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Non-Fiction Guidelines
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Clarkesworld Magazine is looking for articles of interest to readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We are looking for a wide range of types of article including, but not limited to: discussions of the genre publishing business, essays on the writing process and the reading experience, scientific material that might be of use in SF stories, and so on. However, please see below for things that we don’t want. We pay 10¢ a word up to our word limit of 2500 words.
Please do not send completed articles. Instead send a query letter with the subject header NONFICTION QUERY: [title or concept] to nonfiction@clarkesworldmagazine.com. There are no response times. We will generally only respond to queries we wish to follow-up on. A follow-up email should not be taken as a guarantee of publication.
There are two common types of non-fiction article that we are specifically not interested in receiving queries for. These are:
- Reviews – if you want to write a critical article such as you might see in NYRSF, that’s a different matter, but we don’t publish reviews;
- Interviews – we do publish interviews, but they are handled separately from the non-fiction articles and are generally commissioned.
As with any field, there are some subjects that have been done to death, or which don’t work well in practice. The following list should give you an idea of the sort of thing that is unlikely to make it out of the slush pile:
- Explanations as to why your favorite genre or sub-genre is the best ever, and everything else is rubbish – because the chances are that most people won’t share your opinion;
- Anything that attempts to categorize genre literature – yes, we have a lot of geeky analytical readers, but the chances of your coming up with something genuinely innovative are very low indeed;
- Convention reports – because all to often they end up sounding like “what I did on my holidays”, and anyway we are not interested in the process of convention running;
- Articles about why a certain set of awards “got it wrong” – because no one ever agrees with award results;
- Articles about why someone is WRONG on the Internet and how we must organize a grass roots campaign to stop this perfidy – because we are not a blog and with our production schedules everyone will have forgotten about the issue by the time we publish your rant;
- Anything that you wrote for an academic journal – we are quite happy to receive academic pieces, and you can even include footnotes if you want, but please remember that you are not writing for an academic audience so your style has to be adapted accordingly;
- Articles that purport to provide 10 rules for success/failure in a particular endeavor – because no set of rules fits everyone, real life isn’t that simple, and in any case if you shoe-horned your advice into a “magic” number like 10 then you’ve probably either left something important out or padded the list;
- Your personal experience of alien abduction – because then it would not be science fiction, would it?
- Articles that make sweeping generalizations on the basis of a few personal observations – it may well be that the market for fantasy is the worst it has ever been, and that this is all the fault of global capitalism and the Internet, but you need to supply some data to back that up, and explain why “ever been” does not include the time before the publication of The Lord of the Rings;
- Details of the heinous and all-pervasive plot by the publishing industry that has prevented your blockbuster 10-volume fantasy trilogy from being published – because the chances are that it is you that is out of step, not the rest of the world.
And yes, we know that’s a list of 10 things. We’ve probably left something out. So before sending your query, think: is this something that a lot of people will enjoy reading about, and do you know enough about the subject the make a credible and convincing argument?
