General Submissions Information
A lot of this is general advice you can, and maybe should, use anywhere you submit.
***To clear up some confusion: You do NOT have to have a Draft2Digital account to submit a story to Knight Writing Press, but a Draft2Digital account will be required to finalize any acceptance, and you will need it to receive any payments.
This is a long section, because a lot of it is important for you to understand, whether you are submitting to us or to anyone else.
Please read all submission guidelines and make sure you understand and follow them before you submit. Remember, individual projects usually have specific additions/changes to a publisher’s general submissions guidelines.
At this time, Knight Writing Press (and Enrapturing Tales) exclusively uses Draft2Digital to distribute so that we can take advantage of their payment splitting program. Please make sure you understand what that means and how it affects you before you submit.
Of particular importance is that you read and understand the sample contract and what is expected of you, and what you have to do to receive your royalties, should your story be accepted. We put all the information here for you to see, before you submit, so that you know what to expect.
Your contract will vary slightly, so make sure you read that contract as well.
In particular, rights granted have since been modified to be exclusive until such time as the anthology the story will be in has been published. We regret this, but some sales outlets (that maybe start with A, have a Z in the middle, and end with an N) have caused us problems when a previously published story appears in whole or in part online anyplace. This means if you posted your story on your (or any) website, it has already been published for free and SOME sales outlets won’t carry it for sale, even as part of a collection, which means we can’t either. This also means (we are even sorrier to say) that we will no longer be accepting reprints for the foreseeable future.
If you do not agree with what is expected of you, please do not waste your time, or ours, by submitting a story.
If you do not agree with something in the contract and feel it is something unreasonable or doesn’t make sense, of if you just don’t understand something, please feel free to contact us to discuss it BEFORE you submit a story. We are not interested in contract negotiations for any particular story, but we are interested in having a fair contract that benefits everyone involved.
**A side note from your friend Sam Knight, because he insisted we put this here:
Make sure you read and understand ANY contract you get from ANYONE! Get a disinterested third party to explain anything you do not understand. Do not trust anyone who can possibly benefit from a contract to explain it to you. Not even us. While we have every intention of being upfront and honest, if you don’t understand something, you should ALWAYS get the opinion of a disinterested 3rd party. After that, make sure you are happy with what you understand BEFORE signing anything! All contracts are negotiable, it is just a matter of whether or not someone wants to negotiate. Strong-arm tactics, like you have to sign now or the deal is off, is not negotiation. If they treat you like that now, how do you expect they will they treat you in the future?
Remember, you never HAVE TO sign a contract.
If someone tells you that you HAVE TO sign a contract, it is time for you to walk away or get a lawyer or both.
If you do not understand something in a contract——any contract, not just ours——do not sign it until you understand it.
**A side note from your friend Sam Knight, because he insisted we put this here:
Make sure you read and understand ANY contract you get from ANYONE! Get a disinterested third party to explain anything you do not understand. Do not trust anyone who can possibly benefit from a contract to explain it to you. Not even us. While we have every intention of being upfront and honest, if you don’t understand something, you should ALWAYS get the opinion of a disinterested 3rd party. After that, make sure you are happy with what you understand BEFORE signing anything! All contracts are negotiable, it is just a matter of whether or not someone wants to negotiate. Strong-arm tactics, like you have to sign now or the deal is off, is not negotiation. If they treat you like that now, how do you expect they will they treat you in the future?
Remember, you never HAVE TO sign a contract.
If someone tells you that you HAVE TO sign a contract, it is time for you to walk away or get a lawyer or both.
If you do not understand something in a contract——any contract, not just ours——do not sign it until you understand it.
Of Special Importance and Note, Regarding Payment for Stories:
At this time, we are only paying in the form of royalty sharing, and we are exclusively using Draft2Digital as our distributor for our upcoming projects so that we can take advantage of the Draft2Digital royalty sharing program. While this means you will not receive any upfront payment for your story, royalty sharing allows our authors a chance to eventually make considerably more money for their stories than we could afford to have initially paid them for inclusion in our anthologies. (This also means that the more our authors self-promote the anthologies they are in, the more they directly benefit themselves.)
In order to receive these royalty share payments, each author has to have, and maintain, a Draft2Digital account, as Draft2Digital pays each person directly. This means you will have to provide tax ID information (for tax reporting purposes) to Draft2Digital as well as way as a way for you to receive payment. Those ways, as of this writing include PayPal, direct deposit, check, and others. If you would like to use our affiliate link to sign up for an account with Draft2Digital, it would be appreciated, but not in any way required. https://www.draft2digital.com/knightwritingpress
**A note of clarification** You do not have to have a Draft2Digitial account to submit to us, but you will have to have one to finalize your contract with us, should your submission be accepted to one of our projects.
