How To Pitch Aftermath

Aftermath is always happy to read pitches from writers both established and new. As a growing outlet, we regret we can’t take every pitch that excites us, but we’re still eager to see your work. Here are some guidelines for pitching us:

Send your pitch to mail@aftermath.site and please write “PITCH:” in the subject line. Include a short summary of your idea and, if you have a sense, how long you foresee the final piece being. Please do not include full drafts.

If you’re pitching a story that involves reporting or sources, please let us know if you’ve spoken with anyone so far or how confident you feel in being able to arrange conversations. (We don’t need to know their identities, we just want a sense of where you are in the reporting process.) If your pitch requires access or speaking with industry figures, we know it can sometimes be tricky to arrange those conversations when a story isn’t attached to an outlet; if we accept a pitch, we can try to help arrange an interview, or to let you cite our outlet when you reach out to those contacts. 

What we’re looking for: Aftermath is committed to using our position as an independent, worker-owned outlet to tell the kinds of stories other outlets can’t. Free from the pressures of SEO, traffic, and the latest big game, we want stories that highlight important, under-explored facets of gaming and technology, as well as stories that hold powerful figures to account. We like stories that are focused on people rather than products, whether that’s developers and game workers, players, online and fan communities, or journalists.

We’re especially interested in investigative or reported stories and stories that include the voices of players, workers, and community members. Games journalism has less and less room for investigative reporting these days, and we’re happy to carry that mantle as much as we can within our means.  

We’re also interested in essays that connect games, technology, and the internet to politics, current events, cultural trends, and other areas. We’re open to experimental formats that tell stories in ways beyond text.

We’re generally not looking for game or hardware reviews, lists, guides, or service posts unless you have some particularly unique expertise to share.

On occasion, we publish book excerpts; these have generally been with publishers with whom we have a relationship. If you’re interested in pitching a book excerpt, please write “book excerpt” in your subject line and we can discuss your situation further.

We do not accept stories written with AI or that use AI-generated imagery, unless these make up a small portion of the work as necessary to report on an AI product’s use or function as required for your story. 

Rate: We pay $300 for shorter pieces, and $500 for more in-depth reporting and analysis. We know not every piece and its work requirements fits neatly within these numbers; if we accept your pitch, we can further discuss an appropriate rate for the piece’s scope. We pay promptly after publication. If, in the course of working together, we decide a story is no longer right for us, we can negotiate a kill fee.