Do you have ideas waiting to be heard? A perspective that deserves a broader audience? We have exciting news for you: Clearer Thinking is accepting submissions!
Why Submit to Clearer Thinking?
Exposure for Your work: if your submission is selected for publication, it will go to our active community of over 200,000 subscribers. Your words, ideas, and perspectives will be showcased to a readership eager to learn and engage.
Flexibility in Submission: Whether you have a complete article, just an abstract, or even a rough outline, we're open to it all! You don't have to invest time in crafting a full article from the get-go. Pitch us your idea and if we accept it then we can collaborate to bring it to life!
No Need to Start from Scratch: Have a gem of an article already written and showcased on your personal site? Perfect! We welcome the submission of your existing work (as long as it hasn't been published before other than on your personal website). Let's give your masterpieces a bigger platform.
Get Paid for Your Passion: Not only will you have the potential to reach a large audience, but every accepted proposal that we approve to turn into a full-length article will receive a total compensation of $200 (please read the section "Submission and Compensation" in this page to understand how it works).
General Guidelines
Clearer Thinking publishes articles (blog posts) on various topics, typically taking an evidence-based or research-guided approach. We welcome submissions of high-quality original writing addressing any of the following topics:
Practical concepts from psychology, philosophy, or social science that people can use to improve their everyday lives or better understand the world that are not yet covered on our site.
Applied rationality, critical thinking, or philosophy concepts that most people would find it valuable to know.
Effective altruism (EA) or existential risk-related concepts yet to be covered on our site that most people would find valuable to know.
Self-improvement techniques that are likely helpful to most people (e.g., practices drawn from ACT, DBT, Interpersonal Therapy, Metacognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, CBT, etc.)
Behavior change techniques that can help people act more in line with how their ideal self would act.
Concepts from mathematics, probability, statistics, computer science, economics, or science that can be usefully applied to everyday life.
Techniques for improving self-esteem, increasing self-compassion, gaining self-understanding, reducing negative self-talk, improving helpful reflection, or helping people accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses.
Techniques for better understanding, effectively engaging with, or shifting one’s emotions, or for improving resilience.
Techniques for developing or maintaining good relationships with others, preventing unhelpful conflict, or navigating disagreement - including with colleagues, friends, family, or romantic partners.
Techniques for prioritizing between goals or managing multiple goals, or for improving prioritization or productivity.
Techniques for improving decision-making.
Techniques for helping people improve their predictions.
Besides fitting in one of these categories, all content we publish must:
Add value to the reader's life
Be aligned with our mission
Be well-reasoned and clearly written
Be evidence-based, research-guided, or well argued/well reasoned
Avoid making exaggerated claims, and appropriately caveat claims that are uncertain
Provide value to the reader early on in the article, so that even a reader who doesn't read the whole article is still likely to find it to be a valuable experience
We avoid taking inflammatory or deliberately polarizing stances and prioritize careful reasoning and clarity. To determine whether your idea might be accepted, a good start is to familiarize yourself with some of the long-format content we have already published in our blog. He are a few examples:
Also, since Clearer Thinking has readers from many parts of the world, we encourage authors to submit queries that will be meaningful to an international audience.
There is no maximum or minimum word count, but we encourage authors to aim for at least 1,500 words. We don't republish content that has appeared on other websites, though the exception we make is that it's fine to submit work that has previously appeared on your personal blog or equivalent (but please let us know that is the case when submitting).
Submission and Compensation
We compensate the author in three moments:
$50 when your query is approved
$50 when we receive the full article you proposed in the query
$100 when we decide to publish your article
All payments will be made via PayPal.
Our submission process comprises six steps:
1. Query Submission
Although we accept full article submissions in this step, if you have not already written the piece, we strongly encourage you first to submit your query, which explains what you want to write about. This way, you avoid putting in too much work without knowing that it has a significant chance of being accepted.
You can submit your query in the form at the end of this page. Please read all the information on this page before submitting your query.
2. Query Review
After submitting your query, our team will review it to check whether it is aligned with our general guidelines, how much value we believe it will provide for our audience, whether it is too similar to the work we have published previously, and how it fits in our editorial calendar.
The process will typically take between one to two weeks, depending on our work volume, our team capacity at that time, and the clarity of your ideas and sources. We might ask you additional questions before providing a final answer to your query.
A rejection doesn't imply that your idea or work is poor quality. Maybe what you've suggested does not fit our editorial plan or is too similar to other articles or tools we've already published (you can explore what we've created so far using the search box on our website).
We aim to answer all emails, but unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to provide feedback or notes on rejected queries.
If we accept your query, you'll receive $50 and advance to the next phase.
3. Article submission
If our team approves your query, we'll let you know as soon as possible so you can work on the article itself. We won't set a deadline, so you can take your time and send it to us when it's done.
When we receive your article, our team will take between one to two weeks to get back to you. This phase is not a full and in-depth review of your article but a read-through to make sure it's worth putting in the work to hone it and, eventually, publish it.
In this phase, we also might ask you some questions to better understand your points before providing a final answer.
If your article gets approved by our team, you will receive $50 (just so long as you submit the full-length article that we approved you to write and sign the contract giving us the right to use it), regardless of whether it is published on our site or not.
From that point on, you and our team will collaborate to edit the article (if needed) aiming to get the article to the point it's up to our standard for quality.
4. Article Editing
If needed (in our experience, it is in most cases), your article will be copyedited for readability, concision, and to conform to house style. Since you will be credited as the article's author, you can review and approve all changes before publication.
Keep in mind that we expect this step to be highly collaborative. At this point, we'll all want your article to be published, but we have high standards for quality, and we'll only publish what we consider highly valuable to our audience.
5. Publishing
Once we finish the editing and decide to publish the article, you'll be compensated with the third payment of $100, regardless of when (or if) we'll release your work to our audience. Our team will handle the publishing and let you know once it's done.
Please note that our team holds the right to publish it anytime we find it fits our editorial calendar, and we can also decide not to publish it.
Ready To Submit?
If you have questions, please fill out this contact form.