Knowable Magazine Freelance Market Guide

Fees: This digital publication pays flat fees. Writers are paid $1,500 for a Q&A, which typically is assigned at 1,500 to 2,000 words.  A “short” or “explainer” in the 800-to-1,200-word range, pays $1,500, and a “medium” article of between 1,200 to 1,500 words pays $2,025. A “featurette” (1,500 to 2,000 words) pays $2,625. Copyright is retained by author, but all articles are published under a non-exclusive but extremely broad Creative Commons No Derivatives license.

Submit to: Executive Editor Rosie Mestel at rmestel@annualreviews.org; Editor in Chief Eva Emerson at eemerson@annualreviews.org; or Senior Associate Editor Rachel Ehrenberg at rehrenberg@annualreviews.org. Freelancers can find the editors’ short bios on the website.

Website: knowablemagazine.org

Owner: Annual Reviews, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. Annual Reviews products include more than 50 scholarly review journals, Knowable Magazine, the Charleston Library Conference Series, Katina Magazine and Knowledge Unlatched.

Readership demographics: People who are deeply curious about how the world works and evidence-based ways of tackling problems in the world. Life-long learners, informed citizens and the science-interested public — but not necessarily scientific experts. “So writers have to watch out for the jargon, and they have to define their terms,” said Mestel. Additional readership comes from an array of media partners that serve a general population eager for reliable, thoughtful reporting.

Frequency of publication: Editors aim for posting two fresh articles a week.

What editors look for in a pitch: Knowable covers a gamut of topics. Within health, articles focused on health care delivery all the way up to the molecular biology of health conditions and evolving treatments are fair game, said Mestel. However, stories that are very local are not right for Knowable. We don’t do straight news or cover the latest scientific study. We do look for ideas about new trends, things that surprise us, that are timely and offer unusual insights. The Annual Reviews articles can be a good place to search for potential topics. “Quite often, a story is initially inspired by some Annual Reviews article, but it might be from just one paragraph in the article,” said Mestel. Then that inspiration must be developed into a solid article pitch.

Writers should introduce themselves, providing some idea of why they are qualified to write this story. Please give editors a few paragraphs explaining what the story is about, the angle, underlying science, the people they are likely to interview and why the story is important to do now. What main reader question will the story answer? Stories should lean into research and refer to multiple scientific studies. The interviews should include a number of relevant experts, and at least one Annual Reviews author.

Q&As: These are typically with an Annual Reviews author who is an expert in an area that is timely, widely relevant or extremely compelling. These should be substantive. “It could be anything from what are the weird rules in the United States about disposal of dead bodies, which we did one time, to what do we know about how neurons find the right partner to connect with during development,” Mestel said.

Writers new to Knowable should include links to clips, a short bio. While the majority of our articles are written by frequent contributors, we try to work with a select number of new writers each year.

Do they welcome pre-pitches: “I think that’s reasonable,” Mestel said. “Maybe we already did it or we’ve got something in the works. So why should a freelancer waste their time?” But the pre-pitch should not be so skeletal or broad as to give no sense at all of what this story is about. Nor should it simply point to a review paper without proposing a specific angle. “Asking if we are interested in a story about human fossils is not going to help us,” said Mestel.

Most common mistakes editors see with pitches: Please read the magazine closely before pitching to get a sense of our sensibility and the depth of the science we feature in our articles. Common mistakes are pitching ideas that are too vague, too local, too tied to a single new research finding or on an area that the magazine has recently covered. 

Lead time for pitches: Editors meet to review pitches about every month. Writers should feel free to send a follow-up email if they haven’t heard after that time. The time between acceptance of a story pitch and publication varies with the length and nature of the story and the complexity of art development. After editing is complete, freelancers need to prepare the final story for fact checking. And then the story goes to a copy editor. Writers can invoice once the story is sent to the fact checker.

Easiest place to break into the publication: New writers will have the best chance pitching a short article of 800 to 1,200 words. Those articles need to be tightly focused, information-rich and a joy to read.