WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO SUBMIT MATERIAL

Our Goals:

We want to:

1) Help our readers use our platform to explore their areas of interest.

2) Publish high quality, interesting articles.

3) Partner with people and organizations that share values and interests so as to cross-fertilize ideas and promote each other.

4) Help you find enjoyable work.

We DO NOT want to:

1) Have income. That way, we can’t be bought.

2) Pay anyone for anything. We don’t get paid ourselves, and we cover unavoidable expenses out of our own pockets. If you want to get paid, you are probably an avoidable expense.

3) Piss anyone off.

4) Be anyone’s shill.

So, here’s the deal (as of December, 2010):

What we are looking for:

Our goal is to educate people and motivate them to act in their own best interests. We want articles that are informative and inspirational that might help people who care about finding and doing work. We are not interested in opinion pieces or rants. For example, we would be interested in how one can take advantage of unemployment benefits, and even expert opinions on how best to motivate oneself when being paid to not work. But we are not very interested in a discussion of what the government should or should not do.

Submission format and copyright:

If you have written something that you think we’d be interested in, e-mail it to us as an attached .doc (not .docx) or .rtf. It is OK if you’ve published it elsewhere, and if you intend to publish it after we do. Once we publish it, you still retain the copyright and we place no restrictions on what you do with it afterward. However, before you submit anything to us, you must make sure you own the copyright.

Conciseness is always appreciated; try to keep your article between 500 and 1,000 words. However, if you have lots of resources to list or long interviews with experts, we are not constrained on space and will gladly put a brief introduction on the home page that expands if the reader is interested.

We can host audio on our site, and will link to video from other sites, such as YouTube.

Amateurs are encouraged to participate

We encourage non-professionals to submit original material, however we do not have the resources to edit your work or teach you how to write. For this reason, don’t be upset if we reject your work without comment, or send it back with suggestions on how to improve it.

At a minimum, make sure someone who writes well edits your work before sending it to us. Some things that are submitted to us are abysmal, and we’re often tempted to publish them as is just as an example of what not to do. We have not done that yet, and you don’t want to be the first such example.

A good way to get started is to write a review of a favorite book. We may even be able to get you an interview with the author.

If you want to talk with experts in a field of interest, and are willing to commit to writing an article, we can look for experts through our resources, such as: www.helpareporter.com. Often you can find experts who will speak with you in the hopes they will be quoted in an article. This can be an excellent way for you to learn things and establish high-level contacts.

RewriteThis.net

We’ve created a site, RewriteThis.net, where authors can ask for volunteer editing and rewriting help. If you submit a piece to us that we both agree isn’t quite ready for publication, we encourage you to post it on RewriteThis.net, and then we will announce in our newsletter that we have a pending article, and ask for volunteer editing help.

Publishing elsewhere for money

It is perfectly OK if you collaborate with us on an article and then you find another publication that will pay you for it instead of letting us publish it for free. We are all for making money. However, if we do that, we’d like you to write a brief article for us on the process of creating the article and getting it published, along with links to the published piece.

Humorous pieces

We love levity. Lighthearted educational and inspiring articles are welcome here and outrageous, fictional, and silly work are welcome at our self-parody site: www.HumongousShortageOfWork.com. Also, if you insist in arguing with us about our mission or principles, we’d be happy to publish your argument over at Humongous Shortage of Work.

Please send queries and submissions to Adrienne@NoShortageOfWork.com

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