I’m excited to announce that Hardihood Books is now open for guest submissions! Starting today, we are accepting guest posts for publication. From day one, my plan has always been to open up the platform to writers other than myself, and that day has finally come. For the time being, I will continue to publish my own posts on the same schedule I have adhered to since May of 2021. While I do not anticipate a flood of submissions out of the gate, if there comes a time when I need to step back and reduce my own load in order to allow more room for other writers, I will do so.
If you’d like to submit a story or a persuasive essay, please send your submission to hardihoodbooks@substack.com. Please include your name (or pseudonym if, for some reason, you wish to remain anonymous) and a short bio. There is no need to adhere to any particular manuscript format, however we do ask that submissions be professional.
I am excited for this new phase for Hardihood Books. For over two years, it has been a platform for me to build up a body of work. Now that we are going on two hundred posts, it’s time to prepare for the next phase, in which Hardihood Books transitions from its current form to an online magazine for fiction and persuasive nonfiction.
Submission Guidelines:
Submissions must be your own work. We have a zero tolerance policy for plagiarism or other violations of intellectual property laws. All sources must be cited (or hyperlinked). If you include any quotations, it should be obvious to the reader who is being quoted.
We do not accept anything drafted (in whole, or in part) by artificial intelligence. We publish human writers, not AI. There are plenty of opportunities out there for authors who use tools such as ChatGPT and Bard as a part of their creative process. This is not one of them.
We have no length requirements. However, if your work might better be deemed a short novel, you might want to submit elsewhere.
We do not publish anything with graphic, explicit, or suggestive sexual content. If it wouldn’t appear on stage in Shakespeare, we don’t want it to appear on our platform.
Similarly, we would prefer that submissions not contain an undo amount of profanity. Some swearing is fine, however if it is every third word, we think there are better uses of the English language.
Likewise, while we are willing to publish stories containing violence, we would prefer not to publish anything excessively gory or grotesque. As with the previous two guidelines, this is for the benefit of our readers, some of whom would prefer not to read gory or grotesque stories.
Content:
All fiction genres are accepted. While I do not personally write horror or romance, we will consider both. Most of what we publish falls into science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or literary fiction. However, we would like to continue to expand the range and variety of what we publish, and your work need not be similar to anything I have written in the past.
We prefer persuasive nonfiction - that is, essays that present an argument. It need not be an argument with which I personally agree (we are fine with disagreement here at Hardihood Books). It can be an argument on (almost) any topic. All we ask is that you are logical and that you avoid ad hominem attacks.
We are open to creative nonfiction (that is, nonfiction that tells a story), as well as nonfiction that offers advice (on writing, for instance, or on physical fitness). In creative or narrative nonfiction, we prefer stories of adventure. By submitting, you assure us that your story is true, and that it does not misrepresent events or persons or places. If your story is found to have major factual errors or willful misrepresentations, you will be banned from submitting to us in the future.
We are very interested in book reviews. Please submit reviews on books you think our readers would actually like to read. We are open to reviews that are not current (ex. a review of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner), but we would like for you to have a hook (i.e., author’s birthday, anniversary of publication, etc.).
If you aren’t sure whether an idea will fit, send us an email.
Formatting:
Please read these formatting guidelines.
Pitch Us:
If you have an idea for something you’d like to write, but you haven’t written a draft yet, you can send us a pitch at hardihoodbooks@substack.com. This is an easy way to find out more information if you’re unsure whether or not your idea is right for us. If you do have a draft, please just go ahead and submit it, rather than pitching us first.
Rights:
If we publish something you’ve written, the rights will remain yours. If you’d like us to remove your story or essay from our site (because you would like to submit it somewhere else), please contact us and we will oblige.
We are not currently in a position to pay for guest posts. If you submit something to us and we publish it, it will be outside of our paywall and free to the general public.
If it is brought to our attention after publication that you have plagiarized your submission, your post will be removed from our site and you will be banned from submitting to us in the future.
In Conclusion:
If you’d like to submit a short story or an essay to Hardihood Books, now or in the future, please send it to us for our consideration.
If you have a friend who might like to submit to us, please forward this announcement along to them. Our door is open. It will remain open whether submissions start trickling in tomorrow or six months from now.
Cheers,
Ben Connelly