How this gets published.
Who writes here, who decides what runs, and what happens when something on the site turns out to be wrong. Short, because it describes what the software actually does rather than what we would like to be true.
One editor · writers keep their copyright · corrections return to the same URL
Who writes, who decides
Names, not a masthead
Fraghab publishes fragrance writing by people who collect fragrance. That is the whole editorial staff: contributors with bylines, and one editor who reads the queue.
Every piece carries a byline. There is no staff account and no house pseudonym. A name on a piece is a real contributor with a page of their own work and, where they have them, links out to their own channels.
Contributors are read before they are accepted. Applications and invitations both go through a writing sample. There is no follower minimum — the sample decides it.
One editor decides what runs. Fraghab is small and says so: a single person reads the queue, publishes, returns pieces, and answers for what is on the site. There is no committee to hide behind.
Writers keep their copyright. Publishing here is a licence to run the piece, not a transfer of it. It stays theirs to use anywhere else.
How a piece reaches the page
Four states, and nothing in between
A piece is always in exactly one of these, and the site enforces it rather than trusting anyone to remember. A writer with something in the queue can find it here.
Theirs alone. Nobody else can open it, and nothing about it is public — no URL, no listing, no preview.
Handed over for a read. The writer can pull it back out, but cannot keep editing it while it waits.
On the site at a permanent address, with a byline, a date, and a link to everything else that writer has run.
Returned with a note saying what needs doing. They make the change and resubmit; the queue picks it up again.
That last line is the one worth reading twice. An editor here cannot open a contributor’s piece and change the words in it — not before publication and not after. The only replies available are yes, no, or here is what needs fixing. So a sentence with a byline on it is a sentence that writer wrote.
Corrections and takedowns
A live piece cannot be quietly rewritten
The most common way a publication loses trust is editing a mistake out of a page and saying nothing. The software here is built so that route does not exist.
It comes down first. There is no edit-in-place on a published piece. To change one word, the piece is unpublished — which means the page is genuinely off the site while it is wrong, rather than silently different from the version people read.
It goes back to the writer. With a note saying what is wrong. They make the correction themselves, because they are the only person who can edit their own copy.
It returns to the same URL. The address is fixed the first time a piece is published and never recalculated, so a correction never strands a link somebody shared, bookmarked, or cited.
Some pieces stay down. If something should not have run, it is withdrawn rather than patched. Better a gap than a page nobody stands behind.
Send the URL and what is wrong with it. A factual error in a published piece is worth an email even if it is small — a wrong concentration, a misattributed perfumer, a house spelled the way everyone spells it wrong. It reaches a person, not a queue.
Report an error →What we don't run
Four things that will not appear here
Fragrance writing on the open web is mostly these four things, which is the reason this section exists at all.
Press releases. A house announcement is a thing to write about, not a thing to reprint.
Affiliate roundups. No piece exists to move a reader onto a link, and no contributor is paid per click.
Anything written by a language model. The section is a byline section. Generated copy has nobody standing behind it, which is the whole of what a byline is for.
Coverage anyone paid for. Nothing here is for sale — not a piece, not a mention, not a placement in the running order. A brand cannot buy its way into the editorial section, and none has.
Disclosure
Say where the bottle came from
Contributors write about things they were sent as often as things they bought, and there is nothing wrong with either — only with the reader not knowing which. A piece that turns on a gifted bottle, a press trip, a paid relationship with a house, or a stake in a shop says so inside the piece, in the writer’s own words, where it is relevant rather than in a footer nobody reads.
Applications open
Somebody has to write this stuff down
If you have read this far you already care how it is done. The section runs on contributors, and it is open — one sample, one answer, no follower minimum.
Answered in 24 hours · you keep your work
Where to next
The work these rules apply to
Standards are worth exactly as much as the pieces published under them. Read those, and hold this page to them.
