Guidelines for Slackjaw Submissions
Welcome Writer,
As the #1 destination on Medium for all things humor, and think-pieces on cats, Slackjaw wouldn’t be what it is without you, High Warlock of Funny Ideas. That said, we do accept submissions from humor writers of all backgrounds and extraterrestrial lifeforms.
If you’re interested in submitting a humor piece to Slackjaw, please email slackjawsubmissions@gmail.com with a private link to your unpublished Medium draft.
Submission emails containing a PDF, Word Document, Google Doc link, or anything other than a link to a Medium draft are auto-deleted by our magical submission genie, and we will not see them!
Please keep in mind…
- Our pieces fall under 1,000 words. Less is better. But not too less. Most pieces are 300–800 words.
- We publish funny writing: premise-driven humor pieces, funny essays, and a bit of short comedic fiction — if it feels right.
- We also publish illustrated and cartoon pieces. Here are two examples. We don’t publish single-panel (single-image) cartoons, as we prefer pieces with more than one illustration.
- We don’t publish fake-news/Onion-style pieces.
- Send us previously unpublished work.
- To get a feel for what we like, please read Slackjaw.
- New writers and current Slackjaw writers should email submissions to slackjawsubmissions@gmail.com. Please include a link to an unpublished Medium draft in your email. Attachments and pasted texts scare us!
- Our writers are welcome to submit Medium member (gated paywall) pieces. This means you get paid for your work. This is optional.
- One submission at a time, please. Contrary to popular belief, we aren’t multitasking robots.
- Expect a reply in one to two weeks — sometimes more, sometimes less — depending on the alignment of Earth’s rotational axis with the business hours of your local Costco.
- Topical/timely submissions: Because we are prone to occasionally sleep in a treehouse without a computer, 48-hour topical news cycle pieces are not the best fit for us. We love evergreen humor, though. Seasonal timely pieces (New Year’s, Halloween, Xmas, etc.) are welcome, and we adore it when you send those 3+ weeks in advance.
- Anonymous accounts: We don’t publish work from Medium accounts named after a publication or an impersonal pseudonym. With all due respect to “Ancient Wisdom” and “The Slutty Detective,” we like to publish work by real writers. (Pen names are fine, by the way, as long as they resemble a real person’s name.)
- We’re not accepting AI-generated stuff.
- We’re a selective publication. As of 2024, we accept around 15% of submissions.
If your story fits, we’ll add you as a writer and publish it.
We pay writers
We believe in paying Slackjaw writers so that they can purchase coffee, groceries, extra bitcoin, and those cool bouncy balls you find in toy stores.
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We pay via Medium’s partner program. Some stats:
- We commonly publish stories that earn our writers $20-$200+, per piece.
- Our top 5 highest-earning pieces have earned their authors $6,854, $3,496, $3,001, $2,483, and $2,255. (The last time we checked this was 2021.) These were organic Medium paywall earnings, all paid directly to our authors.
We get way more submissions than we can publish. To improve your odds…
- Give your piece a clear and funny or interesting title that will make readers go, “That sounds cool! I’m clickin’, baby!”
- Good title example: “Jeff Bezos’s Lazy Saturday Morning Routine”
- We like pieces with a clear humor premise in the title and first paragraph. We’re allergic to long, unfunny preambles. We have a doctor’s note on this.
- Also, for newer writers, it wouldn’t hurt to read these: “Top 10 Short Humor Writing Mistakes,” by Alex Baia, and “Your Humor Piece Needs Way Less Explanation Than You Think It Does,” by sarah james
Farewell and prosper,
The Slackjaw Editors (and Matthew McConaughey)
