The majority of commissions for the magazine result from people contacting us out of the blue, so do get in touch. All we need from you is a short (100-300 word) summary of what you want to write, plus a brief bio explaining why you’re the right person to write it.
Here’s how it works. Every three months we scoop up all the pitches we’ve received recently, and debate which we’re going to commission for the next edition of the mag. Then we contact the writers concerned to discuss the specifics.
Those commissioning conversations are crucial, because they narrow the writers’ focus to the key aspects of the articles they’ll be writing, and prevent them from covering material our readers have seen before, or ranging too wide to be useful. As a result we often end up commissioning a rather different piece to the one that was originally suggested. For me that’s half the fun of being an editor: chatting to writers about their ideas, and working out how best to communicate them to our readers.
Sadly, many of the pitches we receive have to be set aside long before that commissioning conversation: usually because a pitch is too vague, or too predictable – or in some cases not about writing at all! And that breaks my heart a bit, because I know how much effort goes into a pitch letter, and I hate to think of that gesture being wasted.
I also worry about all the pitches we never receive in the first place – all that fascinating material we’ll never read, all those talented writers we’re missing – because you’re not quite sure how to approach us. So I thought I’d use this space to provide some guidance about pitching Mslexia.
If you didn’t know already, the first thing to stress is that Mslexia is not a general women’s magazine. It’s a magazine designed specifically for women as writers. This means that everything we publish relates to our writing craft and creativity, to our literary career paths, and to our practical and motivational challenges – and we are unlikely to commission a more wide-ranging article on women’s rights.
Secondly, because Mslexia has been going for over 25 years, we are also unlikely to commission a very general article about writing. So please choose a specific topic to pitch, or try to come at a more general topic from a fresh angle.
(You can find a full list of our different journalism and nonfiction slots in the Submissions area of this website along with our many submission slots for poetry and fiction.)
We commission four main journalistic articles in every edition: the headlining Agenda feature, which is around 3,000 words in length; and three two-page articles of around 1,500 words each, for our Craft, Career and Creativity sections respectively. It’s worth keeping those word lengths in mind when deciding on the scope of your article; there’s a limit to what you can cover in 1,500 words, so focused pitches work best.
If you buy a copy of the magazine, or take out a subscription, you’ll see how those word counts pan out in practice. (And you’ll be supporting what we’re trying to do for women writers at the same time – just saying.)
What about subject matter? We often receive pitches from writers wanting to talk about their personal publishing journey: understandable, because it’s such an angst-ridden marathon for most of us. But unless you have grappled with a very unusual challenge, we’re unlikely to commission a two-page article of this kind. However your individual experience might be perfect for a pitch to our popular one-page #amwriting series. Or you could send in a complete submission for the 300-500-word Mouthpiece slot in our Elevenses newsletter. Details of both slots are here.
I’m afraid we are also unlikely to commission an account of your personal writing retreat, or your research for a particular book project – unless it involves a very particular or unusual endeavour that might inspire other writers to challenge themselves in a similar way (e.g., sleeping rough, living as a nun, interviewing 100 people in 100 days…).
So what are we interested in? Some recent commissions include a guide to writing biography, by someone who’s just published a life-story of Elvis narrated via his extraordinary fashion outfits; a piece on how to enter the mental ‘green zone’ where creativity flourishes; an article on using common tropes in romantic fiction; and a look at recent developments in ‘hybrid’ memoir.
For our headlining author interviews, which run over four pages, the interviewee is always someone with a significant publication record, who is prominent within their particular genre. We only commission experienced interviewers for this slot, so do get in touch and tell us a bit about yourself if you’d like to be considered.
We always time this lead interview to appear when the author is not publicising a new book, because we don’t want to coincide with a plethora of other interviews in the mainstream media. The exception is prolific genre authors who write a book a year, where it’s unavoidable.
We also have several shorter interview slots for established prose and poetry authors who are seeking coverage of a new book – which focus on their individual writing process – so do please keep us in mind if you are publicising a recent or upcoming release.
Interviews with debut authors are currently limited to writers of poetry or short story collections, who are rarely covered elsewhere. If you fit the bill, please pitch us via the website and we’ll forward your suggestion to our regular reviewer of that genre, who will also conduct the interview.
I’m afraid we don’t commission individual book reviews as such. Instead, we employ a team of regular columnists who analyse recent releases from a writer’s point of view for the ‘Reading for Writers’ section in the magazine. But we are open to your pitches on writerly topics related to your recent book release – in which case all the guidelines listed above apply!
Finally, and this is important, please pitch via the website, so that we can keep a record of the correspondence and ensure your proposal goes to the right person.
We’re open to approaches at any time. If we like your idea, but it doesn’t fit into the next issue of the mag, we’ll hold onto it for consideration in the next one. And if it looks like it has more than one pair of legs, we’ll pop it into our ‘possible series’ folder for when we’re commissioning new columnists next August. Meanwhile feel free to pitch it elsewhere at any time. If someone else snaps it up, that’s our loss.
What I’m trying to say is that we’d really like to hear from you!
The Author
