Click here for the 2012 Best Music Writing submission ballot
Best Music Writing has an open nomination system for all music writing lovers to nominate great pieces of writing from the preceding year.
We seek brilliant features, essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction, fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, and journal articles on musical and music culture-related topics. We also actively seek work that doesn't fit into these categories-more whimsical and/or emergent forms of music writing, such as tweets, blogs, Tumblr posts, substantive online comments/discussions, and joint writing efforts.
We use the term "music" broadly to include all genres, time periods, and performers and "writing" to mean all work published in periodical form either print or online. The book collects work from the calendar year prior to the date on the book (so the 2012 edition collects writing from 2011). We include December/January and winter 2011/2012 periodicals as 2011 materials.
Please send your own best work, work you've edited or overseen, great work of your friends and colleagues, or work that you have admired in passing throughout the year.
If you are an editor, please limit the number of submissions to your publication's best, most favored, most original and important works, as we do get quite a large number of submissions and only reprint 30-40 pieces per year (and, historically, never more than three from any one publication). We ask that the limit be 15 per title, but you are more than welcome to ask your writers to nominate themselves as individuals or have other members of the editorial staff send their recommendations.
If you are nominating as an individual, please send no more than 3-5 of your best pieces from the year. You are more than free to nominate other people's work alongside your own.
The 2012 ballot can be found through this link. The submission process will end on February 28, 2012. We ask that you use that form even if you are emailing attachments or sending mail versions of things so we can keep track of all submissions.
In an ideal world, the submissions would be formatted with the following information:
Author Name, "Article Title," Publication, Date
-Please email BMW nomination files to bestmusicwritingseries at gmail dot com
-Hard copies of articles and whole publications are accepted to:
Best Music Writing 2012
603 West 115th Street #120
New York, NY 10025
Submission note:
All submissions made by online form should be considered received. We will briefly acknowledge all emails and packages by follow up email. Please allow two weeks from mailing for follow up. Once the selections have been made for the anthology, all contributors will be contacted to ask for reprint permission. Only selectees will be notified.
Please check the "More of the Best Music Writing" section of each year's book to see if your work was selected for this honorable mention.