Submissions Guidelines:



You retain all copyrights to your submissions. Aphelion makes no claim to your property at all. You must realize that publishing a story online makes it much harder to sell, later. Aphelion doesn't charge any fees, or accept any ads, or generate any money in any way. Aphelion is more of a writer's workshop and exposure resource than anything else. Feedback to the writer is sometimes a direct e-mail to them, but most commentary and critiques will be posted in Aphelion's Lettercol. There are many links to the Lettercol on Aphelion's pages. There should be a link at the bottom of each story or poem, as well as scattered about all over the website.

You do not have to register to read the Lettercol posts, but you do have to register in order to post there. This is a measure to prevent spammers from posting. It works. The registration process does require that you supply a valid e-mail address to complete the process. Your initial password will be sent to that e-mail address. The first time you log in to the Lettercol, you will be able to change your password to something of your own choosing. Aphelion Webzine respects the privacy of our members and will never reveal or distribute your e-mail address to any third party for any reason whatsoever. If you choose, you can check the option which will keep your address private. If you do this, only the administration of Aphelion will be able to see it.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we feel that in the long run this will create a much more vibrant and positive zine experience.



Some changes are being made to this page to reflect our re-structure of Aphelion. Each Editor will be writing their own set of guidelines to be placed here, but for now I'll just do a general update.

Since we've sometimes had some confusion about story lengths, where's what SFWA has to say in their Nebula rules:

(a). Short Story: less than 7,500 words.

(b). Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words.

(c). Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words.

(d). Novel: 40,000 words or more.

We will soon begin to print a), b), and c) as single installments, but perhaps in seperate sections to properly identify them.




Robert Moriyama, the new Short Story Editor, has provided some revised guidelines for his domain. Until otherwise noted by the various other Editors these will be taken to be official Aphelion guidelines for submission.






Short Story Guidelines

Content:

Aphelion will accept original stories with a science fiction, fantasy, or horror theme and will not accept fanfiction stories because of the risk of copyright infringement this often entails. Note, however, that the boundaries of 'science fiction', 'fantasy', and 'horror' are nebulous things, and we have been known to stretch the point. Fan fiction, of course, is anything that involves copyrighted characters or institutions, including (but not limited to) Star Trek (TM), Star Wars (TM), etc., etc.

Stories that, in the opinion of the editors, contain bigotry or slander will not be published.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered.

Length:

Short stories (1500 to 7500 words) should be sent to Robert Moriyama at shorts@aphelion-webzine.com.

Stories longer than 7500 words should be sent to Jeff Williams at serials@aphelion-webzine.com

All Mare Inebrium stories should be sent directly to the senior editor and publisher of Aphelion, Dan Hollifield at mare@aphelion-webzine.com

All poetry submissions should be sent to Iain Muir at poetry@aphelion-webzine.com

Writers will recieve copyright notices at the end of each story, a short biography, and if you include one, a picture. We can handle most graphic formats, but GIF or JPEG are preferred.

Aphelion provides an optional link to your homepage and an e-mail link at the end of each story. Please include the bio and URLs with your submission!

Cover Letter:

The cover letter should state that you are submitting the manuscript to Aphelion and should contain a brief biographical sketch (one or two sentences will be enough, more if you are so inclined. Don't be afraid to write too much. We can cut it down if necessary). If you have published other work, please list the most recent ones, preferably work in the same genre as the story you are submitting.

Format:

In the past we have been willing to accept short story submissions in almost any form, but there are so many different word processors, formats, and mail tools out there that it has become increasingly burdensome to transcribe stories into standard HTML.

We can no longer accept short stories in HTML. The short story editor would prefer submissions in the form of attached files in either MSWord .DOC or Rich Text Format (.RTF), at least one of which can be generated by most word processing programs. Note, however, that the short story editor has anti-virus programs that might block a message and its attachment if it appears to be infected -- .RTF format may be the safer choice.

Please follow the suggested format:

---------------
length of story in words
your email address

Title
By (Your Pen Name)

[Text left justified]

THE END

---------------


Always include a title for your story.

Always indicate your byline beneath the title.

Always place the words "The End" at the end of the story so I will know that I have received everything.


Please be patient. Submissions will be processed in the order they are received and response times will vary depending on the number of manuscripts received and the energy level of the editor. The new Short Story editor is not as organized as Cary Semar, and may not remember to acknowledge receipt of your manuscript within any set time; he will respond promptly to a query about the status of a story (but please do not query repeatedly, as this is not a habit that editors find charming).

