We know there are a lot of great stories out there — more than we can find and read on our own. We are happy to take submissions for stories to feature from Pickwick users!
We have a few guidelines put in place to make sure the process works smoothly.
#Submission Criteria
To submit a series to Pickwick, please observe the following:
- Must be an established series. A good rule of thumb is that there should be at least one "novel" worth (around 300 pages) of existing chapters. Because one of our main missions is discovery, we prioritize series that have been worked on and are likely to continue being worked on instead of abandoned.
- No fan fiction — original works only. There are many great places online to find fan fiction like Archive of Our Own but we are focused on independent authors publishing their own original stories.
- Must be a registered user of Pickwick with at least 2 reviews. To access the form, you need to sign up for the site and have a verified email address. Additionally, because we are a newer platform it would really help us if you left reviews for the many already posted series. It should only take a few minutes and it's a huge help to us and authors!
- Must pass a basic quality check. We will manually review every submission before allowing it on the site. This is to ensure that we are not featuring spam, linking to stolen material, etc... Additionally, we may take other factors into consideration when deciding on allowing a submission.
- “Independently published“ is not a strict requirement. The general idea is to embrace the spirit of independent publishing online and avoid featuring series that come from large traditional publishing companies. We recognize that small publishing companies like Aethon Books and Portal Books have emerged and are doing a great job helping authors market their series in emerging spaces like LitRPG and Progression Fantasy. We are happy to feature series from those companies.
# Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I submit my own work?
Absolutely! We recognize that a huge part of being an independent author means you promoting yourself. As long as you meet the above criteria, you are welcome to submit your own work. However, we ask that you identify that it is your work when submitting it (it will subsequently be linked to your Pickwick account.)
- Can I submit other people's work?
Yes! If you're a huge fan of a series and we do not have it on our site we would absolutely welcome you to submit it to us, and the author of the series would likely appreciate it as well! You will still receive a notification about the outcome. The only difference is that once submitted it will not be linked to your Pickwick profile with you as the author. You will be able to write a regular review for it once it is listed.
- Will my submission be rejected if you don't like the quality of the work?
While we manually review submissions, that will not necessarily include reading the actual work (unless the premise catches our interest as readers!) and making a decision based on the quality of the writing or strength of the story. We do not have the time or inclination to be gatekeepers — there is enough of that in publishing.
There is no requirement for the submission to have achieved a certain level of popularity or views to be approved. Our primary goal is to keep objectively bad content off of our site. This includes people submitting links to Amazon listings of stolen novels or series that have just begun and might be abandoned shortly into serialization, which would be result in a bad experience for our users who rely on us to find new series.
- How will I know the outcome of my submission? We will try to review your submission within 3-4 days (a week at most) of submitting to us and we will let you know of the outcome via email. If the work was not approved, we reserve the right to not provide a specific reason but we will make clear if the work can be submitted again at a later date.