SUBMIT YOUR STORY

Want to hear your story on the Fact or Fake Podcast? We would love to work with you! We are always looking for fun new ways to terrify and stump our audience and love working with artists of all sizes and experience. We accept a broad range of submissions across the horror genre and are excited to see what harrowing tales you have in store for us.

Please read the below submission guidelines carefully and in their entirety before you submit a story to us. We can’t wait to hear from you! Time to get spooky.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please email submissions to: info@factorfakepodcast.com

In the body of your email please include the title and exact word count of the story.

Please send submissions as an editable attachment.
Microsoft Word documents are preferable. Please do not submit your story or script as a .PDF file as we cannot edit or annotate it easily. Anything submitted as a .PDF file will be automatically rejected.

Please do not submit your story by pasting the text into the body of your submission email.
This breaks the formatting of your story and makes it exceptionally hard to read. Any submissions received in this manner without an attachment will be automatically rejected.

Please double check that your story is actually attached to your email. 

If your story submission has been posted online at any point, please provide us with a link so we can share the text version with our listeners.

FICTIONAL STORY REQUIREMENTS

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Stories between 1200 and 2500 words.

Fictional story submissions have to be very scary or reality bending. We currently accept any perspective or tense, but we do ask that you note any part of the story that would need a voice that is not the voice of the narrator. We are a small podcast and do not yet have a budget to hire a lot of voice actors, so this will help us to determine if the story/dialogue is feasible for us at this time. Single character stories are also fine. Prose or script format is fine. If you have sound or production notes that are important, please also include those in the body of your work.

We do not currently guarantee pay for stories submitted to the podcast. Once we have begun to monetize the podcast in a meaningful way we will revisit this policy. Our goal, of course, is to support any artist that is looking to work with us on this podcast.

Email your short story in .doc form or similar universally editable file (NO PDFS PLEASE) to info@factorfakepodcast.com

FACTUAL STORY REQUIREMENTS

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Stories between 1200 and 2500 words.

Factual story submissions MUST be your own story and you must own ALL of the rights for adaptation of that story. You can NOT submit any story that is someone else’s account of a true event. You can NOT submit any story that you heard about in the news and are adapting yourself.

We ENCOURAGE you to change details of the factual story you submit such as names, dates, locations, etc to protect your identity and the integrity of the story. Please, do not use any person’s real name for a story without their expressed permission.

Please do not try to submit any fictional accounts as fact. If you submit a factual account, you may be contacted by a member of the Fact or Fake team for a short interview about the events that took place. We will conduct our own independent research. If we suspect a story may be fake, we will not use the content.

We currently accept any perspective or tense, but we do ask that you note any part of the story that would need a voice that is not the voice of the narrator. We are a small podcast and do not yet have a budget to hire a lot of voice actors, so this will help us to determine if the story/dialogue is feasible for us at this time. Single character stories are also fine. Prose or script formats are fine. If you have sound or production notes that are important, please also include those in the body of your work.

We do not currently guarantee pay for stories submitted to the podcast. Once we have begun to monetize the podcast in a meaningful way we will revisit this policy. Our goal, of course, is to support any artist that is looking to work with us on this podcast.

Email your short story in .doc form or similar universally editable file (NO PDFS PLEASE) to info@factorfakepodcast.com

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Please email us at info@factorfakepodcast.com.

If your story is selected, you may be asked to work with the Fact or Fake team on edits or tweaks to ensure your story is as perfect for the show as it can be.

Feel free to introduce yourself and say hello, but there are no experience requirements to submit a story, so CV’s and resumes are not required as part of the submission process.

Please limit your submissions to 1-2 stories per week. Choose one or two of your best works and submit those via an attachment in a single email. Please don’t send link-dumps, or refer us to an entire anthology of your work. Similarly, please don’t send rapid-fire submissions. If you have a burning desire to send more than 2 stories in a week, of course feel free to do so. We are simply asking for you to take mercy on our inbox as we work through submissions.

