Got a mountain biking story? Get in touch!
You don’t need to be a professional writer or rider to write for Singletrackworld – you just need to be able to tell a great story, and ideally you need some great photography to go with it. If you think ‘I never see stories about… x’ then there’s a good chance that’s a story we’ll be interested in. We want new perspectives and new voices – who wants to read the same old thing rehashed every year?!
What we’re looking for
We like people to write about the things that matter to them and get them excited, so if you can give us some outlines of ideas we can let you know the ones we like the best.
Travel features we look for up to a point, but you should think of them more as adventure stories. Most of the people reading a story will never get the chance to visit the destination, so we aim for all stories to be interesting to someone who will never go there – although reading it might well make you want to go there!
How does mountain biking – or riding off-road – make you feel? Why are you heading out for this ride? Is it a quest to find the deepest bog, the highest hill, or just to put a smile on your face? These are the things that make up an adventure story – not ‘turn left at the signpost’ or ‘the berms were rad’. You don’t need to be in a far flung corner of the world to have an adventure – it might be on your doorstep. Wherever you are riding and photographing, please note that the trails shown must be legal. No unsanctioned dig spots, no footpaths – bridleways and official trails only please (or as appropriate for the access laws in that country). Please make sure you check that out properly – there are plenty of places that people say ‘we’ve always ridden there’ but they are not technically legal.
We’re interested in reflective and timeless opinion pieces or columns (rather than of-the-moment news or clickbait). We look for 800-1500 words for these, and while an image or two to illustrate it can be good, it’s not always essential. While we do publish stories about cycling in the more general sense – bike culture, and issues relevant to cycling and mountain biking – our focus is mountain biking and off-road riding, including gravel. We’re not going to publish stories about the pro-road peloton, or col bagging on skinny tyres. We might be persuaded to look at things on tarmac, like BMX or urban riding, if there’s an interesting bike culture element to it. Try us!
How to pitch
Email your ideas to editorial@singletrackworld.com
Please keep images and text separate – don’t spend time trying to lay out a document with images and text inside it, we’ll have to take it apart in order to publish it anyway.
If you’ve published any work before – maybe it’s on a blog, or in another area of interest than mountain biking – send us some examples so we can see your style and we can see that you have the writing skills needed. If you’re proposing a magazine feature, we’d also need examples of your photography, or the photographer you’d plan to work with.
For columns/opinion pieces, you can either send us an outline of your topic, or just send in the article. Sometimes when you’ve got a column idea it’s easier to just write it than try and explain it!
If you’ve got a few ideas, send us the list of things you’d be interested in writing about, and we can let you know what we think sounds like it will interest our readers – and what the fee would be so you can decide if it’s worth your time. We have a nice simple payment system so you don’t need to worry about invoicing or anything – we deal with that side of things.
There’s a bit of toing and froing when we’re getting to know a potential new writer, especially if you haven’t been published before. Please don’t be discouraged if we say ‘no’ to a bunch of stuff – it might be just that we’ve already published something on the same topic or place. And do follow up with us – we’re a small team and with lots of commitments we can sometimes struggle to respond to all our emails.