RSS

Story Submissions

Here’s your chance to share your baby boomer stories and photos on BoomerCafé. You need not be a professional writer.

BoomerCafé is maintained by a small team so we ask your help when submitting stories.

The most important thing to know is this: BoomerCafé will only accept and consider material of interest to its target audience — baby boomers with active lifestyles and youthful spirits.

Here are our guidelines to submit a story:

  1. Cut and paste the material into the content of the email. NO UNSOLICITED ATTACHMENTS OF ANY KIND, PLEASE! It’s all because of virus/spyware threat.
  2. No news releases. We run stories, not press releases. If you are a PR person and can’t send anything more imaginative than a news release, don’t send anything.
  3. Online magazines have at least one thing in common with hardcopy magazines: pictures, pictures, pictures! Visuals are essential in telling a story, not to mention maintaining a reader’s attention to the page. That’s why we require pictures to accompany any article. When we request photos or images, email to photos@boomercafe.com
  4. When you first send us a story idea, please do not attach photos. We will ask for them later.
  5. As for monetary compensation — and this always can be a “deal-breaker” — BoomerCafé is a labor of love, whose purpose is to provide an interesting, entertaining, and informative online home for baby boomers. As such, we do not pay for content. Your reward is positive exposure, but there is no guarantee.
  6. BoomerCafé’s content is defined by and designed with a focus on baby boomers, which by definition means people born between 1946 and 1964. Our audience is baby boomers with active lifestyles and youthful spirits. Submissions must be relevant exclusively to that audience. (For your guidance, we are not seeking stories about issues like being a grandparent or buying burial insurance… that’s AARP stuff.)
  7. Our goal is to make every piece genuinely interesting for the boomer audience, and the way to achieve that is to keep it as non-commercial as possible. The overriding philosophy is, if the article is interesting and dynamic, the product or service will sell itself!
  8. In the case of book excerpts, we require something that can stand alone as an interesting piece, without requiring the reader to understand what precedes or follows it in the longer context of the book.
  9. When we excerpt a book, we always like to link to where it can be purchased.
  10. Please limit pieces to NO LONGER THAN 700-800 words … max.
  11. BoomerCafé reserves the right to edit any submission for language, clarity, grammar, length, appropriate content, demographic appeal, and anything else that improves it in the opinion of BoomerCafé’s editors.
  12. In terms of format, please carefully conform to these standards:
  13. SPELLCHECK and PROOFREAD the final version.
  14. For uniformity’s sake, inspect the final version to make sure it has only ONE space between words within each sentence, and TWO spaces between the period at the end of a sentence and the first word of the next sentence.
  15. For visual comfort, please SEPARATE PARAGRAPHS with an empty line.
  16. Please do NOT indent the beginning of new paragraphs.
  17. Any articles to be submitted should be sent (text only) only to the following address: news@boomercafe.com.
  18. By inviting a submission, we make no promise of inclusion in BoomerCafé, and we make no promise about when or for what duration any submission may be posted.

If you’re still reading and still interested in submitting to BoomerCafé, we look forward to hearing from you.

Please send any questions to news@boomercafe.com. Publicists: no phone calls, please!

Thanks very much!

Greg Dobbs
Executive Editor
BoomerCafé.com