Submission Guidelines
Before you submit your story for review and publishing on the Healing Fairy Tales website, please make sure that your submission meets the following guidelines.
The healing benefit of writing a healing tale is first and foremost for one’s own heart and soul. Therefore, we are pleased you have arrived at this point and harvested the richest part of this process. Sharing your story with others as a written product requires skills equivalent to being a chef - being able to cook up a story for others’ enjoyment.
THE BASICS
The content must not be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.
The content you post must be original and/or you have complete rights to submit the said content.
The content you submit must not infringe any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, and/or other proprietary rights of any parties.
Healing Fairy Tales retains sole discretion for publishing any content on the website and may/may not deem it necessary to provide the reasons behind any such decisions pertaining to the content submitted.
Topics & Themes
Your poem, illustration, or story needs to have an emotionally-healing theme, with an vulnerability/issue being dealt with, a transformative moment and the ending must be of overcoming the said issue. In other words, we are looking for a positive ending with triumph or self-realization for the story to be healing for readers.
To make sure that we understand the main points of your story and confirm that others will as well, we request that your answer the following questions in your email when you submit your story. This will enable us to evaluate if your story is a good fit for the Healing Fairy Tales website.
Describe the mental, emotional or physical challenge that the lead character struggles with and is seeking to change.
What prevents the main character from changing and how is this described in the story?
What are the stages of the lead character’s transformation? What part of the story shows / describes this? You can create a short table linking the two items.
How does the lead character ultimately heal and grow? What part of the story shows / describes this?
What is the healing message of your story? What knowledge do you want to impart to your readers?
If you are a first time writer, we suggest that you share your story with a few other friends to get their reactions first, to be able to send us the best possible version of your story for sharing.
Format
Your submission must be sent to team@healingfairytales.com in any of the following formats only: .doc, .docx, and .pdf. Please mention the title of your story followed by your name/pen name in the subject of the email. The story must be sent in the email as an attachment in any of the above-mentioned formats.
Word Limit
We will not review more than 5,000 words.
Formatting
Please use 12pt double-spaced text in a standard font.
Grammar and Punctuation
Please make sure your writing follows the rules of English grammar. You can use either British English or American English, but please make sure to keep them consistent throughout the story. (Tip: You can use a free online tool such as Grammarly to make sure your grammar, punctuation and spellings are appropriate. )
Copyrights
You own the copyright to your content and can revoke the posting of it on our website at any time. We ask for two weeks notice though. You can post with a pen name. The content must be your own and not come from another source.
Response Time
We are a small team tending to the garden, and therefore it may take a longer time to read/review and approve entries. It may take 3-4 weeks to get back to you.
Publishing Guarantee
A submission following these guidelines and the Terms and Conditions does not automatically guarantee that the story will be published on the website.
Submission Fee
There is no submission fee associated with the entries.
Payment
Currently, we do not pay for any submissions, however, we will share the writing credits by adding the writer’s name in the story byline. As mentioned above, the writer and illustrator retains all copyrights to their work.
Edits
Please be advised that from time to time we may suggest/need the author to make specific revisions or edits to the story prior to approving the story for publishing on Healing Fairytales. We will only suggest changes if we think your story would be a good fit for our website with minor changes.
Critique/Feedback
We do not provide detailed feedback for each submission that we receive. However, we may provide comments to the author if there are chances of improvement and/or publishing potential post revision in the story.
NOTE: Please note that any critique/feedback will only come from a space of encouragement. We know that not everyone submitting the stories is a professional writer. Sometimes only writing and submitting a story itself can be healing and any critique on the same may be unwelcome. Therefore, in case you do not wish to receive any possible feedback please mention that same in your submission email and we will respect your wishes.