Satire
Publications That Will Pay You a Bazillion Dollars for Your Articles
Well, they’ll pay someone a bazillion dollars, anyway.
This list will give you places that you can submit your articles to that will pay you a bazillion dollars for them. Okay maybe not you, really, but those scant few professional writers that they publish.
Still, I will fulfill the promise the title makes because all of these places do, in fact, pay a bazillion dollars for the articles they publish, even if this only amounts to a tiny number of writers worldwide a year who are already extremely well known and have extensive writing experience and bylines to their credit.
The Atlantic
“We are known for paying very well, so long as you are already a famous journalist, and you are extremely experienced in writing reported articles and can prove it. We want clips going back to kindergarten. Don’t waste time writing and perfecting an article, just send a pitch since we aren’t likely to accept it. If we haven’t heard of you, perhaps you should start with your child’s school paper or neighborhood rag. But we do pay a bazillion dollars.”
The New Yorker
“We are the most famous (and most profitable) magazine with a literary bent and we are among the most competitive publication to get into anywhere. We will consider unsolicited poetry and fiction submissions, provided you are Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Dorothea Lasky, Patricia Lockwood, Tobias Woolf, George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz or considered to be in their class, or you’ve graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Workshop and published at least one volume of critically acclaimed poetry or one collection of award winning short stories.
We don’t accept unsolicited pitches for non-fiction of any type and have a strictly don’t call us, we’ll call you policy for these pieces. If you call us when we didn’t call you, we will black ball you and you’ll never have a shot at earning a bazillion dollars from us ever again.”
The Paris Review
“We publish only the world’s best fiction writers and poets. Some literary criticism is also published here but we have tended to de-emphasize the importance it plays in literary works. We have published Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, Robert Bly, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, Rick Moody, Donald Barthelme, Jim Carroll, Matthiessen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen, among hundreds of other top writers and poets. We will gladly pay them a bazillion dollars. Are you one of them? Can you write as well as any of them? Need we say more?”
The Hearst Publications
“We publish over 300 editions and 240 websites around the world, with more than 25 titles in the U.S. and another 19 in the U.K. alone. Some of these include:
- Good Housekeeping
- Woman’s Day
- Cosmopolitan
- O, The Oprah Magazine
- Redbook
- Seventeen
- Country Living
- Food Network Magazine
- Car and Driver
- Popular Mechanics
- Esquire
- Redbook
- Marie Claire
- Town and Country
- Harper’s Bazaar
Our revenue exceeds $15 billion a year, so we have no problem paying our writers a bazillion dollars for their work. However you must impress us at first glance or be banished to the slush pile.
We recommend reading and carefully studying at least the last 12 to 18 months consisting of a minimum of 10 -20 issues of each magazine you hope to eventually publish in. We say eventually because of over a million unsolicited queries received per year, we request the full manuscript in about two dozen cases and go onto publish only 4–5 pieces. Worldwide. Across all our publications and issues.
The rest of the space in our magazines is graced by the royalty of the writing world. If you were born a commoner, then make sure to really study at least a year’s worth of issues. If you don’t demonstrate an excellent understanding of appropriate subject matter and treatment within the first two sentences you won’t even make it to the slush pile.
For unsolicited pieces we will only consider a short query with a quick summary of what you are proposing. Make sure to enclose a SASE (if you don’t know what that is, you would probably do better submitting to another magazine. Try Highlights.
Should our undergraduate editorial associate assistants like what they see, we’ll ask for a long, detailed query which will be reviewed by at least four undergraduate editorial assistants. We require a minimum of three other samples your writing, that have been published in high quality journals, as well as another SASE.
We require you to provide sources in the form of an annotated bibliography and a list of experts with associated quotes that you could incorporate into your essay or story. We did not become one of the world’s largest diversified media, information and services companies by accident. Our stories are highly credible and every point made must be backed up with source material. Given the number of submissions we receive this will take anywhere from 9 months to 2 years.
Should you be one of the rare birds who manages to get past this point, we will return your synopsis to you with notes as to how we’d like you to develop the piece and will work with you as you do so. To arrive at a finished piece usually takes another year to year and a half, but perhaps as long as three years.
So all told, for those few incredibly talented unknowns who are published by us, it takes on average from 5 to 10 years before you will see your work published in one of our publications. But at that point, you’ll be paid a bazillion dollars.”
TIME Magazine
“While we say we accept queries from freelance writers, the truth is this just means that many of the experienced journalists who report for us are not actually on staff. These are relative unknowns like Robert Fisk, Hu Shuli, Bob Woodward, Glenn Greenwald, Seymour Hersh, Tony Mauro, Robert Novak, and David E. Sanger. If you’re an “unknown” like one of them, we may welcome you to our ranks with a bazillion dollars for each article of yours that we publish.
Otherwise, you might want to consider other homes for your work. We hear that MuddyUm is a good option, with publishing opportunities for writers of all levels. You just might do well there.”
Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had short stories published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured a several anthologies. She is the Managing Editor for novellas and serials at LVP Publications.
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