ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

Here are the five requirements that a story must meet in order to be considered eligible for at least one of the reading lists on BlackStoriesUnite:

☁︎ Must be written by a Black author and/or must have at least one Black main character.

☁︎ Must be a coherent, comprehensive body of work. This means that grammar, spelling, and punctuation should be used correctly. Or at least well enough for your story to be readable. No, I do not discriminate against silly little typos; I make them all the time, but I will be looking for structural consistency.

If you've intentionally constructed your book using only lowercase letters, zero puncuation, no quotation marks on dialogue, or any other unconventional styles of writing, then that needs to be stated somewhere in the earlier sections, or description of your submitted book.

☁︎ Must already have at least three in-story chapters uploaded. That excludes intros, sections dedicated to just authors notes, maps, and face claims as those do not actually start the story. It's okay to have these things in your book of course, but in order to be eligible, you will need three actual chapters posted because I have to have something to actually read!

Example:
Introduction [out of story chapter] ❌
Chapter one [in-story chapter] ✔️
Chapter two [in story chapter] ✔️
Another disclaimer [out of story chapter] ❌
Chapter three [in-story chapter] ✔️
Chapter four [in-story chapter] ✔️

In this example, there are enough in-story chapters to be submitted because it has a total of four. All you need is a minimum of 3 in-story chapters to be eligible.

☁︎Must be an original body of work. As stated in the "COMMUNITY RULES" chapter, no plagiarism or stealing allowed.

☁︎ Must be a completed or regularly updated body of work. An ongoing book that has not received an in-story update in six months or more is ineligible and will be removed (poetry collections and anthologies are the only exception). This is to cut down on the amount of potentially abandoned or discontinued books featured on BlackStoriesUnite, and to give readers a better, more reliable selection.

☁︎ Must follow Wattpad's rules and content guidelines.

All of these requirements are to ensure the creditability of the BlackStoriesUnite reading lists. Part of readers choosing to browse through the featured selection is trusting that they will find an original book that is at least decently written with either an already finished storyline, or one that has a good chance of being finished.

Failure to meet any of these requirements at any point will result in the prevention of a book's addition to the BlackStoriesUnite reading list, and the removal of a book if it becomes inelgible.

Next Chapter: HOW TO SUBMIT.