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What is The Mill Magazine?

A LOCAL EXCHANGE INSPIRING VIBRANT, PROSPEROUS COMMUNITIES

The Mill Magazine boldly showcases localism, community building ideas, and modern ways to build sustainable small town lifestyles.

Each print edition celebrates the local entrepreneur in an award-winning publication by highlighting local, independently-owned businesses alongside forward-thinking feature articles on self-improvement, lifestyle, culture, and provisions for the local influencer. The Mill Magazine – Carolina Piedmont print edition distributes to the Upstate region of South Carolina and the Metrolina region of North Carolina. We are independent, impartial, and honest.

The online edition supports the themes of the print edition fueled by new, unexpected, and emotionally engaging stories. The Mill Magazine online provides inspiring and high-quality content about and for small-town residents across the United States working to shape their town.

All editions are targeted to curious, passionate readers who want to learn how to improve their community and are more concerned with the value of an experience rather than the price. They are professional, intelligent, community influencers.

What is The Mill Magazine's Content Strategy?

We tell readers about community leaders, innovative small business owners, and ways to improve their lifestyle in ways they’ve never seen and show them a new way of inspiring their family, friends, and community to grow towards independence and sustainability. With an open mind, an eye for a vision, the power to motivate, we inspire our readers to fall in love with their world again.

We believe the nation has become imbalanced, and the mass media keeps pushing a national agenda. We’ve forgotten to celebrate the small town, its people, and the backbone of this country…the small business owner. We want to support small town individuality, self-reliance, and help people return to caring about the small businesses in their community.

The Mill Magazine celebrates small town living.

To do that, we tell stories with unexpected angles. These stories are emotional, relatable, or educational.

• Emotional: Stories that will make the reader react. Make them laugh, cry, feel empowered, or inspired. The emotional stories will leave the reader feeling like they watched a great movie, and want to share it with their friends.

• Relatable: Relatable stories are inspirational or an unexpected human interest angle that encourages the reader to connect with the character. The stories should revolve around small towns and small town values.

• Educational: Stories that will capture the audience and teach them something without feeling like a textbook. Usually, something that the reader can use in cocktail conversations, at the next community leader meeting, or the PTA. Educational stories let the readers humbly brag about their knowledge while teaching them something about themselves.

How are we doing this?

• We seek writers that craft narratives that provide compelling, immersive, and contextual stories that give readers a depth of understanding and paint a picture.

• We take our readers on a journey, no matter when they find the articles. Our articles are non-seasonal and without a time limit. These “evergreen” stories matter today and will matter for the next several years to come.

• We’re focusing on people. Stories told about and through the perspective of noteworthy small town residents that are shaping their community. We highlight the people that are activists for their community, are innovative small business owners and are people that are helping their small towns lead prosperous lives.

• We provide context. We don’t just tell the reader why they need to eat better and support small businesses, we illustrate where it is working and explain why it is important to be a part of changing their community to be better, vibrant, and prosperous.

• We look for high-quality photo submissions included with stories, so that all the photography on the website meets our high standard of excellence.

In short, we’re looking for stories that inspire people to improve themselves and their community through a strong, context-heavy narrative and an encounter or character that makes the story emotional, relatable, or educational.

What topics are we looking for?

What types of articles are we looking for?

What are we likely to reject?

You will likely not get a response from us if your pitch falls into one of these categories.

• Not following the Contributor Guideline's General Rules
• Self-promoting articles
• Any ideas that are too general
• Substance-less lists, bullets of venues, and ideas without real writing attached
• Stories pegged to a seasonal or with a “why now” hook, (ie, we should do this story because it’s spring)
• Event-driven pieces
• Articles less than 500 words
• Pieces that don’t keep the TMM audience in mind (eg. Living in the Big Apple)
• Local News Stories

PITCH US

Author Voice

The tone should be evocative, authentic, entertaining, and inspiring, aimed at professional and well-educated readers. Please look through the latest content on TheMillMagazine.com to get an idea of the style and tone we’re looking for. We shifted to a new editorial vision in Spring 2015, so any story that ran before then is not a good example of what we’d run now.

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Can I submit an article for the print issue?

The articles in the print edition are assigned by the Editor-in-Chief. The Mill Magazine is always looking for great writers and the Editor-in-Chief does tap into the writing talent on TheMillMagazine.com for the print issue, however, there is no guarantee that an online contributor will be assigned an article for the print edition. The Editor-in-Chief does not accept pitches.

Do you pay?

TheMillMagazine.com offers “trade for promotion” compensation to online contributors by publishing and promoting their work, which includes author bio, profile picture, and web/social links. Print contributors receive paid compensation for contracted assignments at an agreed rate.