Before You Apply

Membership is $150 a month, billed monthly, and you can cancel at any time. Applying is free and you're charged nothing unless you're accepted. There is no application fee and no separate fee per article.

The fee covers editorial time, your author page and distribution. It does not include coverage, links or placement, and it does not secure acceptance. A place in the network is earned through the application, and no fee will put a piece on the site that doesn't meet the standard. Contributors do not receive a fee for their articles.

We aim to return a decision within 10 business days of a complete application. If we need to verify a role or ask for an extra sample it can run to three weeks. We'll email you either way, so there's no need to chase.

The application must be completed by the person who will hold the byline, using their own work email. You may work with an editor or writer on your drafts, but the ideas, the experience and the final approval have to be yours, and the byline is non-transferable. Applications submitted by third parties on behalf of an unnamed client are declined automatically.

We ask for one original piece a month. Life happens, and the desk is reasonable about a quiet month, but members who publish nothing for two consecutive quarters are moved to inactive status and their author page is archived. Reactivating is a single email.

You can write from your own experience, and that's the point, but the article can't be about your company. Use your work as evidence for a broader argument a reader can apply. Any commercial interest in a company, product or sector you discuss must be disclosed in the piece itself. The promotional content section of the style guide sets out exactly where the line sits.

You can use AI tools for research, outlining, or tightening a draft you wrote. You may not submit AI-generated prose as your own writing, and you may never rely on an AI tool for facts, quotes, statistics or citations. Everything published under your byline must reflect your own judgement, and you are accountable for its accuracy. Submissions that read as machine-generated are returned unedited.

You retain copyright in your work. You grant Fairherst a perpetual, non-exclusive licence to publish, edit, distribute and syndicate it. You're free to republish the piece elsewhere after 30 days, provided you credit Fairherst as the original publisher and link to the original. Full terms are covered at onboarding.

You'll get an email explaining the reason at a high level. Most declines come down to samples that don't yet demonstrate the writing standard, or a subject area we already cover deeply. You're welcome to reapply after six months.

Yes. We publish in English and we're actively looking to broaden the geographies our contributors write from. Your writing needs to be publication-ready in English, but we have no restriction on where you're based.