Frequently Asked Questions

For The Writers relies on direct reports from authors and industry professionals to track patterns, identify bad actors, and build accurate resources. We welcome substantive questions, detailed accounts, and supporting documentation about companies, services, contracts, contests, awards, workshops, educational programs, and other industry practices that affect writers’ rights and income, primarily in English-language markets such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Before you contact us, use the search function in the site header to look up the company, individual, service, or issue you are concerned about. The resource center already covers many recurring topics, contract structures, and fee-driven models, and you may find that your question has already been addressed in depth.

Our contact form is the primary channel for questions and casework. Attachments such as contracts, invoices, marketing materials, screenshots, and correspondence are accepted in standard file formats. If you need to send physical documentation, such as paper contracts, letters, or printed brochures, email first, and we will provide a mailing address and reimburse reasonable photocopying and postage costs for materials sent for case review.

Correspondence and documentation sent to For The Writers are held in strict confidence. Your name, contact information, and any unique identifying details are not shared, publicly posted, or disclosed without your explicit permission, except to appropriate law enforcement agencies, in response to an enforceable subpoena, or as directed by counsel. When we reference patterns or casework in articles or resources, we anonymize individual reports unless you have agreed in writing to be identified.

To keep the record accurate and valuable, we can only work with complete, first-hand material. We do not accept anonymous complaints, complaints that do not identify the company or individual involved, or second-hand reports of someone else’s experience. The person directly affected needs to contact us. Any documentation you send should be original and complete. Forward entire emails, include full contracts and invoices where possible, and avoid cutting text out of context. You may redact personal data or financial information you are uncomfortable sharing, but please leave the document structure and language intact so they can be read accurately.

If you are submitting a full case report, include a summary of what happened, a simple timeline of key events and dates, the names of companies or services involved, and any steps you have already taken, such as refund requests, chargebacks, complaints to regulators, or discussions with counsel. This context helps us understand where your situation fits within the broader pattern of industry behavior.

If you are contacting us with a general question rather than a specific complaint, you are welcome to write even without documentation. In that case, describe your situation, quote or attach any relevant contract language, and explain what you are trying to decide or understand. We can provide information about common structures, red flags, and typical industry practice, but we cannot tell you what to sign.

The information you send is used to update our internal files, support resource development, and track patterns. It may contribute to future articles, guides, aggregated analyses, or referrals to watchdog groups or regulators. It does not create a client relationship. For The Writers does not provide legal, financial, tax, or medical advice, and does not act as an agent, attorney, or representative in disputes. We cannot negotiate on your behalf, intervene directly with a company, or give advice specific to your jurisdiction in place of professional counsel.

We read all correspondence and case materials, but volume and capacity mean we may not be able to respond individually to every email. When we do respond, you can expect general information, links to relevant resources, or a confirmation that your report has been added to our files for pattern tracking.

Please do not send manuscripts, sample pages, complete drafts, or query letters. For The Writers focuses on systems, contracts, services, and industry conduct. We do not read, evaluate, or critique creative work or pitches. Emails with manuscripts or writing samples attached for editorial feedback are deleted without response, so attention remains on structural issues and casework affecting writers’ rights and careers.

For The Writers accepts submissions year-round and observes a single annual reading period from April 1 through June 30 of each year.

The timing is deliberate. Writers are naturally inclined to spend longer hours with their pages during the colder months, helping to ensure drafts are written, set aside, printed, marked up, and revised again and again. Sentences are cut and reworked. Whole sections move, vanish, or return in a different form. By early spring, many manuscripts have undergone several complete passes place of a single quick sweep. The pages in our queue usually reflect that work.

Beginning our reading period in spring means the editorial process starts once those revision cycles have taken place. Editors are reading versions that have already been tested on the page, in writing groups, or with trusted readers. That distance helps everyone involved. It is easier to judge line work, structure, and argument when the writer has already tightened a draft.

A fixed reading period also supports rigor and consistency. Concentrating active review within a defined window allows our editorial team to read in sustained blocks, compare pieces side by side, and maintain a consistent standard throughout the season. Each manuscript is considered in relation to the other work under review at the same time and under the same conditions.

Submissions that arrive outside the April 1 through June 30 reading period are not discarded. They remain in our queue, automatically roll forward to the next reading period, and are read without requiring resubmission, alongside work shaped during the following winter cycle. We encourage writers to use the colder months for drafting and revision and to submit when the work feels fully settled on the page and ready for editorial review.