Previously published or performed stories are fine, as long as you hold the rights to grant usage to The Fact or Fake Podcast. However, stories which have not already previously appeared in audio form will be our top priority.

Please do not re-submit stories that have already been marked as a “pass.” If we think a story could work with certain changes or rewrites, we’ll reach out to you and let you know.

If you’re submitting a story for a holiday special (Christmas, Halloween etc) then say so in the subject line of the email. This is super important! If you don’t do this then there’s a good chance it’ll get overlooked for a specific episode.

Only submit your own work. We can’t adapt stories without the permission of the original author.

If for some reason you’ve decided to withdraw your submission, let us know immediately. Due to the extremely fast turnaround time, a story might be put into production on the same day it’s accepted. By submitting a story, you’re granting us permission to adapt it.

We cannot provide a personalized response to every author individually. However, even if a story is rejected you will hear from us saying so as long as the submission falls within our guidelines.

If your story submission has been posted online at any point, please provide us with a link so we can share the text version with our listeners.

Please spend some time on editing and proofreading your document.
We are super excited to read what you send us. However, we are a super small team at the moment and will have to reject stories that are very obviously not proofread - sentences that randomly end half way through, non-sense words that don’t belong, crazy formatting that would make your high school English teacher cringe, etc. Also, please remember to frame your story for a podcast. If you post your stories to Reddit or other blogs, please be sure to adapt your work to fit a spoken style.

Stick to one font and don’t use fancy title fonts or similar.
Calibri 12 is what we love!

Give the document a sensible file name.
Title – Author is ideal. Make it as easy as possible for us to search for, find, and assess your story. Please try to make the title of your email and the title of your doc the same so your story doesn’t get overlooked because we can’t recall the filename to locate it!

If you forget to do any of this, don’t worry!
Unless it’s incredibly obvious that you’ve made zero effort, we’ll still consider your story. You don’t need to send in multiple revisions fixing things.

Unless it’s obvious that you’ve flagrantly ignored our submissions guidelines, you will hear back whether it’s an acceptance or a rejection. If you haven’t heard back then it’s because we do not currently have an update for you.

Reminder that we don’t require submission exclusivity – you’re welcome to submit your work elsewhere in the meantime. That said, we appreciate any exclusivity you’d like to offer us, and if your story’s entirely unpublished upon acceptance then make a note of it because that’s awesome!

Finally, please don’t contact our host on her personal social media channels about your submission – this is how things get forgotten or overlooked. DM’s asking about submissions will likely not be seen.

If you read this far, you get bonus points, include the phrase ‘Bonus Points For ME!‘ in your submission email. Why? Truly just for fun, and because we think you deserve bonus points.

THINGS TO CONSIDER

Be familiar with the podcast and know about the kinds of stories we do on the show. Here are some details for what works best for the podcast:

Must be horror. Horror is a diverse genre, and this is open to interpretation, but the main focus of a story should be to scare or unsettle.

Stories should be written in the first-person perspective. While there are occasional exceptions to this rule, first-person tends to work by far the best for the show.

We don’t want narratives which rely solely on graphic gore (snuff, torture porn, etc.) or graphic sexual violence. Implied instances will usually be okay but as with any good horror, thoughtful is the most effective. Similarly, cursing (the use of expletives) is totally fine, but please be mindful of their usage. While we are okay with curse words, a narrative that is overly filled with these words will likely need editing or be outright rejected if it is egregious enough.

Provide good audio cues. This is an audio podcast – the better your story can sound the better it will be for the show. If you think an interesting sound will add to the story, we would love to know!

And always remember, rejection doesn’t mean you’ve missed your chance to be featured on the podcast. Feel free to submit new stories even if previous ones have been rejected.

RIGHTS & LEGAL

Authors retain full rights to any story or script performed on The Fact or Fake podcast.

The Fact or Fake podcast does not retain the rights to publish or distribute your story outside of the audio performance without written permission from the author.

Audio production of your story remains the property of The Fact or Fake Podcast and may not be altered, sold or distributed outside of The Fact or Fake Podcast without prior written permission.