GUIDELINES/RULES FOR SUBMITTING PIECES OF WORK TO OUR SITE

All bards are welcome to submit their work to us. Our aim is to encourage any budding bard.

In order to allow surfers/readers to have a clear idea on what each piece of work is about, there has to be a short summary/synopsis (at least 2-3 lines) of the content that you're submitting. This summary would be posted on the site under the title of your work. It is compulsory for stories and optional for other pieces. The summaries are to be included in your e-mail, to which your work is attached.

FOR STORIES:

• They can be of any genre (general or alternative) and any fandom.
• Every time you submit your story to us, please put in your e-mail heading describing which genre, which fandom and the pairing in each submission the story belongs to.
• We will not accept real people fiction/stories
• The characters in the stories must be of legal age to consent if adult sexual relationships are involved. FYI: It doesn't matter what state/country your story is set in...the legal age of consent is 17 years old for characters in stories archived at the Academy.
• The stories must be proofread. As in, all bards should have their beta readers correct any spelling and grammatical mistakes. We are not able to do any beta reading for you because we would not be able to cope with influx of requests to be beta readers for everyone. However, if you have any difficulty in finding beta readers, you can always turn to the BetaReaders YahooGroups http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Beta_Readers or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Beta_Unlimited for help.
• Stories submitted should either be in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .rtf), which is preferred, or in HTML format or in plain text. If you are using Office XP, please send it in .doc format. We have discovered a lot of extraneous code is being added making the files much larger than necessary.
• You may send us your stories to academy_submissions@yahoogroups.com as e-mail file attachments. Please avoid sending your submission solely in the body/text of an e-mail message. We will accept it as a last resort, however, we will not go back and add things such as italics or other types of formatting.
• Please add 'to be continued in part xx or "the end"' at the end of each part so we know if the story is finished or not.
• If you want your e-mail address shown in order to get feedback, include it in the submission. We will not add it for you.
• It is compulsory that a summary be sent in with your submission.
• Please no more than five submissions per bard per week (each section of a continuing story doesn't necessarily count as a separate submission)

NOTE:

This is something that every bard should take note of. If we find many spelling mistakes in your work, we may consider sending it back to you. So..... PLEASE...make sure you and your beta reader go through the work a few times to make sure that there are no spelling errors.

If possible, you may include your e-mail address with your story disclaimers to be posted on the webpage. This is to allow any comments to be sent to you. Of course this is optional. However, we may contact you anytime to inform you about the posting of your story so it is compulsory for us to know your e-mail address. This will be kept totally confidential.

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We do not in any way encourage or condone flaming from anyone or any form of prejudice on our site. If we encounter any pieces of work which is offensive, we will refuse to accept anymore pieces of work from the particular sender and will blacklist the person.
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We reserve the right to remove any story at any time for any reason. Anyone making allegations of plagiarism and/or copyright violation may ask that a story be removed - the request will be considered and they will be required to substantiate their claim with proof and/or a court order compelling removal of the story in question.

If evidence of plagiarism or copyright violation is offered (absent a court order compelling removal of the story) the Academy reserves the sole right to consider the evidence and determine whether removal is appropriate.

IN GENERAL:

1. We accept any type of work. All pieces of work can range from thought provoking, erotic (requiring tons of amazon ice)to something simple.
2. Our main aim is to encourage people to write. All bards, be they experienced or first timers who are unsure about their work, be rest assured that your pieces of work will be duly appreciated. All of us here understand what writing is all about. It is about listening to the tiny voice inside your head and using your writing as a channel to your inner emotions. So please do not be shy about submitting your work to us.
3. We may (this can't be guaranteed because we may not be able to cope with the large number of entries) offer commentaries to a few pieces of work but they will subjective comments on the style of your writing and may contain some useful tips on how to enhance your writing skills.
4. If you feel that some comments on your work is totally unjustified, you can always e-mail us to discuss any problem. The same goes for any comments you have on how to improve our site.

***Please Note****Due to the tremendous volume of spam we've been getting at the Academy address, we are going to change how we accept submissions. This is very important for any authors reading this! In order to submit a file to the Academy, please subscribe to

academy_submissions-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

to send us mail to join or just put your email in the box below. You will not get any mail yourself but this will allow you to send us files and we can stop the spam. I know it's a hassle and I promise there is nothing weird we are going to do - I just can't take the spam anymore. Stop the insanity!

This is not an update list nor will you need to do this if you are not going to submit things to us. Thank you!