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We'll be sending out a longer list with our upcoming themes soon, but for now Snap Judgment is accepting pitches with a quick turn around time for Valentines day. If anyone has an already produced piece or a live story that might fit our general format (plot driven narrative arch, twists and turns, surprising ending) send that along too please.
Below find some general instructions and inspiration about pitching to Snap. Please send any pitches or questions to me directly at adlerstein@snapjudgment.org.
Looking forward to reading your submissions,
Ana
Why Should I Pitch To Snap?
1) We pay well. $95/minute for your first three stories. $105/minute after that. We also give everyone a $250 kill fee. And our stories are long (see next line).
2) We give you time to tell your story. The average Snap piece is now 8-15 minutes. That means fewer editorial puppies being killed, and more time being spent on scoring and mixing each piece.
3) Your story stands a very good chance of making it to air very quickly. We have programming gaps for every single upcoming theme. That means if we like your pitch, we will not put it in a maybe pile for a year. Once it's produced (provided it's not killed), it will in all likelihood be on the air shortly.
4) You still own the story and can create your own director's cut. You can't sell something (say on PRX) that's too similar to what we did on the show, but you can always put your own version on your website or resume if you prefer. If you make a story that's substantially different, you can sell it to anyone after we air our version.
5) You can produce cool old stories with no pegs. See next section!
Where Can I Find Stories For Snap?
How Do I Know The Story Is Right For Snap
1) Is the story not just a story, but a tale? In other words, does it have characters with wants and needs and hopes and fears, scenes that play out in a chronological order in which said characters make important decisions and discover new things, and some kind of central tension that gets resolved in an unexpected way over the course of a narrative arc? If so, then it’s a tale, and we’re interested.
2) Is the story cinematic? In other words, will it provide us with scenes rich enough in detail that the listener can see events playing out in their mind’s eye? Because we’re not interested in narratives in which things happen on an abstract level. We want the listener to be transported to a specific time and place.
3) Is there something new about it? Every Snap Judgment story needs to have an unexpected wrinkle, a new element, that makes the listener stop what they’re doing and pay attention. Sometimes the new thing is just the fact that you’ve discovered a great talker, but nine times out of ten it’s a unique premise or plot element. If we feel like we’ve heard this one before (maybe not this precise story, but something super similar) we’ll probably pass.
How Should I Structure My Pitch?
There's actually a really simple trick to this: Don’t pitch us a public radio story. Pitch us a MOVIE. A typical public radio pitch invariably describes what a story is broadly about, more often than not some kind of compelling concept; a movie pitch summarizes a sequence of events. Give us the enticing premise, introduce the compelling characters, then describe the thing that sets the story in motion, the rising stakes, the unexpected development, the third act twist, and the ending that somehow feels unexpected and inevitable at the same time. Okay, it doesn’t need all those things, but you get the idea. Anything that sounds like a movie (or a short film) will definitely get our attention. Because that’s what we do, we make cinematic stories that just happen to be audio-based — usually from a first person perspective. And if you can’t pitch your story as a sequence of events? Well, then, it probably wasn’t a Snap story in the first place.