If your question is not answered here, feel free to visit the forum in our FIMFiction group and ask!

How do you select your stories?

Each story goes through a two-part vetting process.  First, one of our six curators must feel that the story displays special merit, above and beyond simply being enjoyable fanfiction.  Once a curator nominates a story, all of us read it, debate it, and assign it a score on a secret judging scale.  If the story’s cumulative score passes a threshold, it’s featured.

The scoring process is subjective, but the threshold is set such that no single judge can qualify a story, and no single judge can veto a story.  This forces us to reach consensus on which stories are the most deserving of recognition, and helps ensure that honored stories appeal to a variety of tastes.

Which stories are eligible for featuring?

• Stories must be My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction, written in English (or available in English translation), and publically posted on the Internet.
• Stories must be complete to be eligible.
• There are no length requirements or genre restrictions.
• Mature content does not disqualify a story, but our focus is on literary merit.
• Neither story popularity nor author popularity are factored into our process.  (Stories do NOT have to be featureboxed, Equestria Daily-featured, or even published on FIMFiction.net in order to be eligible.  However, all of those factors increase the odds of a story first coming to our attention.)
• Stories which have already been featured in the Pony Fiction Vault, or which received a six-star rating on Equestria Daily, are considered “grandfathered in” to the Library and will not be spotlighted.

To keep our focus on the entire community’s best works, stories of current curators are ineligible.  Curators also aren’t allowed to nominate, or vote on, any story that they’ve edited/assisted (which means that if another one of us finds and nominates such a story, it must reach our “pass” threshold with five scores instead of six).

Do you accept story submissions?

Stories must be nominated by one of our six curators.  However, we realize that in a community this big, it can be easy to overlook good stories, so we do accept reading recommendations. (About 1/5 of our features have come from recommendations, so keep them coming!)

In order to suggest a story, visit our FIMFiction group and follow the instructions on the Story Recommendation Thread.  Please note that self-submissions are not allowed.

What type of stories do you look for?

On our About page, you can see what we individually enjoy in stories, but keep in mind that scoring involves all six of us, and our goal is to find great fics, period.  Collectively, we want stories of every genre, and stories that are exemplars of their genre. Don’t write a story because you think we’ll like that type of story — write something that does what it sets out to do really, really well.

What’s the difference between the Library and a (FIMFiction/Equestria Daily) feature?

Our goal is to spotlight the best of the best.  We feature one story per week, so we’re more selective than the FIMFiction featurebox or Equestria Daily’s fanfiction posts.  We also post custom-crafted interviews to give readers insight into the story and the author behind it.

Can authors have more than one story in the Library?

Yes, but we prioritize stories from authors not yet featured.