Call for Subscriber Writing, April 2024

It’s time for our bimonthly call for subscriber writing! We are finally switching to a Google form to collect responses. Please submit your responses here. Deadline for this month is Sunday, April 14th, at 10 PM EST. At that time I will disable the ability to submit new responses in the form until the next call, so get your submissions in on time. If you’re an old hand at this, you can click over to the form and submit your work and safely close this email. If you’re new to this, please read the submission information below to help us all out. Don’t forget to use the Google Form!!! Non-subscribers, if you want to take advantage of this forum to share your work, you know what to do.

We’re switching to bimonthly submissions permanently, and we will be using this format moving forward - the call will go out and the form will be opened the second Wednesday of every other month, the submission deadline will be end of day the following Sunday, and the post will be run a week from the call date on the third Wednesday of every other month. The bimonthly format is not only a matter of my serial lack of getting it together in life. I’m trying to balance a few concerns. For one, most of the people who contribute are not professional writers and don’t produce that much regular work, or are people who spend a lot of time on long projects that can’t get turned around that fast. And this connects to the second reason, which is that I really don’t want these emails to arrive sufficiently often that readers tune them out. I think if they arrive bimonthly they’ll be regular enough that people can get their work out there, without coming so frequently that everything gets lost in the shuffle. I also think this will ensure that people will put their best foot forward and choose their very best work to share.

As always, this is all subject to feedback, but I feel good about it, and especially about establishing some regularity in regards to the calendar. I’m working on book clubs returning soon, but I have to think very carefully about format, as the ones we’ve done in the past really petered out hard as people stopped reading. Gotta think of something clever to keep people invested. I’ll let you know.

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For those who are new, let me take a moment to let you know what this is all about, reiterate what it isn’t, and make a much-needed reminder of the format. As a regular feature, I present an opportunity for paying subscribers to share some of their writing with my mailing list of ~55,000 readers, free and paid. This is a subscriber perk, and it’s also something I really love to do because I’m very passionate about writing and writers and want to help people who are trying to build an audience. I emphasize that this is for sharing subscriber writing, not your podcast, your Twitch stream, or your Instagram. One thing that I have to reiterate here is that this is the opportunity to link to writing that’s already hosted elsewhere; it’s not, as some people assume, an opportunity to actually post your work here. If you’re looking for someplace to host your writing, why not start a free Wordpress or Substack, or use another blogging or newsletter service? Then you can link your work here. I’ve had now had dozens of readers tell me that they meaningfully expanded their audience through this service before.

Here’s what I am now just begging for you to do, if you take advantage of this opportunity: please, please, please, use the following format to submit your work. Please. Every time only about half of submissions are in the proper format. It looks like this:

Bolded Name or Pseudonym, Title of Your Work with Link

Synopsis of your work of one or two (at most!) sentences

So in practice that looks like

Freddie deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

A book about the elite capture that has neutered our progressive social movements

I understand that some people think they’re helping when they do things like this:

Name: Questo the Wizard
Title: “Spells That Make You Horny”
Link: http://questothebesto.org/horny
Synopsis: A grimoire of useful cantrips to get your motor running

But that isn’t helping; it’s taking a 30-second process of copying and pasting the exact format above and turning it into a five minute process of putting down each individual element in the right place and inserting the link and bolding the thing that should be bolded and taking italics off of the things that shouldn’t be italicized…. I implore you, guys, make this easier for me. It’s more backend work than you think. Please make sure to use the Google Form as well.

If I messed up previously and promised to include your entry in a later edition, please respond to this email to remind me! If you submitted something before the submission period began, submit it again! And if you don’t use the Google Form, I have no sympathy if I fail to include you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Yes, I do check your email against the emails on the subscriber list, so if ordinarily use a different one, point me to your subscribed email in the form.

Edit: My test seemed to include formatting, but if that's not working for you, no worries, just make sure the info including link are in there and I'll take care of it.