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: to be published in BoomerCafé, your piece must be told as a story — as a narrative (as opposed to a press release) — and be baby boomer-centric. What that means is, your piece cannot be about “seniors,” or “middle age;” that’s for someone else’s website. BoomerCafé only runs stories for and about active baby boomers.

Here are our guidelines to submit a story:

  1. 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.)
  2. 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!
  3. Cut and paste your story into the content of the email. Do NOT send as an attachment.
  4. NO PRESS 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.
  5. Great quality, appealing images are very important to BoomerCafé.com. First, we need a photo of you, a head shot, ideally in a horizontal (aka “landscape”) rather than vertical format. And it has to satisfy our requirements for high-quality, high-resolution pictures. That includes its size — we will only accept a minimum size of 500kb per photo (and no bigger than 2mb); anything smaller becomes blurry when we enlarge it.
    Second, if you have any other kind of photo or artwork that is relevant to your piece — or if you can find something relevant on the internet that is not under a copyright — that will help ensure that the story is put in our feature window for a day on the home page.
    Smartphones can take terrific photos. If using a smartphone to take a photo for BoomerCafé.com, hold the phone horizontal to snap a landscape format photo.  (You might find this brief article to be helpful:  http://www.boomercafe.com/baby-boomer/3-easy-steps-to-photos-that-endure-time/}.
    When we request photos or images, email to [email protected].
  6. We accept only copyright-free photos.
  7. When you first send us a story idea, please do not attach photos. We will ask for them later.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. When we excerpt a book, we always like to link to where it can be purchased.
  11. Please limit pieces to NO LONGER THAN 500 words … max.
  12. 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. This applies also to material labeled as copywritten. If it is submitted to BoomerCafé, we reserve the right to change it.
  13. In terms of format, please carefully conform to these standards:
  14. SPELLCHECK and PROOFREAD the final version.
  15. 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.
  16. For visual comfort, please SEPARATE PARAGRAPHS with an empty line.
  17. Please make sure the piece is single-spaced.
  18. Please do NOT indent the beginning of new paragraphs.
  19. Any articles to be submitted should be sent (text only) only to the following address: writing@boomercafe.com.
  20. 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 [email protected]. Publicists: no phone calls, please!

Thanks very much!

Greg Dobbs
Executive Editor
BoomerCafé.com