Rules and Guidelines

Applications for Add Magic to Taste are now closed!

However, a lot of information applicable to accepted authors is in these rules and guidelines, and we are likely to use similar rules and guidelines for future projects, we are leaving this page accessible for the moment.

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Anthology 1 Theme:

Duck Prints Press LLC’s first Anthology, entitled Add Magic to Taste, has four required elements that must be incorporated into every story:

  1. Settings: Modern/contemporary worlds with magic
  2. Romance: Queer love stories
  3. Locale: Coffee Shops, tea shops, and bakeries
  4. Trope: Fluff

If considering those elements sparks your imagination, read on to familiarize yourself with our rules and guidelines!

General Rules and Guidelines:

  1. All contributors must be 18 years old or older.
  2. You must be respectful toward your fellow applicants, collaborators and towards the anthologists at all times. 
  3. This Anthology will be published in print and in e-book formats. The print book will be available exclusively to the backers of a crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter which we expect to launch in July. After the campaign, the e-book will continue to be sold on the Duck Prints Press website. Assuming minimum funds are raised, contributors will receive a free e-book copy of the book and will have the opportunity to purchase the print book and campaign merchandise at a discount. Feel free to review this draft of our budget for more information about our projected costs.
  4. This is a paid writing opportunity. Contributors will be required to sign a contract. As such, you must be willing to share your legal name and address to participate in this anthology, and you must be legally able to work as an independent contractor in your country of residence.
  5. We will primarily be communicating with contributors via e-mail and Discord. All participants must provide an e-mail address they check regularly and we encourage everyone to create a Discord account as well. Invitations to our Discord server will be included in acceptance e-mails. If you’re new to Discord, you can learn more about setting up a Discord account for yourself here.
  6. Please contact us if you have questions:
  7. DO NOT POST THIS CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS ON SUBMISSION GRINDER OR ANY OTHER MASS/AGGREGATE CALL FOR SUBMISSION WEBSITE. If we find out that you have done so you will be permanently banned from all Duck Prints Press projects. This is a small test project, not a general call to the wider public. Give us time, we’ll get there.
  8. Rules violations will result in consequences ranging from a warning through a ban, depending on how many infractions take place and how severe those infractions are.

Authors Rules and Guidelines

  1. An author must meet the following minimum requirements to apply:
  2. Interested authors are asked to submit a sample of their work (between 1,000 and 2,000 words) and a brief pitch aligned with the anthology themes (no longer than 200 words). Your sample must function as a short story; other than that, we don’t care if it’s fanfiction or original fiction, previously published or written specifically for this application or something you’ve written in the past but never shared. Samples may be extracts from longer works but must be understandable as stand-alone stories, and must not require specialized knowledge of a specific fandom, meta, or pre-existing world. Work samples will be anonymously coded and then reviewed by the project staff to select authors.
  3. We will select 20 applicants to contribute stories of up to 5,000 words to the Anthology.
  4. Understanding that we may experience attrition among recruited authors, applicants may volunteer as “pinch hitters.” If some of our initially accepted authors withdraw, we will contact authors who have offered to pinch hit.
  5. We will be rigorously editing all contributed stories to ensure that they meet professional standards of formatting and grammar. We will do our best to work with you, help you learn, point out things that don’t work, and highlight things that do work. If this level of editing and betaing will be too difficult for you to endure, please don’t apply. If you become overly defensive, aggressive with your beta and/or editor, or otherwise act like a jerk as regards editing, you will receive a warning; subsequent infractions will result in your being removed from this project, and potentially banned from contributing to future Duck Prints Press projects.
  6. You must meet all deadlines. If you’re concerned that you’ll not be able to do so, please contact the mods as early as possible and we will try to help you. You can view the schedule here. The final deadline listed on the schedule is final. Don’t commit to this project if you don’t think you can meet these deadlines. If you miss a check-in without having already come to an alternative agreement with us, you will be removed from this project. If you ghost completely (ie, don’t contact us to explain yourself) you will be permanently banned from contributing to future Duck Prints Press projects. If you need to drop out, you may do so anytime before the first check-in, for any reason, and you won’t be penalized.
  7. Stories are due on June 15th. At this time, we expect you to submit your full story, including your best good faith effort at editing and grammar. We will then work with you to further edit your submissions.
  8. You will have to provide a name for a byline. You may use a pseudonym or pen name; you may not use an online username. 
  9. Authors who complete their stories in accordance with all of the above will be asked to sign a contract and paid a baseline of 1 US cent per word, up to a total of $50 per author. Depending on the success of our crowdsourcing campaign, we will raise this amount to as high as 8 US cents per word. Our primary goal is to guarantee minimum funding for the project; once we have achieved that, our stretch goals will be to help us pay authors more, and we will raise the payment amount in 1 US cent increments. You may review a generic version of that contract here. 
  10. Your legal name and address will be required for the contract. If you’re not comfortable providing those, don’t apply to contribute to this anthology.
  11. Authors will be asked to complete a short biography suitable for inclusion on the Duck Prints Press webpage, on our social media accounts, and as part of promotion for the Kickstarter campaign. We won’t share any information about you except for that which you’ve authorized. You won’t be required to share your fandom activities or links. You won’t have to publicly associate the name you choose to write under for this project with your fanfiction accounts.
  12. We have high hopes that we will find all our authors to be wonderful individuals with whom we work well. It’s our expectation that those with whom we collaborate most effectively will be invited to participate in future paying Duck Prints Press projects, so please do your best! We’d love to invite everyone back!

