Questions and Answers
Submit express is free & works great to submit to search engines all at once. There"s a link to it from my website, www.craftymum61.com if you want to check it out.
I generally know how to submit a novel into an agent/publisher, size 12 font and double spaced, but I want to send in a short story and poem to Chicken Soup for the Soul, and I don"t know the specific requirements for submitting short stories and poems. Is there a certain font that you must use? Would this even matter for something like Chicken Soup for the Soul?
Thank you for any answers…
Lol, thanks for the information about the site, but don"t worry about that as much, I have already read it!
— For any future responses…
The requirements for short stories are the same requirements for any other story of any length, as long as it follows the requirements set forth on their website. If they think it may be a profitable venture, they will take a look at it. Check the submission requirements via the publishers website and stick to any requirements. Then send them a query letter, and if they follow it up, your book proposal. After this your short story and poem will be sent to the Editorial Department. Same routine goes for Literary Agents.
Similar to many publishers, their website states;
"Please do not send us any book manuscripts, unless through a literary agent, as these will be automatically discarded"
Submission requirements from their website -
1. Tell an exciting, sad or funny story about something that has happened to you or someone you know. Make sure that you introduce the character(s). Please know that your story should be written in the first person.
2. Tell your story in a way that will make the reader cry, laugh or get goose bumps (the good kind!) Don’t leave anything out — how did you feel?
3. The story should start with action; it should include a problem, issue or situation. It should include dialogue and the character should express their feelings though the conflict or situation. It should end in a result, such as a lesson learned, a positive change or pay-off.
4. Above all, let it come from your HEART! Your story is important!
What a Chicken Soup for the Soul story IS NOT:
1. A sermon, an essay or eulogy.
2. An "as told to" story written in the third person.
3. A term paper, thesis, letter or journal entry.
4. About politics or controversial issues.
5. A biography or testimonial.
Story Specifications
1. We are no longer able to accept or consider any submissions sent by fax or postal mail. Please know that the only way to submit your stories or poems to us is via our website: www.chickensoup.com. If you have any problems when trying to submit, please contact our webmaster at: webmaster@chickensoupforthesoul.com.
2. Stories and poems should be non-fiction, ranging in length between 300-1200 words.
3. No anonymous, author unknown or "as told to" submissions, please.
4. We prefer that you submit your stories only once, but if you believe your story fits in more than one book topic, please indicate which other topics you have submitted it for in the Comments line on the submission form. Submitting the SAME story more than once to the SAME topic causes delays, so please resist the urge to submit your story multiple times to the same topic.
5. Be sure to keep a copy of the stories and/or poems that you submit to us. Please do not contact us and ask us to send you a copy of anything you have previously submitted. We are unable to do that.
6. Please submit only stories or poems that have not been previously published. The only exception to this is if your work has only been published in a small local publication with limited circulation.
If the story or poem you wrote is published by us, you will be paid $200 upon publication of the book plus you will receive ten free copies of the book your story or poem appears in.
When you submit your story to us through our website, you will receive an immediate response that we have received it. It is the next screen that comes up after you hit the submit button and not a separate e-mail message from us. The message says, "Thank you! Your information has been received." This is the confirmation that your story has been delivered and accepted into our submission process. It is the only acknowledgment you will receive from us. If you receive an error message when trying to submit, please contact our webmaster for assistance. If you do not have Internet access at home, you can always visit a local library.
It can take up to three or four years for Chicken Soup for the Soul books to develop. Please be patient, as this is an important, yet time-consuming process. If your story is chosen for a future edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul or any other projects, you will be notified and your permission to print it will be requested. Please know that we never publish anything without written permission from the author.
Feel free to submit more than one story or poem to us to consider.
Preferably for free…?
There are a lot of misconceptions and half truths about search engines and how to optimize your site for them which have already been included in the answers I"ve seen so far.
First off YES, you can submit your site to multiple search engines at once. People usually use search engine submitters/blasters for this. There are a few services that will charge you a fee for this—-don"t be fooled by them use the FREE services…………………..
Why?
The majority of these submitters may not submit your sites to the search engines that matter in terms of usability by internet surfers (in fact some require manual submissions to work correctly) and which will provide the bulk of the traffic to your site. It was found by the Nielsen Net ratings in 2005 that some 90% of search engine traffic originated from
Google
Yahoo!
Msn
AltaVista
Ask.com
All The Web
WISENut
HotBot
Gigablast
(It hasn"t changed much since 2005)
So if the blasters aren"t submitting to these your missing out!!
In fact the first three took up some 80% of the use by surfers!
There are also some other high ranked ones like
Ask Jeeves
Webcrawler
Iwon
AOL
EXcite
Netscape
But the truth is that a lot of the lower ranked search engines (SEs) (even some of the top ranked ones) use search results from the wider used "robots" of Yahoo!, Google and Inktomi/HotBot. So why ask a submission service to submit to
multiple SEs (I"ve seen some for 100/200 submissions)
when results for the lower ranked ones come from the top ranked ones?
Try using Submit Express
Http://submitexpress.com
They also provide other useful search engine optimization (seo) tools lilke meta tag generators and keyword suggestion tools.
Secondly, many people feel that once you have your site up with links to other sites and a sitemap you will be indexed by the search engines. I don"t agree with this! What are the quality of these links that you have to your site? Search engine robots take a lot into account when choosing which sites rank well with them. One of these things is the page rank of the site linking to yours and correspondingly the page rank of the other sites linking to your link partner.
So not just because you have a link means this will mean good for bots searching for your site. In fact, some of these other sites will have sitemaps and robot.txt files which tell the search engines where to index on their websites. How do you know your link is included within these files for the search engines to crawl?
It is best to submit your sites regularly every 6 weeks depending on how many changes are made to it and do it yourself manually plus with the aid of the free service I mentioned before. Don"t submit more often than that as your site will be penalized for "spamming " the search engines. Also submit not only to search engines but search directories as well. The most popular of these is DMoz (Direcory Mozilla) also known as the Open Directory.
Http://dmoz.org
Submit Express
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