Congratulations on making the sale!

The SFWA Board of Directors periodically makes changes to the membership qualification criteria. Please review the latest membership qualification criteria here.

Once you have read the rules, you will need to gather your supporting documents to complete your application.

Because the publication process varies widely among professional authors, SFWA will review and consider all supporting documentation from applicants on a case-by-case basis. Broadly, documents provided should include the following information in order to support the application:

• Name of the author
• Title of the qualifying work
• Publisher of work
• Amount of the payment or payments the author received (In currency, not number of copies sold.)
• Date or dates the payments were received
• Word count for short fiction works under 40,000 words. (For works of novel length, screenplays, or games, word count may not be required in supporting documents.)

If you’re not sure whether your documentation meets all the criteria outlined above, please feel free to submit multiple forms of documentation. For example, contract and separate proof of payment. 

Some examples of documentation that SFWA will consider are:

• Contracts (for sales to markets not on SFWA’s qualifying publishers list, additional proof of payment is required.)
• Royalty reports from publishers
• Royalty reports from Amazon, Draft2Digital, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and similar
• Paypal statements
• Bank statements with relevant transactions highlighted
• For older sales made to SFWA qualifying markets prior to 2013, SFWA will accept scans of covers or copyright pages from the published work, if the cover or copyright page clearly identifies the author, title, and publisher. 

Sensitive personal and account info can be blacked out.

For writers publishing on Amazon who would like to submit an Amazon KDP report, SFWA’s Self-publishing Committee has created a helpful guide to assist you: Amazon Report Instructions for SFWA 

Game Writers:

• If you are applying with game writing work and that work was done with a qualifying market, all we would need to see would be a contract.
• If you are applying with game writing work that was self-published, creator-owned, or produced by an independent publisher or game company not on our qualifying markets list, we would need to see some form of proof that you met the current payment thresholds. (e.g. a pay statement from the company, a PayPal deposit, a bank statement, a 1099 from the company where the work being used toward the application is the only work represented on the 1099, etc.)