Submission Guidelines
About your story submission
We appreciate your willingness to share your story. We’re looking for personal stories from patients, caregivers, medical professionals, and industry allies from the rare disease community. We understand that sometimes these roles overlap, such as a caregiver can also be medical provider, so stories may have a layered perspective. With that in mind, we’d specifically like stories that:
Share authentic and honest experiences of living with a rare disease—or providing care or treatment for someone who does.
Explore the emotional territory and practical realities of living with a rare condition.
Provide helpful insights and valuable lessons learned from your experience in the rare disease space.
Offer words of encouragement to those in the beginning stages of their rare disease odyssey.
Important details to keep in mind when writing
Here are our general submission guidelines:
Length: Stories should run between 750-3,000 words. If your story is shorter or longer and you’d still like to submit it, please reach out to us at editor@writersforrare.com before doing so.
Point-of-View and Structure: Stories should be written in first person and should have a beginning, middle, and end.
Writing Tips and Story Ideas: Please read our Writing Tips & Story Ideas before submitting your story.
AI: Please don’t submit writing generated by artificial intelligence. We’re seeking original stories written by real people. AI-generated content will not be accepted.
Plagiarism: We check for plagiarism, and we won’t be able to publish plagiarized content. If you include statistics or quotes, please cite the original source or publication.
Citing Sources: Please provide links to any sources you include, such as a statistic or fact.
Format: Please submit your story as a double-spaced MS Word document. You can email your story to editor@writersforrare.com. Be sure to include your name, relationship to the rare disease community, and rare disease diagnosis at the top of your MS Word document.
After submitting your story
If your story is selected for our anthology, we’ll notify you within thirty days of submission and ask you to sign our permission release agreement. Our standard agreement asks for non-exclusive rights to publish your story. Non-exclusive rights means that you retain ownership of your story but you grant us the rights to publish it and use it again in any future Writers for Rare publications.
“I see rare disease as a puzzle with thousands of pieces. Some fit perfectly, while others need to be twisted and turned to work. And some pieces will never fit together.”
