Writers'
Guidelines
Revised June 2007
Thank you for your interest in submitting your work for our consideration. Please send a letter of inquiry with a synopsis of your story, to disciplineanddesire@hotmail.com. If we are interested in the concept of your story, we will request that you send a first chapter for us to read and evaluate.
If, after reading your first chapter, we are interested in purchasing your manuscript for publication on our website, we will contact you to send the entire story/novella. We will notify you as soon as possible, usually within a week, if we find it acceptable for publication or not.
At that time, you will need to provide us with your legal name, mailing address, and Social Security number. This information is for business and tax purposes only, and will be kept private and secure. This information is not in our computer system. It will be accessible only to the staff who have to know it for purposes of paying by check and notifying both you and IRS at the end of the tax year of how much money we have paid you during that year.
Before we can buy the rights to your work, we will e-mail you a “Release of First Publication Rights” agreement. You must print it out, sign it, and mail it back to us by postal mail. When we receive the release, we will mail you a check. Although we pay for your work at this time, it may not be published on our site for several months, because we keep an inventory of stories in order to provide a steady supply of excellent reading for our members. After your stories have been on our website for three months, they are eligible for E-Book publication. We pay our authors 50% royalties and up for E-Book sales.
All stories must be written in either Microsoft Word or some program such as WordPad that can be easily converted to Word. Rich Text Format (.rtf) can be opened in most word processing programs. Use Times New Roman 12 point black font with no colored backgrounds, headers, footers, or special characters. Use a single column, single-spaced paragraph with no indentations, and double-space between paragraphs, left-sided justification. If you have questions about how your story should look, go to our website and look at a story as it appears there. This document is also formatted in the required manner.
Your work should be edited for grammar and punctuation before you send it to us. This is a basic requirement, however, we have editors that are willing to work with you on more advanced writing skills, such as style, sentence structure and overall reading ease. There is no fee for this service.
All short stories or parts of continuing stories must be 4000 words in length plus or minus 200 words. If your story is at least 3800 words, we will pay per word up to a total of 4200 words. If your story is longer, it may be accepted, but you will not be paid for any words over the 4200 word limit. We usually pay new authors about one and one third cents per word. Experienced authors can earn much more, and we do give increases for quality, volume, and dependability. We expect new, never-before-published material. If your story has ever been posted on a forum or blog, it is not new. We will sometimes buy previously published (on a forum or blog, not on another subscriber website) material at the reduced rate of one-half cent per word, for our “bonus” stories.
As for content, the stories need not center around spanking. Our goal is to provide romantic stories that include spanking. There must be a creative plot with good character development, not just a series of detailed spanking episodes. We will not accept stories involving bondage, BDSM, age play, “golden showers,” and derogatory, obscene, or offensive names for women or parts of the female anatomy. Absolutely no minors may be portrayed in relation to corporal punishment or sensuality. Minors may be incorporated into the plot, if necessary, as long as they are not the central theme. A brief mention of a childhood spanking is acceptable, but NO details, please. The theme must be male dominant, female submissive. The more detailed your plot is, the better. PLEASE, no drunk driving plots.
With rare exceptions, they remain romantic stories where boy meets girl, spanks girl, and they live happily ever after, or stories about couples that are already engaged in a Domestic Discipline lifestyle, or perhaps just a loving discipline couple of male spanking female. We publish romantic spanking stories, so group spankings of women just for the sake of spanking, schoolgirl scenarios, judicial scenarios, etc., are not our genre. We also don’t publish “family” spankings (uncle/niece etc) except between husband and wife. We appreciate your understanding with regards to these guidelines.
We cannot use the words “rape” or “incest” on our site, and these words cannot even be mentioned casually, such as “rape crisis center.” We cannot include any mention of extreme violence, such as killing, murder, gunshots, etc. If your story centers around crime-fighting, then a threatened beating or “hurting” a character is acceptable, but no references to death, murder, or killing, please. Submitting a synopsis, as requested above, will give both you and us an idea about whether your story delves too deeply into themes that we avoid, before we all spend a lot of time only to find out that your story is really not for us.
Nothing in this document constitutes a contract between the prospective author and the owners of the Discipline and Desire website. Nor does it obligate either party to either buy or sell the works in question. The guidelines are subject to change as our needs change, but you will be notified when that happens. We reserve the right to reject stories for any reason that serves the purpose and needs of Discipline and Desire.