Bella Donna Comedy

 Full details 

Thank you so much for your interest in submitting to The Belladonna! We can only accept work that fully follows these (hopefully helpful) guidelines:

WHO can submit

We warmly welcome all women, non-binary, genderqueer, and GNC authors, however green or seasoned, to submit. We exist to nurture and claim more space for writers of marginalized genders.

WHAT to submit

• One single, complete piece at a time: Please no first drafts, pitches, or previously published work, even from your blog or Medium page.
• Please don’t submit multiple pieces simultaneously to us, or submit work that is also out for review elsewhere (with the exception of ultra-timely pieces). We will respond to you within our three-week review period.
• Satire and other humor, in a variety of formats and lengths up to 800-ish words. (Our sweet spot is 550–700-ish). We love lists (both short and expanded), longer satirical pieces and essays, animations, cartoons, illustrations, and open letters. Have a crazy new format we didn’t even think of? Go for it. We also love entries into our recurring columns “Daily Itineraries” or “Top Ten Sex Dreams I Have Had About…” (While humorous daily diary pieces exist elsewhere online, please reserve anything with our proprietary “Daily Itinerary” title and exact format for us. If you publish a humorous itinerary elsewhere, please think of a slightly different slant/title).
• We do NOT accept: satirical news formats (a la “Area Man” or “Brave! This Woman…” as you might see done well in The Onion/Reductress, etc.), non-fiction personal essays (even if they are witty, it needs to heighten out of reality in some way to be satire), narrative fiction, or poetry. We don’t run pieces where the target/joke “punches down,” including but limited to someone’s unchangeable physical appearance, marginalized sexual orientation or race, children of public figures, etc.

WHEN to submit

We accept pieces on a rolling basis, with the exception of a few times a year when we briefly close submissions (during holidays or editor travel), which we announce on our social channels and in email auto-reply.

HOW to submit

Email us at thebelladonnacomedy@gmail.com with the subject heading SUBMISSION: (NAME OF PIECE), and with your piece attached as a WORD DOCUMENT (.DOC or .DOCX) AND ALSO PASTED in the email body. (You can export a Google Doc in Word format if you don’t have Word!) It’s helpful if the Word doc file is titled the same as the subject heading.

***If you don’t attach a Word doc, WE WILL NOT SEE YOUR WORK, as this is how our handy system auto-feeds our review queue. Please do NOT add drafts to our Medium pub prior to its express acceptance or as a means of pitching.***

What else to include in your email (optional):

We were founded to widen the comedy writing pipeline for under-represented writers. To help elevate more of these voices and encourage/welcome new writers in these communities to the satire space, any writer who chooses to and identifies as a member of one or more of the below under-represented communities may include the following information at the top of their pasted piece, and will receive priority queue placement and more structured feedback on their piece:

Name:

Have you published with us before?: Y/N

Do you identify as the following:

• BIPOC
• LGBTQ+
• Living with disabilities
• Currently/Formerly incarcerated
• Currently/Formerly unhoused

OPTION TO BE PAID/CURATED via the Medium Partner Program

We provide the option (not requirement) to publish pieces that are part of the Medium Partner program, so writers can be paid by Medium for their work. While the average piece doesn’t earn much, it’s a way as a non-monetized publication to at last offer writers some payment for their hard work. This also makes the piece eligible for more likely curation/promotion by Medium onto their front page, emails, etc. Since we only publish a handful of pieces per week and access to our readership is important, the publication will only share “friend links” in its promotion of the piece, which bypasses the paywall.

TIMELY/TOPICAL submissions

Send timely/topical pieces to our designated email: BelladonnaTopicalSubs@gmail.com. We aim to respond to topical pieces ASAP, within a business day or two.

A note about topical/timely vs. seasonal: Truly topical and timely are topics likely to be out of the news cycle within about 48 hours. Things like holidays and other foreseen events are NOT topical, and we kindly ask the latter be sent to the regular subs inbox a month-ish prior. If you have simultaneously submitted your timely/topical piece and it is accepted elsewhere before you hear back from us, please let us know ASAP.

If we accept your piece, we’ll do a little dance of celebration, promote your piece once it’s published, and invite you to our online Writer’s Room for networking, calls for content, and more.

If we don’t take your piece, the hardworking volunteer editors will always provide you with brief, constructive feedback. We may ask you to resubmit a rewrite, make a few minor punch-ups, or to send us another piece in the future. We aim to make minimal changes to your work, because we want you to feel great about having your name on it even after we’ve edited it.

Thank you for submitting to The Belladonna! Thank you for reading all the way to the end. We are rooting for you! Questions? Reach out by email at the address above.

— The Editors (Emily, Emily, Heidi, & Kristen)