Job links and a new article experiment

Yet another breadcrumb trail today led me to The Dabbling Mum, which is looking for all sorts of things. The pay is decent, especially for reprints of articles that are already up, and you don’t have to give them exclusive rights for original material.

They do have some pretty strict submission requirements, though, so make sure you pay attention to what they want and how they want it! I am currently trying to figure out how to get a headshot without asking someone to take a picture of me. I picked that one up from this forum, run by another AC guru, Michy.

I tried a little experiment with Associated Content. They require a minimum of 400 words for article submission, and in most cases I have no problem hitting at least that if not 500 or more. News articles, on the other hand, tend to give me much more difficulty. In part this is because I pick only slightly wacky things to post as news, and in part it is because it was an event that may not be finished playing out, as with the one I chose for this experiment.

I wrote up my article and discovered that it was just under 275 words. My previous low-count article (also a new story) was about 100 words more than that and I figured it was so close to the 400-word minimum that they just didn’t mind. My experiment was to submit this one anyway. I got a rejection, of course, but not because it was too short. The rejection was because they didn’t feel that enough people would care that this recently-released murderer had bitten his girlfriend’s forehead. I can’t blame them for that - they're probably right. But it did ease my concern that I would have to pad short news bits to get them published.