Submission Sunday: Writing for Stellar Relic

The response so far to Stellar Relic’s launch has been staggering – thank you to everyone reading, tweeting, and posting about the site! Your excitement helped accelerate some of our plans, including starting up our submissions program.

Before we get to the nitty gritty, though, we wanted to explain some things.

First and foremost, the site isn’t making any money and neither are we. In fact, we’re in the negative right now. As such, we’re unable to pay for any submitted work. This sucks, but we want to be up front. We do intend to pay for freelance work as soon as we’re able to – now is just not that time.

Second, we really care about what goes up on the site and as such we won’t be posting anything and everything. We hope to be able to post up 1 submission piece every Sunday, but we won’t be compromising our editorial standards to meet that goal. If we don’t have anything of sufficient quality on a given Sunday, we won’t publish anything. Conversely, if we are inundated with quality pieces, more than 1 piece will go up on Sundays.

Third, we really love to read about things from perspectives other than our own. We want to stand as a great place for new writers and writers from a variety of backgrounds, social communities, and viewpoints to have their work featured. The quickest way to our hearts (and by virtue of our hearts, the frontpage) is to present us with a compelling, evocative, fresh angle.

Finally, we have some guidelines for anyone wishing to submit their work to us:

How To Submit

Send your piece to admin@stellarrelic.com, with the subject “[SUBMISSION] Name of Piece“
Please send us a pitch, which is a basic outline of what you’d like to write, whether you’ve already written the piece or not. We won’t have the time to read full submissions and pitches are a good test of your ability to hook us. (Here’s some information on writing pitches.)
There is no pay. This, much like Stellar Relic in general, is volunteer-based. Submit if you want to work with good editors and writers.
We will usually only run one submission per week, although this can change based on extenuating circumstances.
Your piece will be pored over by the Stellar Relic staff, which means you’ll get plenty of critique and editing. If you want your piece to run as-is, this isn’t the place.
We will not accept a piece you have already posted elsewhere.

What We’re Looking For

While you can submit a piece on anything, we are more likely to accept pieces on certain topics. Right now, we’re looking for pieces on:

EVE Online, especially anything related to the current state of the game, its politics, or its economy. Really, any EVE piece will do, as long as it has context, history, and great analysis.
Tabletop games, especially the new rework to Warhammer Fantasy Battle – titled, appropriately, Age of Sigmar. We want to hear about how Age of Sigmar has impacted existing Warhammer players, the general state of Games Workshop’s treasured tabletop IP, and what this means for the long-term health of Warhammer.

These two topics will catch our eye, as they are things we want to cover but have neither the time nor knowledge to do so well. However, we’re always open to new angles and niches that we have previously left uncovered – feel free to surprise us! Just keep it to games, though.

Happy writing!