Welcome to the nitty gritty. These are a few of our house rules for work published at Aphor.

When you publish with us, we reserve first publication rights. In other words, we are so excited about what you’ve sent us that we want to be the first to publish your work! We may ask for edits or revisions, although they will be minor, so as not to disturb your original voice or vision for the work. We do not offer edits or feedback on work we reject unless you submitted through the donation route.

If we’re publishing something that has already been published before, as you would have indicated in your cover letter (winky face), we still want second first publication rights. After we publish your work, it’s all yours again and you’re free to do with it as you damn well please. We, of course, would always appreciate an acknowledgement of our publication if you publish it elsewhere after.

Similarly, we reserve the right to nominate your work for prizes (ooh-la-la!) and other exciting opportunities. We also reserve the right to reproduce your online work in print when we have the resources to create print editions.

If you’re sharing anything you’ve found here on social media as a reader, we’d also appreciate that you link back to our publication and acknowledge that Aphor published it. We may even request that you do so if we come across it, but we’re not out for blood.

Works, especially philosophical works, do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or views of our editor. We seek to publish work from myriad perspectives and schools of thought, from Cartesians to Confucians. If you have a rebuttal or response, we would similarly be more than happy to publish work that challenges something we’ve already published.

We do not read work blind, and we’re known to solicit writing along with receiving work unsolicited (seriously, writers, please have a public email...). However, we do not care about how many times you’ve been published, your accolades, or anything of the sort when we look to publish your writing. We love the work that we love because it speaks for itself, not because of who it is attached to.

We encourage authors of any background or perspective to send along their work, even if we didn’t make the first move.