We thought you'd never ask.
Most magazines want to know what a woman is launching. We would rather know what it cost her, who noticed at the time, and whether she would do the whole thing again. Business, life, health, money, travel and books, told by the women who lived them and edited by someone who spent forty years in journalism and never managed to shake the habit.
Ask. Listen. Publish in full.Asked this month
The question came first. The headline is what she said backAsk.Listen.Publish in full.
We are not much interested in how many people follow you or what your title says on LinkedIn, and being midway through a rebrand does nothing for you here either. What we want to know is whether you have something true to say and whether you will say it without sanding the edges off first. Some of the best stories we have run came from women who would never have described themselves as having one.
The desks
Six of them, and one is emptier than we would like
Image unavailableMaybe it is not that I am failing. Maybe I am just exhausted.
Read the whole thing Why sometimes it all feels too much
Four ways in
Two you pitch for nothing, two you commissionIn her own words
FreeYou write it, in third person, about something that happened to you and left a mark. We edit it properly, which means we will push you on the bits you skated over.
The useful bit
FreeWhat you know that somebody else needs. Insight, wisdom and hard-won experience on health, wellbeing, money, relationships or business, written to leave a reader better off than they were before. Not a piece about your business.
Uncut profile
$950We interview you over video, write the piece ourselves, and put the recording inside the article so people can hear how you say it and not only what you said.
Waxing Lyrical
$1,200Forty-five minutes on what you stand for. A position, a stance, a lesson that cost you something, or a subject you think people should be sitting with. This is where readers meet the person behind the business.
Free pieces carry no links to your business, your website or your offers. What they do carry is your byline, linked to your LinkedIn profile, so anyone who finishes the story and wants to find you can do exactly that.
Commissioned pieces are produced by Uncut Poppy's studio and labelled every time. The subject takes part in interviews and fact-checking. The subject does not determine the publication's editorial conclusions.
What has nobody asked you?
Tell us what the story is in a sentence, where the tension sits in a couple more, and what you can back up if somebody asks. We do not need a media kit or a follower count and we are entirely unmoved by the headshot in a blazer against a brick wall. What we do need is something specific enough that nobody else could have written it, and a willingness to be edited by a person who will move your paragraphs around.
Pitch the editorstories@uncutpoppy.com
- Can you say what it is about in one sentence, without a run-up?
- Is there a moment or a detail that makes somebody want the next line?
- Have you got the specifics, including what happened afterwards?
- Would it matter to somebody who has never met you and never will?
- Is it interesting because it is true, or because it sounds impressive?
Sending it does not mean we will run it. We check facts, rearrange things and say no more often than we say yes, which sounds harsher than it is and is the only reason anybody believes the ones we do run.