Sunday 26 January 2020

The Weekly News Fiction Submission Guidelines

The Weekly News is a weekly publication which is technically a newspaper (the clues are there in the name!). That means you'll need to look in a different section, from where the magazines are displayed in the newsagents, to find it. Often it's amongst Auto Trader and fishing publications. This classification also means you can't claim ALCS for work published in The Weekly News.

Other than that technicality, it's quite like a womag in style, with a range of articles on health, real people, gardening, entertainment and royalty. There are recipes, readers letter and of course fiction. It labels itself, 'the paper with the feel good factotr'.

You can find the full, official fiction guidelines here. I'm not being lazy in not reproducing them here. At least that's not my only reason for not doing so! Whenever possible it's best to refer to a publication's own guidelines as these are the most likely to be current.

Anyone may submit to The Weekly News. If you've not previously had work published by DC Thomson, you'll be asked to sign their contract on first acceptance. The same one applies to My Weekly and The People's Friend (but the guidelines and submission requirements are very different!). They do ask for quite a lot of rights, but NOT all rights. (Always read any contract thoroughly and be sure you understand and agree before signing.)

I'll have a story in the 22nd February issue of The Weekly News.

If you'd like to read more about me and my writing, have a look at this interview on Pen to Print.

4 comments:

Sharon Boothroyd said...

These are very old guidelines that were issued under Jill, the former TWN fiction editor.
I honestly feel that TWN/PF need to update these guidelines, as these don't really relate to the current fiction that's being accepted by TWN, which is run by TPF.
We still don't know who the new fiction ed of TWN is, either.
I assume it's Lucy, the new PF fiction ed, but this hasn't been confirmed.

Patsy said...

@ Sharon – they're the ones from the websote and the most current available. Perhaps they'll be updated once Lucy settles in and it's decided who'll have responsibility for selecting fiction for The Weekly News.

Fay Knowles said...

Congratulations on your story published today in The Weekly News, Patsy! I read their guidelines, thanks. Do you know if they take stories that have been previously published?

Patsy said...

@ Fay – No, they don't. Very few of the magazines do, and that includes all the DC Thomson ones.