How Submissions Work.
These are the guidelines you’re looking for.
How Pants Work is a humor publication, so please submit humorous pieces for our consideration. What makes a piece humorous? If you laugh when you read it, that’s a very good sign. Please always remember and never forget that humor is subjective, however. Very subjective, even.
What to submit.
A solid humor piece is typically not shorter than 750 words and not longer than 1,000. This does not apply to a humorous list, which can be much shorter, or an open letter, which can be longer.
HPW isn’t afraid to be political, but a piece needs to be funny as well as political. Being political — or topical, or timely — alone doesn’t make a piece funny. Even if there’s a duck involved.
What not to submit.
No Onion-style news articles, please. We’re not The Onion and we don’t want to be The Onion. As popular as The Onion? Sure. But not The Onion.
Also: if you’re tempted to tag your piece with Short Story, Fiction, or ANGRY RANT, then it’s likely not for us.
When to submit.
When your piece is ready for the world to read it. The editors will edit a piece as need be, but the less editing your piece needs, the happier the editors will be.
How to format your piece.
Give it a title. Give it a subtitle. Include a photo, preferably under the subtitle and before the body of the piece proper. We recommend finding photos at unsplash.com. The photos there are completely free for any and all uses. No attribution is required, which means you can use the caption area under the photo to make one more joke.
(Please do not include any photo to which you do not own the rights or have permission to use. Definitely do not ever include a stock photograph with a watermark. Because, seriously?)
Medium does not provide many different formatting options, but familiarize yourself with the ones there are and use them as makes sense for your piece. Lists can be numbered or bulleted. Text can be bolded, italicized, or both. Quotations can be pulled.
How to submit.
Please read this even if you’ve submitted before now.
Once you’ve had a piece run at HPW, you become a writer for the publication, which means you can submit a new piece directly for our review. There’s an option to do this in the ••• menu at the top of the editing screen. The editors will then receive an email notifying us of your submission.
If you have not yet had something in HPW, then you/we each need to do a little more:
- You write your complete piece.
- You email us at [email protected] with a link to your piece (as a draft on Medium) in the body of the email. (You can include whatever else you’d like, but no more is required.)
- Please do not put your piece behind the paywall. That makes it more difficult for us to review it, and you don’t want that.
- We’ll then be able to read your piece and “request” it for HPW.
- When you receive the request notification, accept the request… which will allow the editors to edit your piece and add it to HPW.
- You promote the hell out of your piece.
If you change your mind or place your piece elsewhere while we’re considering it or even after we’ve accepted it…
Please let us know as soon as you can. This is just common courtesy, and it’ll keep us from getting our hopes up only to have them dashed.
What to expect if we don’t accept your piece.
Nothing. That said, if at all possible we will tell you why your piece didn’t quite fit the HPW gestalt, and we’ll do our level best not to be pretentious about it.
How often to submit.
No more often than once every 2 weeks is good.
How much you will be paid for your work.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Now that’s comedy.
But, no, seriously: Humor, like crime, doesn’t pay. HPW does not put pieces behind Medium’s paywall. Frankly, we’re not a fan of that paywall. HPW prefers that everything we publish be free for all to read.
