You’re looking to pitch us, which is great news. Here’s what we’re looking for. First, send your pitches to editorial@the-fence.com; if you send them to an editor directly, they will only forward them here immediately after.

Secondly, if you haven’t read the magazine, read the magazine. As a quarterly, we have a pretty hard-and-fast rule on repeating story themes, and if your pitch reminds us of another story we’ve published, we usually say no instantaneously. That said, we’re equally quick to decline things on the bleeding edge of now: don’t send us anything that either became famous last week, or won’t be famous by the time we go to print.

We demarcate our stories into four sections – ‘Facts’, ‘Features’, ‘Fiction’ and ‘Etc.’ – and having a rough idea of where yours might fit best is always helpful. But here are the things we specifically want.

You’re at the top of our list. If you feel you have a particularly unique insight into a company, an industry or a phenomenon, we will do anything to get you in our pages. In five years, we’ve had anonymous peeks inside the BBC, the probation service, the SAS, the Square Mile, television, film, theatre, digital media and publishing. What’s the one weird thing about your job that nobody ever talks about? No matter where you work, let us know.

Some of the best prose we have ever published has been through personal essays, from John Banville writing about the girl from Liverpool who first stole his heart, to Ella Fox-Martens on the man she crossed the world to live with, despite never having met him before. Send us your very very very best – and it has to be your best, because those two essays are the standard, and if your idea isn’t as strong, you’re better off pitching a feature.

The main event. We only have five feature slots per issue, twenty per year, and so the barriers for entry are as high as they can be. This is a space for barnstormers: stories that snowball into national news; profiles pricking at previously untouchable figures; beautifully written essays on cultural icons. There’s space, as ever, for humour, and we are always keen to cover the whole breadth of the UK and Ireland.

We aim to publish two a year. You will receive as many words as you need, editorial support, legal support, everything to get the story over the line. But with these stories, we need real meat on the bone: lots of sources, reams of notes, meetings with us to work on the tone, tenor and structure of the final story. Be ambitious and rigorous, and read our previous investigations on the Diocese of London, Queen Ethelburga’s College and the Institute of Art and Ideas before pitching.

We’re reaching out to agents directly, and if you’re interested, get your agent to email us at editorial@the-fence.com. We don’t like to run extracts or previously written work unless you’re both good and internationally famous (not one or the other), so keep this in mind when approaching.

We’re looking for hyper-original, graphic-led joke ideas, like Nicky Haslam’s Cleromantic Hexagram, a piece of esoterica from the back pages of Issue 19 which uses Eastern philosophy to divine which ‘common’ items will appear on the legendary interior designer’s annual tea towel. Or our Small-Plates-o-Matic from Issue 21, which allows you to plot your own menu for a fictional, terrible London restaurant. Feel free to go really weird with it here, you’d be surprised what we’d take – so long as it’s funny.

Everything is paid. Smaller stuff gets less than longer stuff, easier stuff gets less than harder stuff, because we’re a small magazine and we have to value each story individually against the costs of editing and printing it. But we pay well, and on publication, so don’t worry.

That’s everything. Go to editorial@the-fence.com next and send something over, let’s see what we can do together.