Reasons for Rejection

We at Vote4MyStory make a promise to publish stories, although there are some stories that are unsuitable to publish for a variety of reasons. As we state in our guarantee, "If for some reason, we determine a story to be unsuitable to publish, we will offer the author a chance to make changes in her/his story to make it more suitable or a one time, complimentary submission for a different story. Because of costs on our end, we cannot refund the entry fee to an author that has submitted an unpublishable story.

Here are the reasons that may cause a story to be rejected. Please check back as these reasons may be added to.

1. Word count. Please make sure your word count is 2,001 words or less. This total does not include the title, the author's name and website. However, trying to sneak extra sentences into an unusually long title may also be grounds for exceeding the word limit. This is a contest, and rules are rules.

2. Profanity, prejudice or disrespect that goes beyond common decency. These stories must be readable by large audiences, so think of the content as something suitable for television and not an R or X rated movie. Just because a story may use the s-word or the f-word doesn't always make it profane. If those words go suitably with the story, then that's okay. But if our proof-readers believe the content is unnecessarily vulgar, profane, disrespectful, prejudiced or something like that, then those stories will be rejected.

3. Plagiarism. While we cannot possibly track down many acts of plagiarism, if our proof-readers come across something they know to be another author's work, that story will of course be rejected.

4. Liability. Using full names of people and corporations can be a bad thing, especially if those entities feel they are being made liable by the content of the story. It's certainly okay to use names in stories that don't offend anyone, but if we feel there are great liability risks with a certain story, we will reject it.

5. If a story has absolutely nothing to do with the category, then we will reject it. The only exception to this would be for the Once Upon a Time... category, which can be anything you want it to be.

6. A few typos and misspellings are okay and actually expected. But if a story is so poorly written that it is basically un-readable, (for instance, continual grammar, typos and misspellings that are so frequent it makes it difficult to read), then we might reject it. While a few typos and misspellings will probably be the norm, it is in every author's interest to have a clean collection of well-written stories. While we won't be story Nazis, we will attempt to make professional collections.

7. Multiple authors. Having more than one author complicates issues that may arise on our end. Please do not send us stories with more than one author in the credits.

And please remember - we want to support and promote authors. We do not expect to run into these kinds of issues often, but we must present the possibilities to cover our butts.