Welcome to Our Collective
Share a book, share a story, share your love of BIPOC writing — check out our submission guidelines.
We are a brand new publication and collective. Bearing that in mind, please note that it may be nearly 2–4 weeks before we are able to respond to your pitch. Starting out, we will try to give a personalized response to all pitches. Thank you for your patience!
Who We Are
We are a collective of book critics dedicated to reading and discussing books by BIPOC authors. We place special importance on reviewing the works of hybrid, indie, self-published and all those other writers in between.
What We Are Looking For
The BIPOC Book Critics Collective Publication is written for analytical readers, and should be crafted with thoughtfulness and a huge dose of edge. We want engaging, messy reviews that reflect experience of reading and relating.
In order for you to be able to connect with us through your writing, you generally need to be engaged and committed to either the author, subject, or genre. Be academic. Be experimental. Be creative. Be playful. Be You. Make us laugh or make us cry. However you approach your book review, just be sure to inject yourself into it.
Let us know what it was like to walk through this book. We want to know your headspace. Did a character in here remind you of someone? Is the story something you could relate to on a personal level or to our current political climate? Were you disturbed or titillated?
Our Sections Are:
- Book Reviews: tell us a story. 600–1,300 words.
- Interviews: Real and imagined interviews with authors and their characters. 600–800 words.
- Book Playlists: Does the song inspire the words or do the words inspire the music. 500–600 words.
- Reading Lists: Books threaded together into lists with a deeper purpose than promotion. What impactful conversations can be had around these books. Once again, make it personal. We rather see this in a title pitch: “These five books represent each stage of grief when I lost granny” than “five books about dying” because well…who cares. 100–150 words per blurb with twelve book max list size.
- Day in the Life: Authors walk us through a day in their lives. 1,500 words max.
- Critic’s Craft: Quick tips by authors and critics on the craft of writing or cultural commentary. 500-800 words max.
- Illustrated Reviews: Comics, paintings, pastels, watercolors, and multimedia book reviews. 100–300 words to accompany images.
- Words in Movement: performative reviews of books. 150 words. 10 mins recorded time limit.
All genres welcome. All languages welcome. Untranslated, Self Published and Indie titles welcome.
Who is allowed to pitch?
We don’t discriminate. We make it our mission to spotlight book reviews written by women of color to give them a chance to shine in an arena that they have been historically marginalized from, but all voices are welcome!
We do not accept “hotepery”, hate speech, or condescending book reviews on LGBTQ+ issues. Periodt.
How to Pitch
- Submit pitches via our “submit” tab on our publication’s homepage and it’ll take you to our pitch submission form. If you have issues submitting, please send an email with the subject “question” to editors@bipoccriticscollective.com. If you are later added as a writer, you will not need to submit future pitches via the Google Form.
- Please only one pitch at a time. If your pitch is not accepted, you may send a new pitch. Wait to hear back from us.
- All reviews should have a strong, inviting feature image. If you need help with the image or if you plan to use an image that is outside of the medium’s image search, cite the image as best you can and we will double-check your citation before final publication. The Writing Cooperative has an excellent article about images here.
- Include a strong title and deck for your review. Deck is that little bit of space under the title that gives a brief description of your article.
- Please do not submit to us and then pull your piece out to submit elsewhere. There is a chance your piece might be curated throughout other parts of Medium. You can read all about curation here.
- Allow 2–4 weeks for a response. We might respond before then, but please don’t assume that you’ll always hear from us right away.
- Reviews should generally fall between 600 and 1,000 words (roughly a 6 to 15 minute read — max). If it goes over this word count, we may extend the word limit. We will go up to no more than 1,500 words. Readers generally don’t like longer articles, but each case is special and we do take that into account.
- If we accept your pitch and add you to our writers list, you have within two weeks to submit your first post. We will also invite you to our Slack Channel or our “mini collective”.
- We currently do not accept reviews that have been previously published.
- A note on compensation: at this time, we are not personally compensating. If you are a part of the Medium Partner Program and your post fits within the guidelines of their paywall, you may earn from eligible posts. You can learn more about Medium’s Partner Program here.
- Once you are added to the publication, you should be able to submit as a writer. Below, I made a video on how to actually submit to a Medium Publication.
