Submit Articles

Want to share your story with Pursuit Magazine? Check out the guidelines below.

Pursuit Magazine is an adorable little upstart magazine for professional investigators — free and online only, no wasted paper! Subscribing is easy: just click here. We’ll send you weekly non-spammy emails with links to new articles, videos and webinars from our YouTube channel, and new course announcements at PI Education, our sister company.

Pursuit articles fall into these general categories:

The Business — Tips and techniques for the work we do: investigative tools, tricks of the trade, ethical and legal issues, technology and innovation, and Internet resources for investigators. Surveillance tips, criminal defense investigations, trash pulls, OSINT, and everything in between.

The Pitch — On marketing, branding, networking, and business development.

The Life — A glimpse behind the curtain into the investigator’s world: PI origin stories and insightful personal essays by investigators about the life and the work.

The LiteratureBook reviews, excerpts, best-of lists, and author Q&As related to crime fiction or true crime NF.

What we aren’t: a blog or an SEO factory. We don’t do outbound paid links or paid posts. That just feels gross to us.

Whether you’re a PI with writing chops or a PI with no writing experience whatsoever, PLEASE hit us up! And if you’re a rookie writer looking for bylines and interested in spy stuff, pitch us a specific story idea on one of the topics above. Our editor Kim will help you hone your pitch and polish your article.

We promise to get back to you quickly and treat you with respect. And if you’re an actual person with an actual story idea (and not a robot pitching generic “content”), our answer will probably be yes.

A Brief FAQ

What kinds of articles are you looking for?

We love well-written stories with personality and authority, on subjects relevant to the investigations industry. Teach us something! Tell us about an idea or technique you’ve found that made your life easier or helped you make more money. Share your tech recs, business hacks for getting clients to pay on time, personal stories about cases that stymied you, and essays about why you love/hate this work sometimes. Our archive is free and deep! Spend a rainy Sunday reading and get inspired by your colleagues’ great ideas.

And if you’re up for doing some reporting on a controversial issue or topic in PI land, we’ll drop everything just to publish it.

You don’t have to be an experienced writer. If you’ve got expertise or a good story to share, we’ll work with you on style and structure. We’re grateful to all our genius contributors who share their wisdom with colleagues. We literally would not exist without you.

If your article is actually a sales pitch, please see our advertising guidelines.

How long should the story be?

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” —Blaise Pascal

You know how attention spans are. To reel folks in, keep word count between 600-1500 words. Articles of exactly 879 words almost publish themselves. That said, longer stories can work if they’re truly fantastic, like this one.

If your piece needs a lot of words to get the message across, break it up into sections with simple sub-headers. Add some photos and pull quotes! Interrupt the long text with something interesting.

How do I send my story?

First, send Kim a brief email with your story idea to see if it’s a good fit. Then you won’t have wasted your time writing about a topic that we can’t use. When you DO submit, email us a Word document (not a PDF), as an attachment. It’s easier if you don’t any fun formatting with bullet points, boldface, or numbering or drop any images into the document itself — that makes us feel agitated when we copy text into WordPress. DO include your name and email address in the document, and add a short bio at the end. (And yes, we will be thrilled to link back to your business site, blog, or book sales link in the bio!)

If you have images to share, send those as jpeg attachments, 3MB or smaller, and be sure you own all relevant rights and permissions.

Be straight with me: How can I maximize my odds of getting a “yes”?

It’s easy: Send us a specific story idea, one so good you’d want to read it yourself. Make it interesting, succinct, and information-packed. Add a little personality, maybe some humor. Organize your story well, with a beginning, middle, and end. Add a great title, tagline, and subheadings for each section. Don’t worry too much if your spelling isn’t great — that’s what editing is for. DO try to write in an informal, conversational style. Skip the jargon, the overly complex sentences, and the passive-voice —  things that sound like a Congressional report or academic paper. Write like a human telling a story. Let this guy’s writing be your guide.

Skip the jargon, the overly complex sentences, and the passive-voice —  things that sound like a Congressional report or academic paper. Write like a human telling a story.

DO double-check your sources and information. If you cite facts and statistics, please include the source (with links, if possible). Include attribution when you quote someone directly. We shouldn’t even have to say it, but if you use a source, don’t just copy-paste phrases or sections of another article or reference — put it in quotes and cite it, or mention where the information came from.

If we accept your article, we’ll fact check it and do some editing. Don’t worry: the editor is not mean! Usually, folks are pretty happy with the finished product after her edits. But if not, you’ll have a chance to suggest changes — we’ll always send you a draft to review before we hit “publish.”

The best way of all to get a byline with us is to read a ton of Pursuit articles and get a sense of what we publish. Think about the subjects you know well that haven’t been fully explored. And if you really  want to ingratiate yourself to the Deciding Editor, read the Pursuit Magazine Style Manual.

If you’re not sure what to write, send an email introduction — let Kim know who you are and what your specialty is. She’ll brainstorm story ideas with you by phone or email.

What’s in it for me?

Haha! Not much! Pursuit has no budget and can’t pay for articles. We know — it totally bites. What’s even worse is that we don’t have the Big Media street cred of the NYT or WSJ. But we’re feisty underdogs with great big hearts and humility in spades, and we do have some fans among our fellow professionals. Heck, we’ve even been cited by the New York Times and linked to in the Washington Post.

So if you’re still here after that paragraph and looking for opportunities to get your message out, we’re here for you. With your article, we’ll include a short author bio (1-3 sentences), a link to your website, and any contact information you specify. We don’t have a massive audience, but it’s a loyal niche of uber-cool investigators. We’ll promote your work in all our social media feeds, and popular articles from our archive get good traffic over time. It’s a good way to get your name into the ether and establish yourself as a prominent voice in your chosen field.

Please send articles and pitches to managing editor Kim Green. We’ll try to respond fast! If you don’t hear back in two weeks, send a gentle nudge. And if we decline your submission, don’t be mad! Sometimes we just can’t figure out a way to make a story work. But if your idea is fresh, authoritative, and engaging, we’ll most likely take it, with pleasure.

We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, so please let us know if your story has been published elsewhere and if we have permission to republish it. We’ll acknowledge the original version and link back.

Thanks in advance for your submission. Welcome to the Pursuit contributors’ club!

Hal Humphreys
Executive Editor, Pursuit Magazine