Failure on your part to maintain a Draft2Digital account to receive royalty sharing payments does not constitute an issue on our part. Draft2Digital allots the payments based upon a percentage at the time the payments are distributed, which is determined solely by Draft2Digital. Other than the assignation of the percentages of those funds, we have no control over the distribution of the funds and no recourse to recover or re-allocate disbursed funds. This means that if your account is not actively able to receive those payments at the times they are made, those funds are redistributed to others and are not held for you and cannot be retrieved or paid to you in the future. They are gone and no longer owed to you.
If you have account problems with Draft2Digital, and are able to get them resolved with Draft2Digital, we will of course work with you to attempt to reestablish your percentage of future royalty shares.
If you do not want to obtain and maintain a Draft2Digital account so that you can receive payments, please do not submit a story to us. We are making no other forms of payment or reimbursement at this time.
You can start setting up a Draft2Digital account here:https://www.draft2digital.com/knightwritingpress (our affiliate link) or look up the link yourself. It will take you approximately 10 minutes to set up an account. You will have to provide verifiable tax information (like your Social Security number or a business EIN) to be able to receive payments. In order to participate in the payment sharing program with Knight Writing Press, you will have to provide Knight Writing Press with the email address your Draft2Digital account is using, so that we can add you to the list of payees for any project you are associated with. You will not need to provide us any of your tax information or payment information.
We are not affiliated with Draft2Digital in any way other than possible earnings from use of our affiliate link, which no one is required to use. We have no control or influence with Draft2Digital, and we are at the mercy of the continuation of the royalty sharing program by Draft2Digital. Should that program end, the royalties and payments will end. Should that occur, we will cease distribution of our works distributed through Draft2Digital that make use of the royalty sharing program, and those works will then be considered “out of print.” At that point, there will be no more compensation paid to the authors and no more copies of the works will be printed or distributed for sale or otherwise.
Also, should Draft2Digital cease print book distribution, the printed versions of works shall be likewise considered “out of print,” however eBooks will remain in distribution unless that program is likewise discontinued.
A final note on our use of Draft2Digital: It has been our experience so far that Draft2Digital can be several month behind sales with payments to the authors. As we are not affiliated with D2D, this can be hard to reconcile and we are not privy to all the reasons why other than we understand that they cannot pay us until they have received payment from their sales partners. Tracking sales to specific outlets (like Amazon or B&N or Apple Books) has been difficult and confusing, especially with print books. We hope, as time goes on, D2D will resolve these issues. Meanwhile, we still believe this is the easiest and most affordable way for us to publish short stories by so many authors and make sure those authors receive royalties for their stories. With all of that in mind, please be patient with receiving your royalties and understand we may not have, and may not be able to get, answers to your questions.
Again, if you are not satisfied with this arrangement, do not submit a story to us.
General Submission Guidelines
Please make sure you read the summaries of each individual project you are considering submitting to, to make sure there is nothing different that needs to be added or changed or specialized for that particular project. Like what email to send your submission to…
Warning: Failure to follow the guidelines may result in your story being rejected without being having been read or considered an any way, and you may not receive a rejection notice. This is due to high incidence of emails that, while made to look like submissions, are actually spam, or worse.
First, if you didn’t read the section above about Draft2Digital royalty sharing as our only form of payment, and what is expected of you because of that, do so now. If you aren’t happy with that, don’t submit to us.
Second, do not send us anything that glorifies, supports, encourages, or gratuitously includes hate, hate crimes, rape, sex, sex crimes, racism, ageism, misogyny, misandry, violence, torture, or any of the other forms of inhumanity that we all know humans are too well capable of. The world is a terrible enough place as it is. We want stories that help us escape that, or learn how to survive it, or make it better, not stories that promote it.
Do not send stories using/based upon song lyrics you do not own the rights to.
Depending upon the project, we may accept poetry, art, flash fiction, etc. Please refer to individual project guidelines for more information on what that project will or will not accept.
If the editor accepts your story pending more edits, you must be willing to work with the editor. If you are not open to working with the editor, please don’t waste your time submitting to us. We are not overbearing editors, and we are open to listening to author reasons for not wanting to make changes, but we are not interested in working with authors who are not interested in working with us to make their stories the best they can be.
