Writers' Guidelines
Revised January 2009

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 ask you to send a first chapter for us to evaluate.  If we then wish to purchase it 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, whether we find your material acceptable for publication on our website or not.

We usually pay new authors about one and one third cents per word.  Experienced authors earn more, and we do give increases for quality, volume, and dependability. After publication on disciplineanddesire.com, your stories (eight or more chapters or short stories) will be eligible for book publication, which we do about twice a year. We pay our authors 50% royalties for both ebooks and printed books.

Before we can buy the publishing rights to your work, we will e-mail you an agreement that you must print, sign, and mail back to us by postal mail.  When we receive it back from you, we will need your legal name and mailing address so we can pay you. If you make over $600.00 USD in one calendar year, we will then need your Social Security number.  This information will be kept private and secure, but we are required by federal law to file Form 1099-MISC with the IRS by January 31 of each year regarding how much money we have paid you during the previous year. This does not apply to authors living in countries other than the U.S.A. 

Please note that your story may not be published on our site for several months, because we keep an inventory of stories in order to provide a steady supply of excellent reading for our members.

 Technical requirements *
 

·       All stories must be written in either Microsoft Word or any program that can produce a document with a file extension of .rtf, .txt, .doc, or .docx.

·       Use Times New Roman, 12 point black font with no colored backgrounds, headers, footers, or special characters.

·       Use a single column, single-spaced lines 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’s first few paragraphs are also formatted in the required manner.

·       Grammar and punctuation should be edited before you send us your work.  We do 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, but it can take weeks to months, in some cases, to help you learn and improve upon your story. We do not adhere to any deadlines on helping you edit your story, and there is no agreement by either party that we will buy it upon completion.

·       All short stories must be between 3800 and 4200 words.  Each chapter of a novel/novella must contain between 3800 to 4200 words.  You can write them longer, and we will publish them longer, but we do not pay for any words over the 4200 word limit.  We will buy novel lengths of up to 12 chapters, but anything longer than that must be separated into two or more series before submission.

 Story Content *
 

·       You must submit new, never-before-published material. If your story has ever been posted on a forum or blog, it is not new. The only exception to this is that we will pay ½ cent per word for acceptable, previously-published material that meets all of the guidelines herein.  These stories will be published as “bonus” stories in addition to our usual weekly publications.

·       The stories should not center upon the spanking scene. 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 spanking episodes, and not a story that is entirely one detailed spanking episode.

·       We do not accept stories involving bondage, BDSM, age play, “golden showers,” or other subgenres. No derogatory, obscene, racist or offensive names may be used.

·       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 is about crime-fighting, then a threatened beating or “hurting” a character is acceptable, but no references to or descriptions of violent acts are acceptable.

·       Minors may NOT be portrayed in relation to corporal punishment or sensuality. Minors may be incorporated into a family themed story, if necessary, as long as they are not central characters.  A brief mention of a childhood spanking is acceptable, but no details may be published.

·       We publish only romantic, male dominant, female submissive relationships. We publish spankings between lovers, boyfriend/girlfriend, a Male/Female couple that has just met, or husband/wife.  All spankings must be men spanking women, with no exceptions.

·       We don’t usually publish group spankings, schoolgirl scenarios, judicial scenarios, public spankings, etc.  We will publish tasteful, intimate, private spankings involving two couples either demonstrating a technique or observing a deserved punishment.  It depends upon the context and how it’s written, so please submit your synopsis before writing a story that we might reject, as it will save everyone a lot of time.

·       No drunk driving plots.

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 buy or sell the works in question.  These 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.

* The only exceptions to the above guidelines are for novels/novellas submitted solely for ebook/printed book publication.  We solicit and accept nearly all genres of fiction or non-fiction for book publications.  These stories will not be posted on our website and we do not pay cash up front for them. We will, however, sell them in our book markets, which include Fictionwise.com and Lulu.com at present.  Our market base is expanding in the near future.  Our publication services are free, and we pay you 50% of the net royalties for as long as we publish your book. Our publishing contract is non-exclusive for these books, and you are free to publish them with any other publishing house simultaneously, as you retain the copyright to them.