Submit Ideas
A good many of our writers are people just like you, customers who've stumbled onto our website, or lo and behold seen our shirts in a store or on the street. We never know from whence our next great idea will come--we have parents and cousins and children earning royalties for their ideas. We welcome yours too. If you wish to make submissions, please use the guidelines below. We cannot entertain ideas that do not conform to these rules, please. We just get too many!
Royalties run between 7.5¢ and 25¢ per shirt sold depending on the customer, but they usually average 10¢. Currently royalty payments to a small handful of successful writers averages more than $50,000 per month. Royalties are paid on a quarterly basis, one quarter in arears. Royalties are paid on designs that sell only; we do not pay for submissions. Acceptance of submissions is not a guarantee that they will be used, but we do promise they will be reviewed unless it becomes clear your style and our needs just aren't a match. We will reply acknowledging receipt of your submissions, but we will not be able to tell you what's been presented or sold. If you start to receive checks, you'll know!
Now and Zen is scrupulous about our royalty payments. No submission will be sold withough paying royalties, with three known exceptions. The known instances in which royalties would not be paid are:
- We are not paid by the customer for the order (never happened yet).
- An order is returned over complaints (sometimes--rarely--we'll put a shirt out that gets recalled), or:
- A design presented is discovered to pre-exist in the market. We run copyright and Google checks before launching any design to make sure it doesn't belong to someone else, but if something slips through the cracks, and we end up running a slogan you gave us that can be proven to have belonged to someone else, no royalties will be paid.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Now and Zen is regularly looking for slogans and designs in the following categories: Young Men's, Boys 8-20, Boys 4-7, Infants and Toddler Boys (ITB), Juniors, Girls, Infants and Toddler Girls (ITG), Activewear (Sports), and Holiday (Christmas, Valentine's Day, St. Paddy's Day, Independence Day, Halloween). We are always looking for ideas in these categories throughout the year.
- If your submissions feel viable we will put your name on our Writers List. You will receive regular releases telling you our latest stories and accomplishments, but more importantly you will be notified whenever we have a specific and urgent need.
- Please make sure your name and contact information appear on every page of your submissions. Follow your name with your initials. We use your initials to assign style numbers to your ideas.
- We ask that you accumulate your lists of ideas. Please don't send one or two, then follow with additional emails saying "I just thought of another one". If you start out as a potential one hit wonder, you're welcome to send that one. If you start to think of more, please collect them and send them together.
- If you're want your ideas to be taken seriously, they must be seriously viable ideas. Just as everyone has a screenplay, everyone has an idea they think would make a great tee shirt ("All my friends think this would sell like mad!"). Unfortunately it doesn't usually turn out that way. If you're a trend hound and you already think you know the market, great. If you aren't, please spend time at department stores and at the mall studying what's out there before swearing your idea will make millions.
- Please edit your submissions with a heavy hand and a sharp knife. Really consider what you're sending in after your brainstorm to make sure it's the best in that round. Consider whether you could actually see every slogan as a shirt on the wall of Target or Hot Topic and the like. See whether your ideas make others laugh, or at least elicit compliments over their cleverness. If we receive large lists of mostly unviable ideas from any one writer, we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater; the potential needle in the haystack doesn't justify combing through. (Sorry for mixing metaphors.) This means you should not send umpteen variations on a theme. If you have a handful of ways of stating an idea, pick the best one. If it needs a slight rewrite, we'll figure it out.
- Please put your initials after the slogans you submit. If you don't, they will be counted as an "NR", which means "No Royalty".
- If you are responding to a Writers release that specifies a deadline, we can only accept submissions received by the deadline. Submissions received after the deadline will go into the folder for the next round.
- Please submit your lists on as few sheets as necessary. Single spacing is preferred. Please delete any footers, headers, and the original email request from your return email.
- Occasionally it happens that we have to ask a writer to stop sending ideas. We try to put it as delicately and gratefully as possible. Sometimes it just isn't a match. Doesn't mean we aren't grateful for the effort.
- To save us all a lot of trouble, we ask that you yourself do a Google check before submitting your ideas to make sure you didn't see them somewhere and forget. After all, everything comes to our unconscious, somehow.
SEND ALL SUBMISSIONS TO mike@nowandzen.com
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