This form is here to accept sign ups and pitches for games and essays for the Far Horizons Guide to Death, an anthology of games and essays around the subject of death.
Firstly, some information of what this anthology will be:
The Book
The book itself will be a small-form factor (A5, US Digest or Royal, or similar) hardcover book, initially with approximately 120 pages. This product is intended to be high-quality, with a black linen cover and foil-pressed titles, and quality page stock, with a retail price around GBP 40. A more affordable softcover print-on-demand version will also be made available through DriveThruRPG.
Update: There's a read-only PDF version of this form so you can see the questions in advance
at this Google Drive link. If you have a Google account you can use "Open With > Google Docs" to get an editable version you can save in your drive.
This Form
Your Pitches
Your pitches don't have to be long, but we need an understanding of what you'll be writing. The specifications are as follows:
- Games: 2,000 to 5,000 words
- Essays: 1,000 to 2,000 words
- Type: tabletop roleplaying games preferred, but larps/larplikes or other forms of game are also acceptable
- Subject: themes, topics, subjects around death; this is deliberately wide-ranging, because we want a wide range of content
- Tone: a range of emotional tones from sad to joyous to comic; we want a wide range of content
- (Essays: tone somewhere between journalistic and academic; a point of view on a subject reinforced with fact, citations not required if not relevant)
- Limitations: hateful content or fascist ideologies will be immediately rejected
All pieces will be paid at a rate of 0.17 GBP (~$0.21) per word, up to a maximum of 850 GBP (i.e. for 5,000 words; ~$1050). To bring your idea to life, you also get access to Far Horizons CoOp staff editors, proofreaders, layout designers, and illustrators. We can provide a framework for writing a game if you need one. We may be able to provide an advance in some limited circumstances.
Contrary to the initial post, you'll be paid directly once work is completed, i.e. you won't receive royalty shares from the final publication once you've been paid. That money will instead go to the Far Horizons CoOp members who have worked on the book, according to their input. Effectively, we're paying you for worldwide physical and digital publication rights.
Rights Retention
At Far Horizons CoOp it's important to us that creators keep control over their own work. As such, you always retain the copyright over your own game or essay. We do ask for an exclusivity period, usually 3–6 months, so that your independent release isn't directly competing with ours. We also ask for you to discuss rereleased text with the editors and proofreaders who have contributed to the final text, because their labour has also made a difference to your work. You are otherwise free, and indeed encouraged, to publish it again!
Note:– In terms of this form and this submission process, you retain the rights over your own pitch, but if you're successful we're likely to use this in promotional material and on social media. We have too many of our own ideas to steal yours.
Timescales
Once you have completed your pitch, you can expect us to acknowledge it within a few days. All pitches will be assessed anonymously, but once our shortlist is made, we'll be doing some checks on people as well. This isn't anything sinister, and if you've never been a Twitter Main Character there's nothing you need to worry about.
This applications will be open until Friday, June 2nd 2023 11:59pm UTC+1. Applications received after this time may be considered if there are extenuating circumstances; please detail these in the final section of this form.
We will let you know if you have been successful as soon as our decision is made; however, we're a small team not doing this for profit, so we don't want to hold ourselves to deadlines at this stage. Initially we have room for five games and one essay, but we'd like to keep some people in reserve for Kickstarter stretch goals.
We intend to run our Kickstarter campaign in July 2023. It would be useful to have at least a partially completed draft copy of your game or essay by then for the purposes of promotion, although this will not be essential for everybody to achieve. Timescales beyond this date are dependent on the general availability of the shortlisted authors.
IMPORTANT:- We can accept material that's previously been self-published (although we would prefer new material), but we absolutely cannot accept pitches for games or essays that already exist in other anthologies or that have been published by a third party. We will be checking up on this, but it is really important that you are honest with us because it's impossible for us to find everything.
