Interested in writing for the blog? Our email list and LinkedIn newsletter has thousands of readers. They are attorneys, accountants, and other knowledge workers working at firms large and small.
They are also busy. They’re drowning in a million messages. That’s why we have editorial standards.
Here are some questions that can serve as guidelines about the kind of ideas we’d like to share with our readers:
- Is the idea useful? It cannot be just self-serving, but it needs real utility for our readers, even if it is just entertaining the readers.
- Is the story interesting? Some people would rather share a story vs. an article. If so, does the story actually have a valuable lesson or insight for the reader? Is it at least entertaining?
- Is the writing readable? Consider using the Hemingway Editor to write between a Grade 5-7 level. This isn’t a college essay, this is something that people should be able to pick up and understand right away.
- Can the write-up fit in 1-2 pages? We want our posts to be relatively short and to the point. This is not a place to post 10,000 word essays.
- Does the writing sound human? Helpful tip: write like you talk. If you pick up a sentence and it doesn’t read like how you’d sound, simplify it!
- Is there one central coherent idea/message to your post? One strong idea or message beats trying to share a dozen ideas in just 1 page.
- Is the post self-contained? We’re not actively looking for multi-part posts that carry over from one post to another just yet. Let’s instead first start off with a few interesting posts.
- Are you willing to submit your article under a Creative Commons License? We believe that generosity and abundance are the currency of the 21st century. That’s why most posts on our blog are NOT under copyright, but under a Creative Commons license where you retain ownership of the article, but others are free to use them, remix them, and more.
Sticking with these ideas has brought us a lot of goodwill and we believe it will do the same for you.
We’ll keep updating this guide periodically. If you’d like to submit an article that follows the guidelines above, just send an email to blog @ buildyourbook . org.