We are not currently open to pitches from writers we haven’t worked with before. Please revisit us in the fall!
Creating and publishing some of the best content for young people about sex, sexuality, relationships and identities there is is what we do here. Diversity of voices and perspectives is also important to our organization and our users. This is where you could come in!
We always want more great, original and radical writers, sex, bodies and relationships educators and thinkers on our freelance team. We welcome all kinds of voices, and are especially seeking queer and LGBTQA+ writers, BIPOC writers, women, trans and nonbinary writers, disabled writers, young writers and other marginalized and underrepresented groups. We do our best to make writing with us a positive, relaxed and supportive experience. Our writers typically report having a very good experience working with us, and feeling like they and their work are treated with care and respect. We are always happy to work with young or emerging writers and have often been the first place many established writers in our subject areas have been published. We think Scarleteen is a great place to get started as a writer.
Pitching
Before pitching, please read the content of this page. We do not accept nor reply to spam, PR/SEO seeking or mass-submitted pitches, nor are we interested in pitches that are not based off the list on this page of current topics we are looking for. Our successful model of sex education is based in creating content centered in on what our users and readers show an express need or want for. Pitches submitted outside the format we ask for here will typically not be accepted and may not receive a reply. We also will not accept or engage with pitches where AI like ChatGPT has been used to make the pitch (nor is it ever acceptable to use AI when writing for us). Please also do not send us complete pieces you have already written in advance of speaking with us: we won’t review or respond to any work we haven’t first accepted as a pitch.
Style and form
Content at Scarleteen is quality and is usually created with evergreen intent. We need talented writers, with clean, clear copy, who can write inclusively, considering factors like diversity of economic class, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, ability and agency. Scarleteen is often ahead of the curve with inclusion, so feel free to look at current pieces as a guide.
Writers must demonstrate respect for young people, presenting themselves as a helper, not a parent or director. Young people trust Scarleteen as a place that has and always conveys a real value of them as whole people with agency. If you’re familiar with our content, you know already that it is primarily user-driven; based in what users have expressed to us meets their needs. It is friendly and accessible in style, plain and direct in tone, while treating sensitive topics with the sensitivity and sometimes mutual vulnerability they truly demand. We need writers who can give our users depth and expansiveness, and the feeling of someone really taking the time to talk with them in a warm and thoughtful way. Surfacey, purposefully provocative or glib sex talk just doesn’t cut it here: our readers both deserve and expect realness from us.
Currently, our site serves around 4 million unique readers a year. Many like-minded organizations and media services also link to our content, so your work will be seen widely. Scarleteen is and remains the most widely used site specifically for young people seeking out sex and relationships information, so it’s a great place to get targeted readers for that content.
Our users – and thus, your readers – are primarily between the ages of 15 and 25, and live all over the world. About 50% of our users are in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, and the other half are in the rest of the world. Our readership is highly diverse.
Pay and Word Count
Our base pay per piece for 2025 is $200, paid only via direct deposit via Gusto, a secure payroll platform, to you as an independent contractor, usually within a week of publication (and no more than 30 days after publication). We’re sorry, but we cannot pay via other platforms like PayPal or Venmo and will also no longer mail paper checks as payment.
We do not support (or approve of) work-for-hire: we share copyright with you, so you retain rights to your work. You may reprint or republish as you like after a piece has been exclusive with us first for one month.
Writers who have written three or more pieces with us who continue to work with us are advanced to $250 per piece. Writers who have written nine or more pieces receive $300 per piece with their tenth piece. Whatever your pay rate, it is always okay to try and negotiate a different rate with us: we can often offer higher base pay for seasoned writers. We also accept and appreciate donating pay for written work back to the organization for those who want to and are able, something some of our writers choose to do.
Pieces here vary a great deal in length: if the piece is engaging, how long or short a piece is is mostly influenced by the topic at hand. Human sexuality and relationships are complex topics, so very short pieces are not often right for us. We expect a minimum of 1500 words submitted for any draft. Clear, engaging longform, or a longer series made of shorter pieces, tends to be more of what our readers want and respond to. We expect writers to say as much or as little about something as needs be said for a reader to benefit and clearly understand, and to do so in an engaging way. Literacy tends to be high for many of our users, but we still ask that writers do their best to use plain language and explain any terms or acronyms. Demystification of all the things is the name of the game around here. We do like publishing series here, so if you have a series in mind, let us know in your pitch! Series are paid per published piece of the series.
The Process
Here’s the way a piece usually goes from start to finish with us.
1. You look around the site, including our publicly posted direct services (that’s the message boards and advice columns), and see if the tone, style and subject matter here feel like a good fit for you. Please familiarize yourself with our content and style before pitching: some of the most popular current styles of internet content – super snappy, snarky and short, listicles, or where much of the content is image-based – are not a good fit for us.
2. You look at the current needs listed below for ideas, throw us a couple examples of your writing, let us know where you have been published before if you have, and a pitch in email based on that list. If you want to send more than one pitch at a time, it’s also fine to send a few in one email. We have been publishing for getting close to 25 years now, and have thousands of pages of content here, so please do use our search function first to be sure we don’t already have what you’re pitching. All pitches should be emailed to me, Heather Corinna, at editorialATscarleteenDOTcom. We neither accept nor respond to auto-generated or mass pitches, or to unsolicited submissions of whole content. Do not send these to us.
3. We look at what you send. If we’re not interested and you have pitched within our guidelines, we’ll get back to you with either a rejection or a request for a different pitch. If we are interested in your pitch, we’ll email you, and we can set a deadline for a first draft, hammer out any other details or questions, and then you can get cracking. We care a great deal about fair conditions and value for labor: we believe the agreements we suggest and ask for respect the rights and value of our content creators and collaborators, but if you have any special needs or concerns with it, you can always let us know and we’re happy to consider adjustments or changes. Please turn your files in as either Microsoft Word or Apple Pages (Google Docs allows you to save files as Word).
4. You submit a first draft. If it looks like something we just can’t work with, or will have to do a lot of work on ourselves, we may decline taking it any further. Otherwise, we will review, leave notes and edits using track changes, and return the document to you to revise. We try to avoid multiple rounds of revision as much as possible. At the current time, you’ll either work with myself, with s.e. smith, with volunteer editorial assistant Hannah Peterson, or some combination of the three of us. The editorial process here is relaxed and collaborative, and we are always happy to chat if you have questions or concerns.
When working with your document, please do NOT remove anything in track changes, accept or delete any changes, or start a new document. (You can view on “simple markup” if seeing all the changes is distracting.) Instead, leave the edits you’re comfortable with and address editorial feedback (such as “please add more detail here”). For any edits you don’t like or want to reject, you can add comments/notes to or within the track changes (such as “I prefer my original word use”). Then, return the document to your editor.
5. Ideally, we get to a finish within two rounds of edits, but sometimes it takes three. If it’s looking like more than that, we may or may not continue work on the piece, but do always pay kill fees (typically $100) if we decide not to run or finish a piece after the second draft. If a piece looks good to go, we’ll polish it up any more as needed, finalize all the track changes, and publish and promote the piece. We email you to let you know when it goes live, and you then invoice us. We’ll get you in our payroll system and will pay you within net30, though most typically payment clears in a week.
This whole process can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months, depending on the length of the piece, how quickly or slowly you and we are working, and where it fits with our editorial schedule.