Submission Guidelines

365 Tales is open to submissions from the public. The owner of this site and the site’s moderators are not responsible for the content of stories or of comments left on stories.

In order to be accepted for publication, a story must meet the following criteria:

1. It must be no longer than 365 words in length. The “story” may be a vignette, a conversation, part of a scene, an open-ended set up, a character sketch, or even a description of an interesting object or place, but it cannot be any longer than 365 words. This isn’t a poetry site, but a poem which tells a story or a story in the form of a poem is acceptable.
2. It must be the original creation and property of the person who submits it. No plagiarism. If you can find a way to co-author a story that’s short enough to fit on this site, create an account with both your names or add a by-line to the beginning of the story. It won’t be counted in the word total.
3. It must be readable. This is an amateur writing site and we will not be rejecting stories for a few spelling errors or a difference of opinion on style and usage rules, but as a bare minimum, please make sure you are familiar with the general rules for punctuation and capitalization. Double space between paragraphs, though a story that is a single paragraph is also acceptable. Remember, you’re writing a story for a general audience, not for your chatroom friends. Unless your story is meant to be set in a chatroom. Then, go nuts.
4. You must select at least one appropriate category for it to appear in. Please don’t go nuts and select all of them, thinking that will get your story more exposure.
5. If your story contains any sexually explicit content or any description of nudity (Note: “He stepped out of the tub naked.” is not a description of nudity.), it must be submitted to the adult category.
6. If your story involves characters or concepts which are the creations of somebody else and are not in the public domain, it must be submitted into the fan fiction category. If the character is public domain (Sherlock Holmes or Little Nemo, for instance), you may still mark it as fan fiction as a mark of respect for the creator. A story which humorously alludes to another character or work of fiction without directly infringing is more of a parody or pastiche, and does not need to be labeled as fan fiction. See the story “Lucky Day“for an example.
7. If your story is meant to come in multiple installments, please put in the Series category. This can be a multiple-chapter story or an ongoing serial, like Tribe. Either way, please don’t simply take a 3,000 word short story and chop it up where ever the 365th word falls. If you do take a longer work and adapt it into micro-chunks, make an effort to have each segment stop at a logical breaking point.

We reserve the right to reject any story for any reason. In particular, we will reject:

1. Any content that is defamatory towards any real person, inflammatory, or illegal.
2. Any content which depicts sexual activity involving minors. To be specific: if your character is a human being under the age of 18, or a science fiction/fantasy race who is clearly under their race’s age of majority, we won’t accept it.
3. Any fan fiction, if the owner of the property in question has requested it be removed. We’re not going to wait for a cease and desist letter or a digital millenium copyright act notice. We respect the rights of other creators.

By submitting your story, you give 365 Tales the following rights:

1. Non-exclusive electronic publication rights. In other words, we can show it on this website. That’s what you submitted it for, right? This is the only right over the story which 365 Tales takes. The author (i.e., you) retains ownership of the original characters, ideas, and the story itself.
2. The right to modify the story’s formatting. For instance, to remove broken HTML tags or extraneous space at the beginning or end.
3. The right to contact you at the e-mail address you provided during registration. If a question or concern about your story comes up and we are unable to get ahold of you, the story may be removed.

We reserve the right to reject any story and to remove any published story from the site without notice. These terms are subject to change at any time.