Hello. We're always keen to hear from talented writers with bright ideas – especially if you have an expertise in one of the creative disciplines we cover. Oh, and we pay.

If that sounds up your street, read on...

What we're after

IdeasTap's mission is to support and inspire creative people. So our editorial content has to be useful for our readers, as well as interesting and entertaining.

Lots of our readers are well-informed professionals. They come to IdeasMag for practical advice, insight into the creative process, ways to improve their work and inspiration. We'd particularly love to hear your pitches for:

• Interviews with big names in any of the disciplines we cover (performing arts, visual art and design, photography, film, writing and publishing, music)
• Practical guides and how-tos about specific creative techniques
• Informative pieces about work, creative industries, business, money etc...
• Trend pieces about the arts/creative industries
• Other interesting features (don't feel you have to stick to our standard formats – so long as it's helpful and relevant to our readership of creative people we want to know!)

NB: We always get a high number of pitches for articles about writing, which is lovely, but we have a limited budget, so try to think about other disciplines, too.

We don't commission

• News
• Reviews
• Opinion pieces
• Essays
• Job of the Week, If Only I'd Known or Meet... (we do these in-house)

Pitching

Stick to a short paragraph or bullet points for each idea. Be specific. So if it's a how-to feature and you plan to interview people, mention them by name. If you're doing a list of dos and don'ts, give us a few examples. If it's a big-name interview, tell us how likely it is you'll actually get to speak to them.

Always think about the following questions when writing your pitch:

• Why is this relevant to IdeasTap members?
• What will our readers learn from this?
• What is your angle on the topic?
• Why should you be the person to write this?
• Why is this something we wouldn't be able to do easily ourselves?
• Are you sure this isn't similar to something we've done before?

And avoid making any of these common mistakes.

How it works

You email your pitch/es to ideasmag@ideastap.com

Around the third Friday of each month, we (Rachel and Nell, IdeasTap’s co-commissioning editors), go through all the pitches we’ve received and decide which ones to commission for the following month. We then get in touch with those writers to talk details and set a deadline.

Due to the volume of emails we receive, we can’t generally reply to unsuccessful pitches. Sorry! It’s fine to send a follow-up email if you haven’t heard from us but please don’t bombard us, and don’t tweet or text us personally – especially on the weekend.

We pay a flat fee of £100 (on publication). The word count is 500-800 words.

Look forward to hearing from you soon...

Rachel and Nell