Deadline: none given
We’d love to see more script submissions, as these have proven to work very well on the show. Scripts should ideally last between 20 and 40 minutes, and star 2 or more characters, with more being preferable. Please include a word count with your script, and a spoiler-free list of characters with speaking roles. If you’re new to scriptwriting and you’d like an example of how to structure and format an audio-only script, you can download an example.
Please make sure your script is written as an audio drama. We can’t adapt scripts written as a screenplay, or scripts that heavily feature visual cues. Anything not written in an audio drama format will not be accepted.
GENERAL GUIDELINES
Please email us at submissions@thenosleeppodcast.com.
If your story is selected, you may be asked to work with the story editor on edits or tweaks to ensure your story is as perfect for the show as it can be.
Feel free to introduce yourself and say hello, but things like cover letters or CV’s aren’t required.
Please be considerate of other authors waiting for a response. Choose one or two of your best works and submit those via an attachment in a single email. Please don’t send link-dumps, or refer us to an entire anthology of your work. Similarly, please don’t send rapid-fire submissions. Ideally wait a few weeks between submissions. This is a polite request and not a rule however, and if you have a burning desire to send another story over in the meantime, go for it.
Stories can appear elsewhere. Previously published or performed stories are fine, as long as you hold the rights to grant usage to The NoSleep Podcast. However, stories which have not already previously appeared in audio form will have priority.
Please do not re-submit stories that have already been passed on. If we think a story could work with certain changes or rewrites, we’ll reach out to you and let you know. This applies to all stories, including holiday specials.
If you’re submitting a story for a holiday special (Christmas, Halloween etc) then say so in the subject line of the email. This is super important! If you don’t do this then there’s a good chance it’ll get overlooked for a specific episode.
Only submit your own work. We can’t adapt stories without the permission of the author.
If for some reason you’ve decided to withdraw your submission, let us know immediately. Due to the extremely fast turnaround time, a story might be put into production on the same day it’s accepted. By submitting a story, you’re granting us permission to adapt it.
We cannot provide a personalized response to every author individually. Similarly, requests for writing advice or critiques will probably go unanswered. However, even if a story is rejected you will hear from us saying so as long as the submission falls within our guidelines.
If your story submission has been posted online at any point, please provide us with a link so we can share the text version with our listeners. Secondly, when including a word count, please include the exact word count rather than an estimate. Thanks!
Due to an ever-increasing volume of submissions and a number of documents which are almost impossible to format, we are now requesting the following formatting requirements for submissions going forward:
No tabbed indents.
If you need to remove tabbed indents from your submission document, an easy way to batch remove them is find/replace ^t with nothing in the replace field.
Documents where you’ve created tabbed indents by pressing space bar a bunch of times will be automatically rejected.
Please spend some time on editing and proofreading your document.
We get dozens of submissions a month with mistakes so obvious that you couldn’t fail to miss them on an editing pass, leading us to believe that these editing passes aren’t being done. Obvious things like sentences ending half way through, nonsense typos that aren’t real words etc. Sometimes we find these in the opening paragraph.
Keep the header/footer blank.
Stick to one font and don’t use fancy title fonts or similar.
We format the documents to Calibri 14 so it’s a waste of your time. If your document is already Calibri 14 then we’ll love you more.
Keep the prose left aligned.
Nobody wants to read a 4000 word center aligned story.
Only use one space between words.
We get submissions with two, three or even four spaces between words at random and it’s an absolute pain to fix if the amount of spaces fluctuates. If we have to spend hours deleting spaces from your document, it won’t be considered.
Give the document a sensible file name.
Title – Author is ideal. Make it as easy as possible for us to search for, find and assess your story. HotSexySubmission.doc might seem funny at the time, but it’s less funny when your story gets overlooked because we can’t recall the filename to locate it!
Give your story an extra editing pass for superfluous commas and run-on sentences.
These are the bane of our lives as editors of an audio production because excessive commas can be extremely disruptive to the voice actors. If your 150 word paragraph is one sentence long with twelve commas, it shouldn’t be. This is the single biggest issue that takes up our editorial time and we’d like to see more authors making a concerted effort to fix this stuff up before submitting. You don’t need to guide the reader by the hand to quite the degree some people do with commas, they’re capable of parsing sentences with only the most mandatory of commas in place. Go through your story and remove any commas that don’t absolutely need to be there when you’re writing for audio.
If you post your stories to Reddit, please remove the Reddit formatting before sending it in.
Your submissions shouldn’t be rife with asterisks and underscores framing a bunch of words. Likewise, please edit things like ‘I’m posting this on Reddit because’ or even ‘I’m typing this’ or similar unless it’s mandatory to the plot (for eg it’s framed as something that’s been written up and is then being read by another person). If you want your story to be adapted on the podcast then it should be from the perspective of being spoken aloud. We do audio drama adaptations, not narrations. There are many great horror narrators out there but it’s a different medium and requires different presentation.
Remember that somebody has to do all these things.
You might have a reason why you use three spaces between words, or center align, or have a complex and unintuitive filename, but someone has to fix it. If it’s left to us to fix thousands of typos, superfluous spaces, tabbed indents etc then that’s (much, much) less time we have to focus on selecting stories and giving people opportunities to be on the show. If it’s something generic that the editors can fix, it’s something you can fix before you send it in. The great thing about digital is that you can save as many copies of a file as you want. If you want your prose version to have tabbed indents, that’s great! Save another copy without them to submit to places who don’t want them. If it’s in your muscle memory to double space between words and you just can’t break the habit, cool! But you’re also able to find/replace double space with single space. If you don’t have time to proofread and edit your story in general, then… actually there’s no excuse for that, it just means you’re only doing part of your job as a writer.
If you forget to do any of this, don’t worry!
Unless it’s incredibly obvious that you’ve made zero effort, we’ll still consider your story. You don’t need to send in six revisions fixing things.
This only applies to submissions going forward.
If you’ve already submitted something filled with tabbed indents or something then we might frown at it but we won’t hold it against you. Please don’t send in revisions of existing submissions.
When you’re submitting somewhere, you want to do everything you can to make it as easy as possible for the editors to accept it. Everything we get submitted has to be edited and adapted into a uniform script type for our voice actors. If we have two equally great stories and one has been submitted with care in the presentation and the other hasn’t, and will take hours longer to edit, then we’re going to go with the former every time. If we have to spend 10-15 minutes just preparing your document for you so it’s readable for assessment then we don’t have that 10-15 minutes to spend making an awesome podcast.
Unless it’s obvious that you’ve flagrantly ignored our submissions guidelines, you will hear back whether it’s an acceptance or a rejection. We’re in a place where we’re very on top of things and nothing is slipping through the cracks. If you haven’t heard back then it’s because we have nothing to tell you right now. As soon as your story’s been selected or rejected, you’ll know. Especially with flash fiction; if you listen to the show, you’ll know that our flash fiction episodes only happen generally once a season, so we’re simply unable to be constantly assessing the hundreds of flash fic submissions we get a week. Now that flashfic submissions are temporarily closed this is less of an issue, but if you have a pending flash fiction submission then please be patient.
Please include the phrase ‘I’m bracing myself for The NoSleep Podcast‘ in your submission email.