You will receive a link to the online galley proof of the manuscript in HTML for review prior to publication, OR a copy of the HTML file that should allow you to view the story as it will appear online. If you do not respond to the email, it will be assumed that you accept the document as it stands.

Aphelion welcomes your submissions.

Robert Moriyama
Short Story Editor
shorts@aphelion-webzine.com


Serials/Novellas/Novellettes

There are only two differences between Cary's requirements for Short story submissions and Jeff's requirements for longer submissions:

1. All serials/novellas/novellette submissions must be sent as attachments and must be in one of the following formats: text (with HTML mark-ups), .rtf (Rich Text Format), MS-Word, WordPerfect, or HTML.

2. Beginning 4/7/03, the Serials team will not accept stories embedded in the text of the E-mail. Converting these into HTML is too labor intensive and often results in a look that does not benefit the story or the author.

Poetry Submission Guidelines

Content:

Aphelion will accept original poems with a science fiction, fantasy, or horror theme. Poems that, in the opinion of the editors, contain bigotry or slander will not be published. Any form of poetry will be considered. The only guideline is if the editor likes it, really, and that's a matter of my (warped) taste. We've previously published everything from haiku to mock - saga by way of limericks and sonnets.

We will accept previously published works, but please tell us where they have been published before, so that we can include a link.
Copyright:

Being an amateur publication, ask only the right to publish the work once in our webzine, all other rights are kept by the author. We ask to be able to archive previously published work, but will remove a work from the archive at the authors request (so as not to interfere with potentially paying markets)

Writers will receive copyright notices at the end of each poem, a short biography, and if you include one, a picture. We can handle most graphic formats, but GIF or JPEG are preferred.
Length:

Works of any length will be considered, but if anyone sends in something equivalent to "Beowulf," we reserve the right to serialise it.
Cover Letter:

The cover letter should state that you are submitting the poem to Aphelion and should contain a brief biographical sketch (one or two sentences will be enough, more if you are so inclined. Don't be afraid to write too much. I reserve the right to edit it if the bio is longer than the poem). If you wish us to publish link to your homepage please include the URL. Unless otherwise specified, a link to the e-mail address from which the work was sent will be included at the end of each work. If you don't want your address published, or wish to put an alternate address into the final version, please let us know.
Format:

Do not send more than one poem in a single email. The poem may be included either as a file attachment (Ascii text, HTML, or MS Word are acceptable) or as text within the email. You should be aware that when you export a story from a word processor as text, you will lose paragraphing and italics. If you are sending a story in text form, you might want to insert hyptertext markups to indicate paragraphing and italics.

1. To indicate a paragraph break, insert <p> between each paragraph.

2. To indicate italics, mark the italicized material as follows:

<i> This will appear in italics </i>

Please follow the suggested format:
---------------
Title
By (Your Pen Name)
[Text left justified]
THE END
---------------

Always include a title for your poem.

Always indicate your byline beneath the title.

Always place the words "The End" at the end of the poem so I will know that I have received everything.

If you have deliberately not punctuated or capitalised your work, please indicate this with a note at the start. I have a tendency to apostrophise.

Submissions must be received no later than the 15th of the month to be on time for the issue then under production. Submissions received after the 15th will be held for consideration for the following issue.

We provide a free webzine, and have no income from this enterprise. Consequently, we do do not pay for submissions.

Please be patient. Submissions will be processed in the order they are received and response times will vary depending on the number of poems received and the energy level of the editor. If you do not receive an acknowledgement of your poem within one week, please send a query. If you have not received a rejection or acceptance within four weeks, please send a query.

You will receive a galley proof of the poem in HTML for review prior to publication. If you do not respond to the email, it will be assumed that you accept the document as it stands.

Aphelion welcomes your submissions.

Iain Muir
Poetry and Filk Editor
poetry@aphelion-webzine.com


THE END




Back to the Old Guidelines

I would prefer original stories or articles and will not accept Fanfiction stories because of the risk of copyright infringement this often entails. I have no set wordlength for stories, but reserve the right to split stories longer than 8000 words into multiple parts to carry over two to five months. This means that serial chapters will be longer- 'cause we've found that the longer-running serials lose readers.

Complete stories must be submitted for the serials. Yeah, I know that's going to be a pain- but this was forced upon us all by writers who seemed to fall off the face of the planet after a few serial chapters appeared. I myself, like to write chapters to a deadline, but too many serials had begun publication- only to end abruptly when the writers stopped sending new chapters.

