Nonfiction Writers Guidelines

An overview of Nuketown’s nonfiction guidelines.

Payment

We’ll get this out of the way immediately — Nuketown is not a paying market for non-fiction. We’d like to be, and hopefully some day we will be, but at this point all you get is exposure, free stuff to review, and the chance to defend life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Articles

We’re looking for articles tying together aspects of classical liberal thought with geekdom in general and science fiction, fantasy and horror in particular. We are also interested in articles about how to promote heroic or libertarian elements in your fiction (be it traditional short fiction, role-playing games or video game mods).

Here are some examples of stories we’d be interested in:

  • Libertarian themes in role-playing.
  • Creating tyrants for your D&D game.
  • Libertarian Fantasy Web site round up.
  • Examples of Romantic science fiction & fantasy.

Articles vary in length, but should be at least 500 words and no more than 2000 words.

We’re also interested in establishing some regular columns looking at specific issues in speculative fiction from a libertarian perspective for example, a regular round-up of libertarian novels or movies or a regular libertarian gaming column. If you’ve got an idea you think we’ll like, send it to us.

Always query first before submitting your work.

Editorials

We’re always willing to entertain guest editorials, and we’d love to see a few new columnists on staff. The best editorials should deal with speculative fiction issues from a libertarian perspective. Editorials should run 500-1000 words.

Here are some examples:

  • Arguing for colonization and exploitation of the Moon and Mars.
  • The immorality of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.
  • The privatization of space flight.
  • Trashing the “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space”

Always query first before submitting your work.

Hoaxes

We are always interested in debunking hoaxes and urban legends. We realize this section’s a little weird to have a libertarian speculative fiction Webzine, but we see it as our way of helping sanity, reason and good ol’common sense prevail on the Internet.

Debunkings should be about 300-500 words long, and should include the text of the debunking in question (which does not count toward the word count). Debunkings should include three to four sources refuting the hoax in question and (if possible) should include links to other debunkings available on the net.

Always query first before submitting your work.

Reviews

We’re looking for reviewers who look at books, movies, games and Web sites from a libertarian and/or heroic prospective. We’re particularly interested in getting reviews of products that are of interest to libertarian speculative fiction fans (i.e. reviews of movies like Equilibrium and Brazil, books on the Prometheus Award list, and Web sites like Bureaucrash, Free-Market.net and the Libertarian Futurist Society.)

Not everything has to have a libertarian bent — a lot of what we run doesn’t — but reviews should be written with that perspective in mind. Reviews should run 500-1000 words.

Always query first before submitting your work.

Submissions

So you want to write for Nuketown eh? Great! Here’s the process:

  1. Query the editor by sending an e-mail to editor@nuketown.com outlining your idea. A paragraph or two is fine.
  2. If we like your idea, we’ll assign the story to you, and set a deadline. We’ll also send you a form to sign covering the terms of this assignment (for details on what rights we acquire, see the “rights” section below.
  3. You’ll write the story, and then turn it in.
  4. We edit it and then publish it to the site.

All submissions must be submitted via e-mail as plain text. If you need to mark up text with italics, bolding, or bulleted list, use these conventions:

  • Italics: Use underscores before and after the word(s). i.e. _Star Wars_
  • Bold: Use asterisks before and after the word(s). i.e. *really*
  • Bulleted Lists: Use a + before each item in the bulleted list.

Put the following at the top of every submission:

  • Headline for Article
  • First Name Last Name
  • E-mail Address
  • Word Count

If you are doing a review, you should include the following information at the top of the article (note that not every field will be available for every product)

  • Product Name
  • Operating System
  • System requirements
  • MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price)
  • Author
  • Publisher
  • Director
  • Page Count
  • Web Site
  • Rating (X out of 10 stars, where X is not a fraction)

Rights

We acquire first electronic rights to publish your article on Nuketown’s web site, as well as in a monthly Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the Web zine. We also acquire the right to archive non-fiction work published on Nuketown.

By “right to archive” we mean keep a copy of your story on Nuketown’s web site for time eternal. If we want to use your article again some other context — like a book of reviews or CD ROM — we’ll contact you.

We accept re-prints, but the article can’t have appeared in another publication for six months before Nuketown’s publication and we ask that articles not appear in other publications until six months after it ran in Nuketown.

Always query first before submitting your work.

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