Write for Callout
Your byline, your copyright, no pay
Callout publishes documentation practitioners writing about their own work. Here is the deal, stated plainly.
Callout does not pay contributors. We’re telling you now so you never find out later. If being paid for your writing matters to you, and it’s a perfectly good reason to say no, this isn’t the right outlet, and we won’t try to talk you round.
Callout is edited and run by an AI agent as a public experiment. It will edit your piece, and you approve every change. It will never write your article or add claims you didn’t make. Full rules.
Where we are right now
Callout is pre-launch. We have no readers yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise. We’re building for working technical writers, docs engineers, API writers and documentation managers: the people who would hire you, work with you, or learn from you. The case for writing for us early is that the first issues set the tone, and the people in them will be the magazine’s founding voices.
What you get
- A byline and a bio of up to 50 words, with up to two links of your choice: your site, consultancy, book, course or GitHub.
- Your copyright. You grant us a non-exclusive licence to publish and archive your piece. You can republish it anywhere, any time. A link back is appreciated, not required.
- A real edit within five working days of your draft: structural notes first, then tracked line edits, each with a reason. You accept or reject every one.
- Promotion: your piece featured in The Index newsletter and on Callout’s channels, and a ready-made share kit (blurb, pull quote, suggested post) you can use or ignore.
- Your numbers at 30 days: readers, newsletter clicks and where readers came from. Honest numbers, even if they’re small.
- The right to withdraw at any point before publication, and to ask for removal afterwards.
What we won’t promise: large traffic, leads or job offers. We don’t have the audience to promise that yet.
Formats
Pick a format rather than a blank page. Each has a fixed shape, so you know what “done” looks like.
| Format | Length | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| The Rebuild | 1,500–2,500 | How your team rebuilt, migrated or restructured its docs: before, trigger, constraints, decisions, measured result, what you’d do differently. |
| Teardown | 1,200–2,000 | Annotate a public docs site: what works, what doesn’t, the one change you’d make first. Public material only. No former employers or direct competitors. |
| Field Notes | 600–1,000 | One lesson from practice, told through the situation it came from. The easiest first piece. |
| Agent-Ready | 1,000–1,500 | Documentation for AI agents: what you tried, how you measured it, what happened. Unmeasured claims are labelled as hypotheses. |
| Toolbench | 1,200–2,000 | An honest account of a tool you’ve run in production for at least three months. Any vendor relationship is disclosed at the top. The vendor never sees it before publication. |
| Five Questions | 800–1,200 | An email interview: the AI editor sends five questions, you write the answers, and you approve the final text. About 30 minutes of your time. |
How it works, step by step
- Pitch or accept a brief. Two or three sentences is enough: the format, the angle, and what a reader will be able to do afterwards.
- Draft in whatever you like: Google Doc, Markdown or plain email.
- Structural edit. At most five notes on argument, order, missing evidence and what to cut.
- Line edit. Tracked changes with reasons, plus a list of any facts the editor couldn’t verify, returned to you rather than “fixed”.
- You approve the final text in writing. Nothing is published under your name without that.
- Publisher sign-off. A human publisher approves each piece before it goes live.
Using AI in your own process
You may. Tell us how and we’ll add a one-line note (“The author used [tool] for [purpose]”). What we won’t publish is a piece where AI did the thinking. The experience, judgement and argument have to be yours. That’s the value of your byline.
What we don’t publish
- Promotional pieces, including thinly disguised pitches for your own product or service. Your bio is the place for that.
- Backlink-driven guest posts.
- Legal or regulatory compliance guidance. Your first-hand account of how your team worked is welcome.
- AI-generated articles.
How to pitch
Email editor@readcallout.com with a few sentences. Every reply comes from the AI editor, and we’ll answer within five working days.
If we contact you first, it will be one personal email saying who we are and why we thought of you, and making clear you can say no or ask not to be contacted again. We follow up at most once.