Submissions must be received no later than the 15th of the month to be on time for the issue then under production. Submissions received after the 15th will be held for consideration for the following issue. Because we are now producing issues a month before they appear online, we are more easily able to control the size of each issue.

Because I cannot charge readers for viewing anything published online, I do not currently pay for submissions.

Writers will recieve copyright notices at the end of each story, a short biography, and if you include one, a photo. I will also provide a link to your homepage and an e-mail link at the end of each story. Links to homepages will also be added to our ongoing Links page on a permanent basis. Please include the bio and URLs with your submission!

As space on our ISP server is at a premium, I would like to ask that you archive any multi-part stories on your own websites if at all possible. I would then link back to your websites for the parts that are removed from our ISP as each new issue comes online each month.

The new addresses for submissions:

I'd like to ask for short story submissions please be sent only to shorts@aphelion-webzine.com.
Serialized stories to serials@aphelion-webzine.com,
Poetry to poetry@aphelion-webzine.com,
Features: features@aphelion-webzine.com
Mare Inebrium Stories: mare@aphelion-webzine.com

These addresses will be repeated further down in this page so that after reading the whole page, you won't have to scroll back up all the way to here again just to submit something.


Submissions should be e-mailed as something contained within the message itself as either .txt (Text for DOS) attachments in MIME encoded format or as the contents of an e-mail.

As the issues of Aphelion have gotten larger, I have begun to get bogged down in the proofreading and editing of each submission. My thanks to Cary and Martin for doing so much to lighten the load. Anything that you yourself can do to speed the process will also be greatly appreciated. This means extra proofreading, editing your stories yourselves before submitting them, and even learning basic HTML.

HINT: Word 6.0 and later versions of Word can be converted to an automatic HTML coder with a simple add-on available from Microsoft. Its free, easy to install, and works really well. I reccomend it. You can also download several HTML writing programs that are available on the web as free trial versions.

Acceptable Filetypes:

( Note from Dan: This section is going to have to be replaced by separate sections that detail the preferences of each editor. Since we all use different programs to do our editing, we're going to have different requirements. )

HTML files are always acceptable, if you know how to HTML code your submissions and feel like taking the time. Sending HTML files means far less work for me and easier preview of what your story will look like as a webpage. You can read your work in your own web-browser, which generally means that you can catch more mistakes before you even submit your story.

If the Wordprocessor you use is MSWorks save your files as:

Do not send files saved in Works WP (.wps) format!

If the Wordprocessor you use is Windows' WordPad (or Windows' Write) save your files as:

If the Wordprocessor you use is Windows' Notepad save your files as: If the Wordprocessor you use is Word for Windows save your files as: If the Wordprocessor you use is Word Perfect save your files as: .. and so on. You get the idea. Files saved in .bin cannot be read by ANY of my wordprocessors! I have lost several good stories because they have been submitted in .bin format. Please don't use this format! Also, attachments MUST be in MIME encoding! Attachments in BinHex or Base 64 encoding CANNOT be read by any of my wordprocessors or E-mail programs! Just look at your Options or Preferences settings for your E-mailers and choose MIME encoding before sending me a story. Otherwise, all I get is garbage symbols and scrambled text. That is bad for both you and myself as I have to spend days trying to unscramble the text of a story, or waste time trying to get you to re-submit in a format that I can read.

The Wordprocessors I use are:

And the E-mailers I use are:

I hope to provide a quality forum for new writers to hone their skills enough to make the leap to submiting to a professional (I.E. paying) publisher.I think that I have suceeded in this, as the number of readers has climbed steadily since I started the Zine. There's been some fanmail for the zine, all favorible, and Aphelion has been added to John Labovitz's E-Zine List and Virtual Sample Copy- Writer's Market in their Non-Paying E-Zine section. VSC actually compared Aphelion favoribly to OMNI Magazine! (High prase indeed! Its a shame that review vanished with the next update.)


Address any of my messages to Dan, or if you're kinda stuffily formal, Mr. Hollifield. I'm really an informal kinda guy, so just talk to me is if I were a friend you haven't seen in a while. And address those to Cary, Iain, and Jeff just as informally.


  • Short story submissions; Cary Semar
  • Serialized stories: Jeffrey Williams
  • Poetry: Iain Muir
  • Features: Robert Wynne
  • Mare Inebrium Stories: Dan Hollifield

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