Submission Guidelines

We are happy to accept article submissions at this time. Please read all the submission guidelines carefully before submitting.

NB: We are ALL volunteers, and therefore we are not able to pay writers. St. Joseph’s Shelf is a ministry, and we invite you to join our team in sharing your writing to help others grow in their spiritual lives.

What We’re Looking For

We recommend subscribing to the St. Joseph’s Shelf newsletter and reading through our articles to get a sense of what types of articles we publish. Some aspects of the articles we like are:

  1. Solid adherence to the Catholic Faith.  No ambiguity on the Church’s position regarding an issue.
  2. Universal relevance for laypeople.  No promotion of a specific spirituality (traditionalists, charismatics, Franciscans, etc.)
  3. Depth & originality.  No mere reiterating of basic facts or excessive citing of material from outside sources.
  4. A focus on the ordinary & the practical.  “Practical” can include more reflective pieces that help a person appreciate or understand a certain truth (like the Eucharist) better.
  5. Content will be preferably timeless (i.e. not centered around current politics, news, etc.).
  6. Friendly/personal tone with a positive outlook.
  7. Use of accessible layman’s language without dumbing things down.

Articles about theological concepts or long, personal stories without any practical connection to the Faith are great, but not generally what we’re looking to publish here.

You can also review the Who Are We? page for more about St. Joseph’s Shelf.

Policies

  1. Articles should generally be 500–1,000 words. If your submission is over or under this target length, we may consider it if we are particularly impressed with the content. But for your first submission, we recommend adhering to this guideline.
  2. Your article must have solid writing – correct use of grammar; subheadings; a good opening and closing. Please proofread and edit your article before submitting. We will not accept articles that are poorly written or are in need of substantial revision.
  3. We accept submissions from all writers, whether or not you’ve been published before.
  4. Writers must be 18 or older to submit an article.
  5. We retain the right to publish your article in perpetuity digitally on St. Joseph’s Shelf. However, you retain the right to publish your article anywhere else.

How to Submit

Please email thewriters@stjosephshelf.com with your story attached.

File types accepted: .DOCX, .DOC, .RTF

Use the subject line: “SUBMISSION: [title of your article]”

Review Process

Our average response time is 1–3 weeks. We will email you when your article has either been reviewed. We will respond with one of two outcomes:

  1. Acceptance – Every accepted article will be edited for grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc., by our team. The writer will have a chance to review any edits before the article is officially accepted and published.
  2. Rejection – We may reject an article if it is poorly written, too long or too short, or simply not the right type of content for St. Joseph’s Shelf.

Unless we specifically ask you to rewrite and resubmit an article, please do NOT send us unsolicited rewrites of rejected articles.

Questions

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns by emailing us at thewriters@stjosephshelf.com or using our contact form.

Happy writing!

~Amber & Rose