Small Wars Journal

Submit Content

  1. About

Submit What?

We are presently accepting:

  • Original, unpublished works for publication in Small Wars Journal.

For the moment, we are not accepting the following, pending some renovation and expansion. We'll get back into that business soon, and with a vengeance.

  • Published works for inclusion in the Library.
  • Current news items of interest.
  • Event announcements.

Original Work for Publication in SWJ

Small Wars Journal publishes contributed content from serious, authentic voices from across the wide spectrum of participants and stakeholders in small wars. We welcome your submission of content suitable for our professional community. We will review what you submit and may publish original content as a guest post in the SWJ Blog or a Journal article; we also appreciate your assistance in pointing out relevant published works, news, and activities as we build a useful index of resources for practitioners. Authors submitting their original, unpublished work for consideration for publication in SWJ should review this section closely.

If you agree with the provisions on this page, submit through this link or the one further down. If you do not agree, don't submit your work; if in doubt, contact us on any nuances before submitting.

Checklist

  • You agree with all the terms on this page, including:
    • You are able to grant us rights to the work. (6)
    • You grant us those rights stated. (7-11)
    • It is READY TO GO (2-4), it's good, you know it, and you're thick-skinned. (5)
  • You've included the right stuff (document, bio, misc files, info) (A-G)
  • Your submission constitutes acceptance of the terms on this page.

All the gruesome details

Thanks for considering Small Wars Journal as an outlet for your work. We aim to provide a responsive publishing vehicle for thoughtful work to enable it to quickly reach the broad community of small wars stakeholders. We depend on the high quality of contributed content from motivated professionals.

  1. We will consider your submission for publication in the SWJ Blog (short commentary, op-ed) or Small Wars Journal (longer articles, analysis, feature length work), as appropriate. Intermediate things like book reviews or shorter articles could go in either place at our discretion.
  2. We accept only ready-to-go original works. We screen them per our editorial policy. When we're convinced they're good, we publish them with no or minimal adjustments. Sometimes on the same day as receipt.
  3. DO NOT SEND US DRAFTS FOR COMMENT. If your draft is "good enough" it may get published as is. We don't want that to be a bad surprise.
  4. We try to make minor editorial corrections as we format the article for publishing, but regret we are not staffed for rigorous editing. Our target is authentic, really good, and right now. Unfortunately, the perfect has proven to be the enemy of the good, and we simply can't hunt for typos and grammar while great content languishes in our queue. If you're after perfect, please work with a good editor or proofreader before you submit to us.
  5. You understand, accept, and hopefully even relish the fact that your work will be exposed to a broad, spirited, and opinionated audience that will have no hesitation at all about making public their high praise or scathing criticism of your work; likely some of both.
  6. You represent and warrant that you are the sole copyright holder of the original work or are otherwise duly authorized to act irrevocably on behalf of the copyright holder(s).
  7. You understand and agree that, if your work is accepted for publication, we will almost certainly publish it under a Creative Commons license that provides for some permissive uses of your work. See also our Terms of Use for more information on that license. Hint: that's not the route you want to go if you are in this for the money.
  8. You grant us 30 days to decide whether or not we will publish your work, during which time you will not withdraw your submission. If, at our sole discretion, we choose to publish your work within those 30 days or prior to our acknowledgement of your withdrawal of the submission, you grant us, without any further action on your part than the initial submission, a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferrable right to use or to license to use your work in any way we deem appropriate.
  9. We will always identify you as the author of the work.
  10. We do not expect to make money on the publication of your work. From time to time we do collect some license fees or royalties for reuse of published works. When we do, our practice has been to share proceeds with the author(s) and we expect to continue to do so, but this is at our sole discretion.
  11. You retain copyright and are free to use your work or derivatives as you desire. If published with Small Wars Journal, we would appreciate you recognizing first publication in any future citations.
  12. Authors, by submitting their content, also consent to republication of their article or essay in topical Small Wars Journal Anthologies in print and electronic format.

If you agree with all that stuff, then submit your work for publication. Be sure to include:

  1. The original work in a format we can use. MS Word, rich text, etc. We can't easily pull from PDFs for reformatting, please send us the source.
  2. Your Byline as you would like it and a bio of a few sentences as you would like it to appear.
  3. If you have pictures, graphs, etc., we prefer that you embed them as you would like them to appear. You can also send us the originals as separate files.
  4. Any additional contact info besides your current email (for us, not for publication). In particular, a permanent email address if you have one.
  5. Is there anything interesting to say about the work? We can introduce things with an editor's note that may not be appropriate in the introduction to or body of the work. In particular, commentary with regard to the genesis of the work or initial reception of it, etc. are often useful to set a context for readers.
  6. For shorter works that reference documents available online, please use embedded hyperlinks to the maximum extent possible.
  7. If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page that you will use to publicize the piece, please include that information so we can include your tags when we announce the piece via Twitter and Facebook.

You should hear a decision within 30 days. Please give us that long. But if you do not hear from us, feel free to poke us.

Submit original content through this link.