Pitching Your Story to IHTOV

by editor Michele Catalano

Here are some things I’m looking for: personal narrative essays about a specific record, about collecting vinyl, about your favorite record store or why you buy variants or how you came to love a certain record. I want stories about your first purchase or your first visit to a record store. I want to hear about your passion for vinyl, for music, for collecting. I want odd stories about novelty records, and lamentations on greatest hits volumes and box sets. 

The possibilities are endless, really. No pitch is too weird or offbeat for me. I want variety on the site, not the same old records being talked over and over. I want to read about how your favorite record skipped when you were little and you still sing it that way. I want to know why you have three copies of the same Bjork album, or about that 45 you treasured when you were a kid. 

Interview your favorite record store owner. Tell me about handing down records to your kids and sharing the music with them. Tell me about making your own records, musicians. Talk to me about recording and engineering and mixing. 

The most important thing I want to stress is you do not have to be a great writer to write passionately about something you love. I don’t care about your credentials. I can work with you.

What I am not looking for: anything written with the help of AI (I run everything through a detector), AI images, or any more stories about records that skip or broken turntables.

Here are the basic guidelines:

Please send in Google Docs or Word.

Songs get quotation marks, albums are italicized

Please do not indent paragraphs

Include a bio with your submission 

Include any image you want me to use as the “cover” to your story

Please do not embed the pictures in your document, send them separately to my email.

Pitch me at pitches@ihavethatonvinly.com with IHTOV PITCH in your header. 

Please note I only take reprints that appeared on a blog or personal page.

If you are sending a whole essay, please use Google Docs and do not embed images in the doc. You can email the pictures separately. 

IHTOV pays $10 per essay/interview.

Thanks!