Lime Tea welcomes your submissions.
We're looking for work with verve and pizazz from writers
with boundless energy and generous hearts. That's right,
we don't pay. Maybe someday we'll be able to, but for
now anything we could afford to give you would be more
on the order of an insult than actual remuneration.
If it's any consolation, we don't get paid either; in
fact, we have to pay for all this juicy server space
out of our own lint-filled and threadbare pockets.
All right, I suppose we should pause
for a moment while all these people are leaving the
room.
Okay, for those of you who are still
here: as we were saying, we welcome your submissions.
You can get some idea of the type of stuff we like from
reading the site. You can also get some helpful pointers
from the FAQ. In general,
we like interesting stories of real stuff that happened
to real people. Even our fiction tends toward fictionalized
versions of real experiences rather than events made
up out of whole cloth.
We don't really know anything about poetry.
That's only one of the reasons why we don't publish
it. There are lots of other good ones. Do a google search
for "poetry" to see some of them.
Probably the single most useful piece
of information we can give you on this page is the fact
that, as you can probably tell from reading the site,
our issues are themed. (And, presumably, our themes
are issued, but that's a story for another time.) This
means that your drag-racing story, hair-raising as it
may be, might not be right for our "Cute Puppies" issue.
However, we will keep you abreast of upcoming issue
themes right here, right now:
Vol 1, Issue 1, May 2004: My Finest
Hour (archived)
Vol 1, Issue 4, November 2004: A Walk
on the Wild Side (archived)
Vol. 2, Issue 1, January 2005: Dear
God (see homepage)
Vol. 2, Issue 2, February 2005: Blood
is Thicker Than Water (see homepage)
Vol. 2, Issue 3, March 2005: Crazy
on You (see homepage)
Vol. 2, Issue 4, April 2005: Cool
Jerk (this month)
Vol. 2, Issue 5, May 2005: Welcome
to the Working Week
Vol. 2, Issue 6, June 2006: You're
Sixteen
If you're not sure your story fits any
of the themes you see here... send it anyway. We tend
to interpret the law generously in these matters, especially
if the piece is good. If it's really good, we might
even choose a future issue theme based on your story,
just 'cause we love it so much.
We prefer to receive submissions in Microsoft
Word format; face it, those guys own the world and there's
no sense fighting it. If you can't send your piece in
Word, paste it in the body of your email. Don't
send it pre-coded in HTML. This will only anger the
web gods, who'll just have to throw out all your formatting
and replace it with their own anyway.
If you're wondering where to send these
things, send them here.
(This link will open your mail client and fill in the
correct address, which we're not writing out directly
in a futile effort to hide said address from filthy
spambots.) Simple enough.
Finally, if you submitted something to
us a month ago and still haven't heard back, go ahead
and send a throat-clearing email. It's possible that
your submission got lost in the shuffle or accidentally
deleted in the heat of battle. The most likely scenario
is that we thought we responded but didn't-- our memory
sometimes plays tricks on us, especially since the Accident.
In any case, you're entitled to a response, so if you
don't hear back, go ahead and ask us what's up.
Audio submissions
Although you wouldn't know it by looking
at the site right now, Lime Tea is still pursuing the
concept of hosting audio, radio-documentary-type pieces
on the site. If you've got a completed audio piece under
15 minutes in length (under 7 preferred; bandwidth ain't
free), and This American Life has turned you
down, we want to hear it.
That said, we don't want you to email
us a giant audio file out of the blue-- send an email
to the same address as above
and let us know what you've got, then send us the audio
after we write back. (We get a little scared of giant
attachments that come at us without warning.) Audio
submissions are subject to the same theme guidelines
as prose submissions.
We can accept most audio formats and
encode them to stream over the web. We can't edit your
raw tapes into a completed piece for you, that's your
job. If you need help figuring out how to do this, the
folks over at Transom.org
have a ton of great resources to help you get started.
