WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OUR NEW FICTION NEWSLETTER BLAST
Here's what you need to know to get your fiction featured
Hello everyone and thank you for being a part of the SOTB fiction community/newsletter blast. I’m
, author of (you may know me better from Adventure Story, my loving parody of the fantasy genre) and I started this project because fiction is underrepresented here on Substack and I want to help build community and get our work more visibility and recognition.To that end, I’ll be putting out regular email blasts from this page featuring a selection of your fiction works. All you have to do is subscribe, submit, and do your part to engage with the featured posts from our community so that others will do the same for you.
Isn’t this just another self-gratifying loop? I hear you ask. The answer is yes, in a way, but it’s a self-gratifying loop with a clear end goal: generating enough traction and cross-pollination to reach a place of higher visibility on Substack and start gaining the eyeballs of our true readers.
Gaining eyeballs was kind of a gross phrase. Makes us sound like a band of body part collectors, not a fiction community. Yuck.
Anyways, I digress. Wondering what to do next? Here’s our roadmap to growth:
Submit a piece of writing for inclusion in the next newsletter blast. To be eligible for inclusion you need to a) subscribe to SOTB and b) fill out the corresponding form (linked in the latest call for submissions post). I won’t notify you individually if I’ve selected you to be featured, but you will obviously be tagged in the post and notified when the newsletter goes out.
Once the newsletter goes out, even if you are not featured, it’s important to go interact with the featured pieces. If you don’t have time to read it’s ok to just quickly like them individually and re-stack the newsletter blast. This is kind of the bare minimum - obviously reading and leaving thoughtful comments and re-stacking your favorite individual pieces is idea, but we are all busy and I won’t require that level of engagement right now. Remember that your reward for taking 5 minutes to interact with 10 pieces a couple times per monthis that when it’s your turn to get featured, you will receive hundreds of likes and (hopefully) several dozen re-stacks that will get your work out to new readers. NOT COMPLYING WITH THE BARE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH, SOMETHING THAT IS DEFINITELY REASONABLE AND ALSO WITHIN MY POWER.
Re-stack posts of SOTB and recommend the newsletter - write a blurb if you can, that helps a lot! - so that we can get as much visibility and reach as possible. That’s all for now, FAQs below:
FAQs (Frequently Anal Questions):
What is the submission criteria and how do you decide who to include in the newsletter blasts? Also, what gives you the authority to decide what’s good or not?
The only submission criteria is that it has to be fiction, and it cannot be micro-fiction. I see my “job” as organizer of this initiative as more of an organizational one - I’m more focused on curating a list of pieces that make sense together than I am on evaluating “quality” so to speak. With that said, if you submit something that’s riddled with mistakes and typos, or just generally sloppy and not written with care, don’t be surprised if you fall behind in priority compared to some of the more polished stuff coming through. Ideally, I’d like to feature most submissions at some point, so if you don’t get picked for the first blast, don’t despair.
How often will the newsletter go out?
Subject to change, but monthly seems like a good place to start. Judging by volume of submissions already it may have to be more often than that, we’ll see.
How can I get more involved in this?
Depending on how things go there may be opportunities to get more involved in organizing all of this. Having a team of editors to review submissions at some point could be nice. If you’d like to participate beyond just reading and submitting, send me a DM!
More questions? Just shoot me a DM :)
Big thank you to the following publications for recommending SOTB already! You guys are amazing.
Thanks for being a part of this and stay tuned for the first blast!
-Niccolò
Brilliant. Recommended and sharing however I can. Great work Niccolò.
Instead of "bimonthly," may I suggest "fortnightly"? That means "once every two weeks," which is pretty close to the same thing.