BootsnAll Feature Articles Program

BootsnAll.com is seeking feature articles that are related to travel in one way or another. Our preference is for articles that could potentially appeal to a wide audience, rather than an audience specific to people researching one destination. Articles can certainly be about one specific destination, as long as the theme or topic might interest a broad group. We can be creative with this, and we are willing to hear any ideas you might have.

Word count: 800+ words is preferred, though the word count will actually relate more to the photos for the article than to a strict arbitrary minimum.

Pay: $50 for any published article, and a one-paragraph “about the author” mini-bio at the bottom.

Publication rights: We are looking only for articles that aren’t yet published, and BootsnAll owns all future rights to the paid pieces you publish through us. If you prefer to maintain future rights, please submit your article through our unpaid articles program.

What we are looking for:

We are open to any ideas. As long as the article has wide potential, we’d love to hear the idea. Generally speaking, an article that focuses on only one destination won’t work for this program. Large and famous cities and places do have some potential if your angle is really unique and attention-getting, but lesser-known places just don’t have a large enough audience on our site.

To see what we’ve done recently in this program, check out the top-right corner of the main bootsnall.com home page - the 10 most recent feature articles we’ve done are linked there.

Articles should have a compelling title, and accompanying photos are very important. We need either original photos to be used in the article, or locations of photos we can download and use. For most “list” articles, we need a photo for each list item, and that photo has to help tell the same story the text is telling. Gathering photos is often more difficult than you’d expect, so it’s a good idea to confirm that usable photos are available before an idea is pitched, or at least before writing begins. We’ll give you more information on this process once you’ve contacted us with an idea.

Photo features

We now have the ability to use larger photos than before, and this opens up a new kind of article. We call them “photo features” since they are more about collecting a group of entertaining photos than about the text that goes along with them.

Here is the first in this program:

The 12 Most Beautiful Castles in Europe

For articles like this, the photos are ideally 585 pixels wide (or a minimum of 500 pixels) and the text goes below the photo instead of wrapping around. We are open to any travel-related idea for photo features, as long as we have access to photos we can actually use. The text on such articles can and should be kept to only a few sentences per photo, since the majority of readers tend not to read long explanations on such articles anyway.

How to proceed

If you have an idea for an article that might fit this project, please email us at features@bootsnall.com. You don’t need to do a formal query letter, just send the title/idea with enough of an explanation that we can tell what it’s meant to be, and also a general writing sample or link to things you’ve written that are online. If it sounds good we’ll approve it and work on a deadline and publication date. We might also have suggestions on changes or slightly different ideas if the idea seems close.

We already have a group of regular writers, and we are going to be expanding this program soon, so we are looking to find some new talent. If you are interested in writing just one article, that’s fine, but if you are interested in writing on a regular basis, that’s even better.

Help for up and coming travel writers

Travel writing sounds like a wonderful job, and in many ways it is. Because of this, there is limitless competition for paying jobs, and unfortunately, there is also huge competition among the publishers and companies, so pay tends to be modest. For some perspective on how things really work, we recommend reading Tim Leffel’s article discussing the Seven Myths of Being a Travel Writer. In addition to being helpful about how the industry works, it contains several tips that will help you figure out the sort of articles that we are looking for, as well as information that helps clarify what we can’t use.