.

Each short story will have a voting button. So, once you have finished posting your story, forward the story link to your friends and ask them to read and vote for your story if they like it (i.e., don’t be shy!). Visitors will only be allowed to vote once per story.  Your story will be open to feedback from other users of the site, which may be taken into account in the event of a tie (please ensure that you only ever engage in constructive criticism – the administrator reserves the right to bar users who abuse the comment box).

The 3 stories with the most votes from 3 different authors will form the shortlist for each month’s award, with Authortrek editor Kevin Mahoney choosing the winner. So it’s best to only submit 1 short story per month, or your votes may be split between all the stories that you have entered. It’s also a good idea for you submit your story as early in the month as possible, as votes will only be counted per calendar month (not from the date that you submitted the story).  The winning author will not win any money or a prize, only the title of Authortrek Writer of the Month, but this is still a mighty fine addition to your writing CV.  However, if your short gets over 30 votes, then you may be invited to submit your story to a paperback anthology, which you will be sent a free copy of. Authortrek editor Kevin Mahoney reserves the final right to choose which stories to appear in the paperback anthology, and will reject any short stories that he feels are not of sufficient quality.

So that you can see what short stories on the site will look like, we have published a copy of Guy de Maupassant’s excellent tale The Necklace.

Please remember that the story you are posting is going on the internet, so it should have single line spacing not double line spacing – if your story has double line spacing, then your readers will have to scroll down the page a lot more!

Please note that some short stories may contain adult themes.