First time authors are always welcome, and encouraged, to submit, but make sure you always put your best foot forward. Your story should be the best you can make it (a minimum of proofread and spell checked thoroughly is a must) before you submit it. We choose our stories based upon the merits of the story and the writing (and the story fitting with the project it was submitted to). We do not base acceptances or rejections upon the author’s perceived or expressed experience, sex, race, religion, age, planetary origin, organic molecule structure base, cause of creation, or whatever. The stories are what are important to us. That said, at this time we are not accepting AI generated stories. If you are an AI, we apologize. We try to be accepting, but this is taking a little getting used to.
If you are under 18, you will need the approval of a parent or guardian to submit. Please note that you are under 18 please let us know at the time of submission. It will not affect your chances of being accepted unless it is not provided. If your story is accepted, you will need a parent or guardian to co-sign the contract. Also, you will need a parent or guardian to help you create a Draft2Digital account in order to receive royalty payments. You can find Draft2Digital’s policy here. The information about minors is near the bottom of the page.
Electronic submissions only.
E-mail submissions with the subject line of: (Project Name): (story name) by (author’s name)
Please note, while we can generally be reached at
knightwritingpress@gmail.com or enrapturing.tales@gmail.com
the submission e-mail address may vary with projects. Please refer to individual project guidelines for more information about which email to use.
The body of the email should be simple. You are not trying to sell yourself, so we don’t need a bio or introduction, and you are not trying to pitch your story, so we don’t need a summary. You are submitting your story for consideration on its own merits, so all we need to double check is that you sent it to the right place, that it is the story you intended to send, and that it meets the initial guidelines of the anthology (length, genre, etc.).
Here is an example of something similar to what your email query letter should look like:
Dear Editors, (Unless you are trying to find a specific person, don’t worry about who to address it to.)
Thank you for considering, “Taking Chances”, approximate word count 3,032, for submission to the anthology, Card Games. It is a modern western with heavy anime influences.
(If your story was previously published, say so, when, in what, and by whom. If not, leave out this part.)
I understand you are using Draft2Digital’s royalty sharing program and that I must have an account with Draft2Digital in order to receive royalties for my story. (This is non-standard. This is for submissions to us only, because we want to make sure you understand how we are paying.)
I am an alumnus of Crayons to Pens Writing Boot Camp, and an active member of the RTWR and POPOQ. (You can throw the alphabet at us if you want, but really this part is unnecessary, we are looking at the story, not you. If your story is accepted, then we’ll ask for a bio you can impress your readers with .)
John Smith writing as Xavior X Zactly (If you use a pen name, make sure we know! Remember, it is not legal to sign a contract with your pen name unless you have a DBA license. Even then it might get iffy.)
1234 Back Alley Doorstep
Uknowhere, CA 80210
John@XaviorXZactly.com
(555)-555-5555
Note: If you do not provide your contact information, we cannot contact you to tell you we liked your story. (You’d be surprised…)
Please attach your story as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file.
We do not want a PDF, .ODT, .jpeg, a link to a fax service, or access your DropBox or Google Docs. We will delete the submission, unopened and without reply, if it is not a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file.
Please submit your story in standard manuscript format, with author name (real name and pen name if one is used), address, phone number and a word count on the first page. This is very important! The editor has to contact writers to request changes and offer contracts. Your story will be dropped if you can’t be reached. (Again. You’d be surprised…)
If you are unfamiliar with standard manuscript format, please refer to the Shunn Manuscript Format for Fiction Writers. If you don’t know it, you should learn it. It will serve you well in most places. (The only difference between the “modern” and “classic” is, according Shunn.net, “The Modern Edition displays in a proportional serif font with one space between sentences, while the Classic Edition displays in a monospaced font with two spaces between sentences.” We don’t care which you use. Other places may. Many older publishers still prefer monospaced fonts.)
Thumbnail sketch of formatting:
Use a 12 point font, Times New Roman (our preference) or Courier New.
Double spaced between lines.
Put your address, phone number, and word count on the first page.
Put the story title and page number on all subsequent pages. (Please do not put the title and page number on each page manually. Use the header function of your word processor.)
Use a hashtag, #, or similar to mark scene breaks. Please mark your scene breaks!
Please do not use spaces or tabs to format your paragraphs. Set your word processor to use First Line Indentation for paragraphs.
We want good stories and we will try to work around minor things, but please understand that some things become too much of an issue for us to deal with on a constant basis. Please do your best to send us the best story you can, in the cleanest format you can.
Thank you for considering submitting to us and for sticking it out and reading the guidelines.