How do I get my story ready to post on GA?

Does Gay Authors have minimum quality guidelines?

• Yes.  Prior to submitting your story, please run it through a spelling/grammar checker and read it over for anything the checker missed.  Stories with a multitude of spelling and grammar errors could be rejected until the errors have been fixed.  If you need help polishing your story prior to posting we encourage you to review the many topics in our Writer’s Forums. 

Do I have to be a seasoned author to post at GA?

• No.  GA allows both seasoned and first-time writers to submit their stories. We do not expect grammatical and structural perfection in every piece.  We do expect as you post to apply the suggestions from readers and your editing team, should you gain one, to hone your skills as an author.

Can I post poems or flash fiction stories on GA?

• Yes.  However, all poems or flash fiction stories under 1k in length MUST be placed in collections.  You cannot post them all as individual stories.  You may create different collections, such as one for free form poetry and another for haikus, but please do not post more than 4-5 collections total.  Making a collection is as simple as choosing a title like “Author Name Poems” and then submitting each poem/flash piece as a chapter.

What are other tips so my story doesn't have any posting guidelines issues that would prevent it from being approved?

• Do not resize text size in the editor since this will eliminate a reader’s ability to re-size the text. 
• Only chapter text should be in the chapter text box.  There are other areas for chapter titles, chapter notes, and copyright information. 
• Disclaimers or content warnings should be placed in the story or chapter notes.
• The text editor was chosen because of its compatibility with Word formatting.  While it offers a lot of options, not all of them work as expected.  Using ‘bold’ and ‘italics’ is okay.  Much more than that and the formatting from the editor conflicts with the formatting for the site and you get unintended consequences.
• Bold and italics are for brief highlights and are NOT to be used in large amounts. This is an accessibility people for some people.

*If you use Word, you can have hidden paragraph breaks that will cause double spaces between paragraphs in our editor. Complete these steps to remove that hidden break yet still see a space between paragraphs when you write in Word* 

• Before posting into the story text box, select all your text in Word. 
• Click the “find and replace” option. 
• Insert ^p^p into the find field and ^p into the replace field. 
• Then go to your paragraph/line spacing option.  Using the pop up box that appears, scroll down to paragraph spacing.  Set the ‘before’ option to 0 and the ‘after’ option to Auto. 
• Then click save. 
• You can now copy your text and paste it into the chapter text box on GA.