Contact

Reaching the editorial team at Creative Writing Authority is straightforward. This page explains how to send a message, what geographic scope the site serves, what details make a message useful, and what a realistic response timeline looks like — so neither party wastes time on back-and-forth that could have been avoided.

How to reach this office

The primary contact method is email. Messages sent to the editorial address are reviewed by the team that manages content across the site's full range of topics — from craft fundamentals like point of view and dialogue to practical publishing questions like literary agents and contest submissions.

There is no phone line, no live chat widget, and no instant-response portal. That is a deliberate choice. Written messages allow the team to engage with questions carefully rather than quickly, which tends to produce more useful answers for topics as nuanced as craft development, revision strategy, or MFA program decisions.

For questions that are genuinely editorial in nature — a factual correction, a content gap, a request to cover a specific aspect of creative writing that the site has not yet addressed — email is the right channel. For questions that are essentially "where do I find X on the site," the FAQ page resolves the majority of common navigation and content questions without any wait.

Service area covered

Creative Writing Authority operates at national scope within the United States. The reference content — on topics ranging from flash fiction to screenwriting to writing conferences — is written with a US-based readership as the primary audience, though the craft guidance itself has no geographic boundary.

Practical sections that touch on publishing infrastructure, such as submitting to literary magazines, self-publishing pathways, or copyright basics for writers, reflect US institutional contexts: US-based literary journals, US copyright law as administered by the US Copyright Office, and US-centric publishing industry norms.

International readers are not excluded — a scene-writing principle from the show don't tell section works the same in Manchester as in Minneapolis — but readers outside the US should be aware that some platform-specific or legal content may not map directly onto their jurisdiction.

What to include in your message

A message that gets a useful response in one exchange rather than three almost always contains the same 4 elements:

1. A specific subject line. "Question about your site" tells the team nothing. "Factual correction — dialogue punctuation section" or "Content suggestion — epistolary fiction" gets the message to the right person faster.
2. The URL or topic of the relevant page. The site covers more than 40 distinct topics. Naming the page — or pasting the URL — eliminates a round of clarifying questions.
3. A concrete description of the issue or question. "I think there's an error" is less useful than "The section on dialogue punctuation states X, but my understanding from the Chicago Manual of Style is Y — can you clarify?" Specificity signals that the message is worth engaging with in depth.
4. Any context that changes the answer. A question about writing groups means something different for a debut short fiction writer than for someone finishing a third novel. A sentence of context prevents generic answers.

What does not need to be included: lengthy personal biography, apologies for asking, or hedged preamble. Direct questions get direct answers.

Response expectations

Messages are reviewed on a rolling basis, not on a fixed daily schedule. The realistic window for a first response is 3 to 5 business days for most inquiries. Factual corrections that require editorial review before a page is updated may take up to 10 business days if the correction involves sourced material that needs verification.

There is a meaningful difference between two categories of incoming messages, and response depth reflects that difference:

Editorial and content messages — corrections, sourcing questions, content suggestions, clarification requests about site coverage — receive substantive responses. These are the messages the team is set up to handle well.

Solicitation and promotional messages — pitches for guest posts, link insertion requests, affiliate partnership proposals, sponsored content inquiries — are not reviewed individually. The site does not accept guest posts, paid placements, or link exchanges. Messages in this category are deleted without response, not out of discourtesy, but because a form response to each one would consume time that goes into improving the reference content itself.

Writers looking for community interaction rather than editorial contact will find more active channels through the resources the site covers directly: writing groups and communities, workshops, and conferences are precisely the spaces built for ongoing conversation about craft.