Story Guidelines

  1. Stories must be new and never-before-published. You may use a story written previously, provided it aligns with the Anthology themes and has never been published elsewhere. The ban on previously published works includes “repurposing” a fanfiction – if the story was previously published as a fanfic, you may not “rebrand” or “scrub the barcodes” in order to make it fit this Anthology.
  2. The worlds and characters in the stories must be original. No fanfiction is allowed, nor are stories featuring original characters inserted into an existing setting.
  3. Stories must incorporate all four elements of the Anthology 1 theme. These elements are: queer romance, modern magical settings, stories set at coffee shops (bakeries, tea shops, and similar venues are also fine – if you have an idea you’re not sure fits, please check with us), and fluff.
  4. Stories must be longer than 1,000 words. The maximum length allowed is 5,000 words. Depending on formatting constraints we may be willing to permit small amounts of latitude over the 5,000 word limit; however, no one will be paid for more than 5,000 words under any circumstances.
  5. Early in the creation process, you’ll be asked to give us an idea of what you intend to write so that we can ensure that stories in the anthology include a diverse range of characters, themes, and settings.
  6. Stories must be primarily in English. Individual words or small chunks of dialog may be in a non-English language. If you use any non-English words, they should either be part of English vernacular (for example, rendezvous), or a reader must be able to infer their meaning from context, or a translation should be offered as a footnote.
  7. Stories must be rated either “general audiences” or “teen.” This is not a mature-themed or explicit anthology.
  8. Stories must have a “Happily for Now” or “Happily Ever After” ending.
  9. Rape/non-con, major character death, and underage characters in explicit situations are not permitted in this anthology. (Non-graphic non-con as an element of a character backstory is fine; if you’re concerned that what you have in mind won’t be permitted, feel free to run your idea by one of the mods.)
  10. Once your story is complete, please provide a list of content tags related to your story, similar to those that would be under the “additional  tags” section on Archive of Our Own. We will include a tagging system in this anthology to give the readers the information necessary to make informed reading decisions.
  11. Please don’t share your work in progress outside of the Duck Prints Press Discord. If you’d like to publish a small sample (no more than 100 words) as part of a meme, work in progress update, or similar social media usage, that’s acceptable – please let us know so we can share and boost your post on our social media accounts!
  12. Teasers and works in progress may be shared on our Patreon to offer exclusive early access/behind the scenes sneak peeks to our backers.
  13. Once stories are complete, authors will be asked to select an excerpt of their story for use in promoting sales of the Anthology. Excerpts should be no more than 250 words.
  14. When stories are complete, authors will be asked to sign a contract regarding the use of the story in this anthology, as described above in the Author Rules and Guidelines section. Only specific rights (such as English Anthology Rights) are being signed over, and for no longer than a year post-publication of the anthology. After that, all rights revert to the author, though Duck Prints Press reserves the right to continue selling e-book versions of the Anthology on our website. For more information, refer to the sample contract we’ve shared.

Have a question not addressed in these rules? Email us, DM us on Twitter, message unforth#6748 on Discord, or send us an ask on Tumblr!