Themes
As is clear from our main navigation, we are looking for articles that fall under three main categories: Living Fully. Dying Well. Money & Law. While these seem mutually exclusive, we have found them to be quite the opposite. But rather than get hung up on what goes where, just use our mission as your guide…we’ll figure out the details later.
Our Brand
The Bucket’s brand is bold, curious and unapologetic. We are not afraid of mortality and we want our writers to feel the same. We encourage humor, honesty and the ability to talk about the elephant in the room. Before you submit a pitch, ask yourself if the topic could easily run in another magazine. If the answer is ‘yes’, that doesn’t make it a bad idea, but it probably means we’ll consider other ideas before giving yours the go-ahead.
Length
There’s a witticism attributed to Abraham Lincoln which claims that when he was asked how long a man’s legs should be, he said, “Long enough to reach the ground.” So take as many words as you need to tell your story. But know that any article that creeps past 1,200 words better be pretty riveting. Story length is also driven by whether you are doing an essay (750-ish), feature (1,200-ish) or investigative piece (1,500-ish).
Compensation
At this time, we cannot compensate writers except with a free subscription to The Bucket. However, if you have a compelling topic, we are willing to hear you out and discuss compensation.
Exclusivity
The Bucket creates original content. We do not allow any article that appears on The Bucket website to be published anywhere else without permission/attribution. And, with few exceptions, we do not publish articles that have already appeared in other publications.
Submitting
Have an idea for an article? Please submit a pitch that should consist of the topic, a summary of the idea and what makes it relevant to The Bucket’s mission. You should also include the methodology you will use such as interviews and research. Finally, estimate the word count and your cost-per-word. Please note, we do not accept unsolicited articles and have no obligation to publish or pay for them.
We also seek short fiction, poetry, art and comics. As with article submissions, please contact us in advance of a submission so that we can let you know if it is what we are looking for and to make sure we are not already publishing a similar subject. When submitting, please email us at info@thebucket.com and use the subject line: Submission Query.