For The Writers publishes literary work in four categories, including creative nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, and photography. We look for work drawn from actual lives and events, shaped with close attention to the line, and set in places and relationships that feel specific and real. We are especially interested in narrative nonfiction, short stories, essays, street photography, and culinary writing that treat kitchens, tables, markets, and service work as serious subjects. Our priority is work from people who have lived through something that matters and can write about it plainly enough that others feel recognized.

We welcome submissions from writers at any stage of their careers. Writers of color, queer and trans writers, writers with disabilities, incarcerated writers, and others who have been sidelined in publishing are invited to send work, but identity alone is not the point. What matters is whether the piece carries a lived truth the world gains from hearing, told with enough honesty that it alters how a reader understands their own life.

We do not consider science fiction, fantasy, or other speculative work in any category, and we do not publish work written for children or young adult audiences.

Creative Nonfiction

We publish essays, memoir, reportage, and hybrid nonfiction from writers around the world.

Send the essay that feels risky to write down. We are not looking for work that smooths over damage with a neat lesson or a quick promise that everything will be okay. Write about the sibling who stopped speaking to you after the will was read, the months when you hid a relapse from your partner, the year you stayed with a boss who harassed you because you needed the health insurance, the day you signed discharge papers knowing you could not pay the bill, or the moment you chose silence when what you wanted to scream from the rooftops. These are pieces that require plain speech and a willingness to let strangers see what you did, what you allowed, and what was done to you. We expect that kind of risk to be matched by control on the page.

Strong submissions build scenes from memory and verifiable detail, place the writer and the piece’s characters within a clear timeline, and show how understanding evolves over the course of the work. That might mean a chronological arc that carries the reader through a single season, a braided structure that moves between an illness and a job, or a segmented form that circles one recurring image until its meaning changes.

We look for nonfiction that has already undergone revision, is honest about what can and cannot be known, and treats real people on the page with care and specificity.

Fiction

We publish literary fiction that is attentive to character, structure, and the line. We consider short stories and novel excerpts that stand on their own as complete works.

Send the story that lets us inhabit a life that is not your own. This might be a fight at the kitchen table that changes the next ten years, a staff meeting where a promotion is decided in careful half-sentences, a campus friendship that fractures over one night and never repairs, a patrol officer driving the same route for the thousandth time, or a group chat where a joke lands and a relationship ends in the same thread. Domestic pieces, workplace narratives, campus stories, realist crime, and social satire are all welcome when they are rooted in concrete detail and consequence.

We are drawn to work that follows cause and effect, that stays with what decisions cost over days, months, or years, and that shows how families, jobs, institutions, and neighborhoods press on the people inside them. Form can be spare or intricate, linear or broken into fragments, as long as a careful reader can follow the movement of the story and understand what is at stake in each scene.

All fiction we publish takes place in a recognizable world. Streets have names, laws have consequences, and bodies have limits. We do not consider work built on invented cosmologies, magic systems, alternate timelines, or other speculative frameworks.

Poetry

We publish poems that reward slow, attentive reading. We consider formal work, free verse, prose poems, and hybrid forms when the choices in line, image, and structure are clearly intentional.

Send the poem that follows you through your day. It may take place at a kitchen table after an argument, in a parking lot outside a store that is closing, in a hospital corridor at shift change, during a long shift at work, in a string of messages on a phone, or inside a sentence you have replayed for years.

We are interested in poems about relationships, grief, desire, faith and doubt, neighborhood and place, illness, work, money, and other forces that press on private lives. Lines should carry rhythm and pressure, and the syntax should allow a careful general reader to follow the movement of thought. The poem should leave the reader with a specific image, phrase, or turn in thinking that changes how they see a detail or situation.

Photography

For The Writers publishes photographic work that can stand alongside the writing as part of a coherent editorial line. We consider single images, small sequences, and photographic essays, with particular interest in architectural studies, street photography, and black-and-white work with strong contrast and decisive shadows.

We are drawn to images that notice structure and pattern in the built world, that pay attention to facades, corridors, stairwells, signage, bus stops, storefront glass, and the corners where people pass without looking up. Strong submissions use framing, light, and sequence to build meaning, so that a group of photographs carries a quiet narrative or argument even without accompanying text. We value photographic work that leans into metaphor, where a hallway can represent a stalemate, a window can read as a threshold, or a street corner can signal a point of decision.

Images may be documentary or staged, quiet or overtly political, but they should remain anchored in the real world and in the textures of actual places. We do not review photography created primarily to illustrate speculative or fantastical scenes.