Help with spreading the word

[Starswirl the Trixie 975]

Hello everypony. Today I need some help.

 

As a handful of people may know, I am the author of a pseudo-academic article on My Little Pony. It is entitled "My Little Republic: Plato is Magic" and explains the similarities between FIM and the Republic dialogue by the Greek philosopher Plato. The announcement post can be found here.

 

I have gone on a long saga of trying to get my work published somewhere. If you don't want to read it you can just skip to the end. I started work in February 2012, then just me jotting down a few odd ideas. Over time I began to develop a long essay. I began to finish it around the beginning of Summer, and looked around for a place to hopefully publish my work. I set my sights on Bronyscholars.com, a website that specialized in this sort of over-analysis.

 

A week before I sent a draft to Brony Scholars, the website's administrator, the "Brony classicist" Foal Papers, announced that the blog was going inactive and would be replaced by a podcast on Everfree Radio (this podcast, unfortunately, has not yet materialized). I contacted Foal nonetheless, explained my situation, and asked for his help in both revising my paper (or at least giving scholarly feedback on it) and publishing it if he saw fit. He cordially agreed. Unfortunately, I mailed it to him literally the same day he left the states to study abroad in Italy (this was in mid June). Email communication was painfully slow; he said that he couldn't remember much about Republic and needed to reread it to evaluate my paper. When he returned to the states around August, he only stayed for some weeks before transferring to a university in England. The whole episode delayed me a few months; I should have realized that he was very busy with his personal life and just couldn't give me any time.

 

In September I finished my own extensive revisions, having been delayed by hassles in my personal life. I posted it on this forum and got several positive comments. I sent EqD an email asking them to consider my paper for publication, feeling that my journey was finally at an end. But no, it wasn't. EqD simply did not respond. After a week, I consulted a Brony friend of mine over the internet, an animator, who said that the website sometimes lost emails and that he once needed to send multiple emails for EqD to finally read one. I would send several more emails over the course of two weeks and convinced my animator friend to send one in case my Gmail account hated Equestria Daily's submissions address or something. All of them ended with the line "If, for whatever reason, you do read this email but feel that my paper does not make the cut, please write me back saying as such to save me some time." I still have received no response.

 

I figured that maybe a smaller Brony website, with a lesser influx of emails, would be more likely to read it. So I emailed the submissions of two sister websites run by the same people: Derpy Hooves News and Lyra Heartstrings Entertainment. My email was addressed to both of them, saying that I didn't know which website it was best suited for, hence I was sending the email to both. I did not receive a response from either. In a last ditch effort, I figured out how to use an imageboard and went on Ponychan. I posted that, if people greatly liked my paper and wanted to do me a favor, they could help me by sending it to Equestria Daily. My two threads, one in /oat/ and one in /dis/, garnered one response and around 3-4 new views on my paper (Scribd tracks views).

 

[/rant]

 

EDIT: Literally in the time that I was writing this post, EqD wrote me back, rejecting the essay in six words. "We dot [sic] really take essays. Sorry!" Well, while I'm fine with rejection I would have PREFERRED that they spelled the word "don't" correctly. EqD has had a historyof posting essays, though I suppose they could have suddenly changed their policy. Oh well. In any case, I can just go somewhere else now. My ask for help, while now not as needed, still stands if you know of a website I could look at. I'll consider significantly reducing the size of my essay and sending it to overthinkingit.com

 

Thanks for reading this anyway, even though this thread isn't quite as needed anymore.

-Starswirl

Edited October 18, 2012 by Starswirl the Trixied

[Yellow Diamond 7,569]

This thread appears to be related to the My Little Pony franchise and/or the Bronydom in general. Thus, it has been sentenced to Sugarcube Corner.

 

This is an automatically generated message, by the way.

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,526]

It's not exactly a news blog, so it might not give you the precise kind of exposure you're looking for; but by virtue of being a site comprised almost entirely of user-generated content, you are more than welcome to share your essay here. It will only be removed if it violates our community guidelines - and believe me, awesome essays about the world of Equestria is something that we fully approve of having here. Unfortunately, there is also no guarantee of constructive responses by posting here, though that is something we aim to improve with the upcoming Octavia's Hall Critics initiative.

 

However... if you're willing to wait a little longer (sorry!), I might have a special opportunity for you. Send me a PM if you're interested.