The New York Times Wants Your Personal Essays?-?Paying?market

Every once in a while a major publisher opens up to writers, offering professional payment. But the payment, while much appreciated, pales in comparison to having your work read by millions of people.

In this instance the New York Times is looking for personal essays. Don’t be disappointed, fiction writers and poets. You can write a personal essay! There is a millimeter thick line that separates fiction from a personal essay.

Read on!

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New York Times: Solver Stories

Have a story that needs to be told about puzzles, games or language? Wordplay wants to hear from you. Wordplay is interested in exploring how puzzles, games and language connect us to each other, how they fit into our daily lives and what we can learn about ourselves from them.

Solver Stories, a feature of Wordplay, welcomes submissions of personal essays on a variety of topics, such as:

• An issue the writer has faced in life, and how solving puzzles (of any kind) has helped them resolve that issue.
• A feel-good story or good news from the worlds of puzzles and games, such as Nancy Pfeffer’s “Flight of the Spelling Bee Player.”
• How solving puzzles has affected a relationship in the writer’s life.
• How puzzles, games or use of language have been agents of cultural change.

The most important thing is that the writing be emotionally honest and for the story to be freshly and compellingly told. An example of the kind of essay we are looking for is Jessica Wolf’s Solver Story, “The Language of Letting Go.”

Wordplay will pay $200 for each essay that is published. Solver Stories will be published every month, and payment will be issued when the story runs. Preferred length: 800 to 1,300 words. Please attach your essay as a Word-compatible document AND paste the text into the body of the email.

Read Solver Stories guidelines HERE.

Read freelance pitch guidelines HERE.

Like this article? For more articles about the publishing world, useful tips on how to get an agent, agents who are looking for clients, how to market and promote your work, building your online platform, how to get reviews, self-publishing, as well as publishers accepting manuscripts directly from writers (no agent required) visit Publishing and Other Forms of Insanity.