What we’re looking for
- Short and long-form articles (750–3000 words) about the highs and lows of life and projects
- A feature interview or creative writing piece
Send your ideas to submissions@louderthanten.com.
Tell us these tales...
- What’s wrong with the industry and how do we fix it?
- Who or what in your life sets you straight? Who or what keeps you crooked?
- How did you end up here? Why does it matter?
- What are you spitting out of your system? Literally or figuratively.
- What do we need to talk about? What should we stop running our mouths off about?
- What gets you giddy about this year? What makes your gut drop?
- What have you done for your community?
Be more specific...
- How is work evolving? What will it look like in five years?
- What do you think your real job is at work? Why won’t people let you do it?
- How do we fix the sales process in our agencies?
- How do we stop broken agencies from reinforcing terrible practices?
- How do we start thinking about content and design differently?
- What can we learn from our teammates? What can we teach them?
- How do we equalize the web industry’s playing field and make more inclusive teams and companies?
- What do we need to be better at? What are we terrible at?
We need more crunch
Know what you don’t get to read much about on the internet? Crunchy content that wraps itself around the core of creating: the people who hold creative projects together. The psychology, the philosophy, the culture, the history of people working with other people to build cool things. What’s this, you say? Project management? Well, actually, we’re all project managers at heart. We complete tasks and do work every day, but more than that, we do it because we need to live and we only live because we matter (or maybe we don’t, but we’re here all the same). But then, that’s an even more interesting idea, isn’t it? These concepts we want to tease out of you are loveable and need a voice—the one nestled between your vocal cords.
Why?
Google project management and your eyes will fall right out of your skull. Images of young professionals in suits drawing black circles with lines stare pensively back at you. Articles about using the right Gantt chart or thousands of Venn diagrams litter your page. This is NOT project management. It’s got no heart.
Let’s talk about the ability to combine the science of process with the art of people & things at the same time. Mixed together, they’re a wildly spicy cocktail that allows us to get things done and get our teams and clients excited. We need to rewrite the story of work.
We need less schtick
Know what we read enough about? Articles aimed at designers, developers, and writers that are saturating our industry with technical advice, SEO content marketing click bait, design best practices and thinking, and self-promotional douchebaggery. We need less project management articles oversimplifying the processes involved in process and methodology, and more about the human hands implementing them. What do we care about processes if we don’t talk about the people holding our projects together?
It’s time to loop in the organizers, the planners, and the executors, dammit. There is a gaping deficit in quality content that project lovers can relate to, and Louder Than Ten is changing that.
But we need your help.
Let’s talk about the people that hold our world together.
Speak up. Everything is a project
We are not making a magazine for project management. These are not cardboard articles for a cookie-cutter project management role.
We want to share new ways of looking through the lens of digital methodology and process. We want to tease out the curiosity of being human while getting work done. We want to examine all the pieces of the world that fit together around managing projects and curate them together.
- What’s missing in the PM role or skillset
- How exponential technological growth is affecting our processes and standards
- Wading through the bullshit of what our industry keeps telling us is important
- The dynamics of trust and fear at work
- What it means to do work that matters and how most of us don’t
- How the future is going to axe our assumptions about work
- Democracy in the workplace
- The dark history of popular business practices and processes
- New PM and operations techniques and approaches that are more equitable and humane
We want you to write with your guts
This is what we need from your nimble fingers: the energy to entertain, inform, hold your stories under water till they wiggle, hold them under hot lights till they squirm. Write with your heart. We’ve all had it up to our necks with dry-as-toast articles. It’s time to eat a bar of soap and say something new.
Nailing the style
To help you blend your style with ours, read through the Louder Than Ten writing guidelines contained in the Content section of our site manual.
You’ll find:
- style
- grammar
- voice & tone conventions
Save time editing and stick with the guidelines. They’re there to help you, and we’ll need you to edit and resubmit your article if you don’t follow them.
Wonderful
We can work with these:
- Original, real-life events
- Interviews with fascinating people (if your grandpa was a fighter pilot or your neighbour a creep, we want to hear about it)
- Thoughtful or critical commentary on human nature, our habits, our weaknesses, our love of the absurd
- Subject matter outside the web industry bubble (let’s examine the world and the people around us)
- Dissections of traditional business or project management practices
- Breakdowns of new techniques or approaches to project management or operations
Weak
Don’t waste your time:
- Ghost written articles (you must be the author)
- Top whatever lists
- Dry as toast, or corporate sounding marketing pieces
- Fluffy clickbait: “you won’t believe what happens next...”
- Regurgitated content
- Reviews about products or services you are affiliated with
- Self-promotional articles or product plugs
- Defamatory articles
- Poorly researched or written content
- Mistake-ridden prose
The submission process
Step one
Let us know what you’d like to write about. Email it to submissions@louderthanten.com. If your idea is solid, we ask for a draft.
Step two
We take your draft content and run it through the editing ringer. We’ll send edits to strengthen your piece and ask you to clean up any untidy parts. You resubmit and we apply the polish.
Step three
You preview the final draft.
Step four
We design and style your article, make any content editing tweaks, and schedule your launch.
Step five
We pay you for your submission. Get ’em tiger.
Want to keep writing? Have at it. We’d love regular contributors.
Can I republish my work elsewhere?
Yes. But here are some guidelines around that:
- Please wait at least one month from your article’s initial launch to republish it on your own or anyone else’s platform (e.g. Medium, personal blog).
- We’d greatly appreciate you including ‘originally published in Coax’ and the direct link to your original article in the intro or end of your article.
If all that sounds cool to you, have at ‘er, friend!
Write for the right audience
People who run projects
Digital PMs, account managers, coordinators, product managers, team leads, and other organized folks are the glue in our creative studios. They keep the clients happy, the team together, the bills paid, and the weekends clear. These are the unsung heroes that support our organizations, ask for no credit, and rarely get recognition. We love our project runners and want to give them the voice, the support, and the shared experiences they’ve long deserved but didn’t know where to find.
Freelancers
If you run solo, you are your own project manager. Freelancers know more than anyone that creative work doesn’t pay the bills on its own. They know their craft too, but when it comes to the hard parts—running a successful and profitable practice—it’s difficult to find the right resources. We want to hear from real people struggling and succeeding in human ways that don’t claim to know all the answers. Wearing so many hats is tricky, but our job is to create a community of support to help each other.
Owners and leaders
We’re sick of cheesy business books written by self-appointed, self-promotional marketing gurus telling you to ‘Crush it’ or ‘Level up’ or ‘Dominate’ their golden circles. We support solid, sustainable work done well and with integrity. A studio should be a creative place that takes care of its employees, cares about its clients, and produces great work. Our team leaders are the key to helping our industry get better by running respectful, democratic businesses, not to win awards they had to pay for.
Do you get paid?
Short answer: yes.
We recognize that quality doesn’t come cheap and we don’t expect you to work for free. That said, we are facing the classic post-print publication quandary regarding how to sustain and honour the writing you submit without losing our shirts. We don’t want a paywall and we don’t want the site to be littered with irrelevant advertising in exchange for page views. These are our rates:
Long form articles
$200/accepted submission
Other content
$100/accepted piece
If you have any questions, please email us at submissions@louderthanten.com.
We won’t publish...
- Paid/advertorial content
- Press releases
- Sales pitches
- Previously published content
- Boring, snooze-inducing commentary
- Stock photos of people wearing suits drawing diagrams on glass