Submission Guidelines

Image Description: Three old televisions. Two show people writing, and the middle one shows a bearded face emerging from a bowl of Fruit Loops. His glasses bear the letters G and C. The text summarises the 'about' page.

Important things to consider before submitting your work to Geelong Cereal:

Geelong Cereal is a free digital publication staffed by volunteers. We do not pay for stories; the purpose of this publication is to publish work by writers and artists at any stage of their creative journey.
You retain copyright of your work and if you ask for it to be removed, it will be, no questions asked.

Please note that by sumbitting work to Geelong Cereal, you confirm that you hold the copyright and publishing rights to that work and it is not subject to any contracts.

Technical stuff.

This platform only accepts block paragraphing, and it melts down whenever a tab key is pressed anywhere in the universe. Please don't indent paragraphs, dialogue or anything else. Please use a single line space to separate paragraphs, different speakers etc just as you see here on this page.

'Like this?' you ask.

'Yes. Exactly like that,' Geelong Cereal replies. 'If I receive work with indents, I have to reformat it. You might not like the result, and that makes me a sad panda'.

Please submit your work using only .docx or PDF formats.

Sumbissions should be emailed to thegeelongcereal@gmail.com

Please submit your work in a 12pt serif font such as Times New Roman or Garamond.

Please be sure to include your name or handle and always give your work a title.

In your email, please state your name, the title of the piece, and let me know what you have written. (You don't need to summarise it, just say something like: 'this is a short fantasy story', or 'this is a comedic piece of microfiction' etc). Bonus points for including a word count, and a bio with a picture of you (or your cat etc) if you plan to be a regular contributor.

A note about pictures.

Geelong Cereal will not publish any AI generated or significantly AI-manipulated images.

You are welcome to include some definitely not AI pictures with your work, however it will not always be possible to publish them. If you include pictures they must be your own original artwork, used with permission by the artist, CC lisenced or public domain images, or photographs taken by you, which do not depict anything that breaches privacy or copyright laws. Images of children that could be used to generate abuse material won't be published.

Having said this, photography and art-work is highly valued here, and if you'd like to have a running photo or art journal or blog about your travels or your art or anything cool that features your pictures, please send me an outline of what you propose and we'll see if we can make it happen :-)

Content guidelines and content warnings.

Work deemed highly offensive will be refused. The purpose of Geelong Cereal is to provide a warm, encouraging and fun place for writers and artists to publish their work.

Geelong Cereal publishes work suitable for adults and mature teenagers 16+. Stories may contain adult themes, strong language, drug use etc, just please don't send in extreme graphic and or sexual violence, hate speech etc. We also won't publish tedious inflamatory political rants or anything defamatory. Content warnings will be provided where necessary.

Be considerate, help us create a welcoming and creative space, and most of all, have fun!

Specific guidelines for serial fiction.

If you are submitting a long piece to be published in sections, please clearly divide the work into roughly equal parts and number them. State in your email the number of sections and the approximate word count of each.

If you are planning to write an "on the run" serial, please send the first 2 episodes (each between 500-2500 words), an overview of how the story is likely to progress, and indicate how many episodes you forsee writing. A commitment to a minimum of six episodes and to writing an ending is required.

If you begin a serial here, and find you are unable to complete it, we ask that you allow another author to write an ending (a maximum of two more episodes) so our readers aren't left hanging and the site doesn't become an unfinished story graveyard.
If you aren't comfortable with that, of course we will simply remove the story at your request or put it on hold in the vault until you're ready to come back and finish it.

If another author writes an ending to your story, you will retain copyright of all of the parts of the story you wrote and the other author's ending could only be used by them if they removed all traces of characters, backstory and anything that has been clearly created by you from that work.

Microfiction Mondays

Microfiction Mondays features stories up to 300 words.
This can take any form or style you choose.

Two Sentence Fiction will be accepted, including but not limited to:
Two Sentence Horror Stories
Two Sentence Mystery Stories
Two Sentence Sci-Fi Stories
Two Sentence Literary Fiction

Please submit your work by 11:59pm on Saturday to have it included the next Monday.

Please email your submission to:
thegeelongcereal@gmail.com

Short stories and creative non-fiction

Important things to consider before sending individual short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction to be published by Geelong Cereal.

Many writing competitions and publications only accept work that has not been published. If there is a chance you may want to enter your work into a competition or submit it to a literary journal, we recommend you do that first.
This is particularly applicable to individual short stories of between 500-5,000 words, the common word count range for many of the various short story competitions available to emerging Australian writers.

If you have a short story that you think is pretty good, and it falls into one of those word counts, please submit it to whichever competitions grab your eye first, and if it doesn't find a home, we will be delighted to publish it afterwards.

Most notably for Geelong residents, Geelong Writers Inc run several fiction competitions each year, including The Geelong Writers Prize (up to 3,000 words), the Funniest 500 (up to 500 words), and the Finest 500 (believe it or not, also up to 500 words). They also publish a poetry journal and a yearly anthology. For your work to be included in any of these great competitions or publications, it must be as-yet-unpublished so if that's your goal for your piece please submit it there first. You can check out Geelong Writers various competitions and publication opportunities here:
Geelong Writers Inc

Geelong Cereal, on the other hand, will publish any great stories that come our way, even if they've been published elsewhere (for example, people frequently publish their own independently published work here).

Word Counts

For our purposes:

Microfiction is fiction up to 300 words.

Flash Fiction is fiction between 300-750 words.

Short fiction is fiction below 5,000 words.

Editorials or interest pieces should be between 500-3000 words.

We will aim to respond to all submissions as soon as we can but sometimes there may be delays. Please wait 14 days before reaching out.

Please check out the FAQ page for more important information.

Please email your submission to:
thegeelongcereal@gmail.com