Payment

Payment will be made within 30 days of receiving your copy and pictures, or invoice, whichever is later. If your bank account is in the UK, we’ll pay by BACS transfer. If your account is anywhere else, we’ll send it via PayPal because bank charges suck, so please include your linked PayPal email address on your invoice.

We make payments on submission of copy in good faith so if your interviewee pulls out, the exclusive we’ve agreed appears elsewhere, the editorial lines we based our commission on do not stand up, the copy is missing information, requires adds you’re not willing to complete or images pitched to us become unavailable, we’ll need the full fee back within 14 days.

Every article will be edited in-house, but if we find the feature needs a reinterview/rewrite, doesn’t fulfil the brief or the quality of writing isn’t up to scratch, we may ask you to rework the copy with specific pointers - however, we reserve the right to cancel the commission. In this rare circumstance, we won’t be able to pay you the full fee.

If your copy is overdue, we reserve the right to cancel the commission without notice, though we’ll usually try to get an update first. If we can’t reach you for an update despite numerous attempts, we reserve the right to cancel the commission and reject late copy without notice or payment.

We do understand sometimes things go wrong, or circumstances come into play that couldn’t possibly be foreseen, so please talk to us if a problem crops up or you need an extension.

terms of commissioning

We aim to run features within six months of receiving your copy (or six months after our launch if we commissioned you before we went live). If we haven’t, please give us a nudge as something may have gone wrong and we’d like the chance to fix it. Please note, we will commission ahead of time for Christmas.

If we’ve hung on to your feature for more than six months and we can’t run it for one reason or another - for instance, the Covid-19 pandemic has made the subject matter untenable - we won’t ask for the fee back.

In the rare scenario we change our minds about the feature (which we’ll work hard to avoid with skilful and selective commissioning), we will let you know as soon as possible and we won’t ask for the fee back.

You’ll always keep your byline with us.

Please be aware, we’ll expect you to have readback and approved your copy with all relevant parties (including experts and case studies) before filing it to us. Please either record your readback if completing it over the telephone, or keep the email chain where approval was given.

We will also give you a chance to see our edit before it goes live. If you feel our edit warrants a further readback, please go ahead and do it, though we reserve the right to readback our edit back directly. It’s important to us that our copy is accurate and our interviewees fully informed. Your interviewee will also need to email us directly to give consent for us to publish their story/pix.

Any pictures you provide to us must either be your/your case study’s collect photos and provided with permission to use, or if you’re sending any professional photos as part of your picture package, you are providing them to us having secured explicit permission from the photographer in writing/via email (or else they are yours to use as you wish i.e. rights free).

Rates

Our rates vary a little depending on if we’re buying first rights and how many words we’ve asked you to write. Typically, you can expect to be paid £100 for 1000 words, first rights. Our features range from 800-1500 words.

This entire platform is funded by our founder. In the future, as revenue increases, so will our fees. We’ll update this page, so it’s worth bookmarking.

Syndication

We syndicate some our content to newspapers, magazines and digital publications in the UK and abroad. We’ll always double-check your position on this before your feature goes live on Lacuna Voices, or before we talk to any titles about syndicating it. If you opt in, we’ll split any revenue 50/50. If you opt out, we won’t mind - it’s your prerogative as a freelancer and we respect your autonomy.

Please bear in mind most other publishers unfortunately operate a payment on publication policy so there may be a delay in payment for syndicated copy fees that is beyond our control.

When you file copy

Please always include the following information:

  • your preferred byline

  • your case study’s full name, age, address, telephone number(s) and email address for our records. You’ll also need to ask your interviewee to file the same info directly to us, along with their consent to publish their story/pictures, and confirm they’ve had a readback from you

  • any legal issues or concerns we need to be aware of (e.g. case study does not have custody of the children they’ve provided pictures of/there is a relevant court case pending etc)

  • file the picture package and name every image clearly (e.g. Stacy on holiday in Spain with her husband Tom in 2009. Must credit Joe Bloggs Photography). We prefer WeTransfer to DropBox.

  • Please file words, pictures, and your invoice together in one email, preferably responding to the last email in our commissioning chain so that we can easily keep track of everything we discussed in the process of commissioning your feature.

We think that covers it, but if we’ve missed something, or you feel unclear about anything on this page, please get in touch. We’re really happy to get to know you and help in any way we can.