Want to contribute to DBB? Here's your chance

Detroit Bad Boys is entering its 10th season covering the Detroit Pistons. It began as a solo project in Oct. 2005 when I was an under-employed freelance writer looking for an excuse to write about my favorite sport and learn more about blogging. I thought I was late to the whole blogging game, but nine years later DBB is one of the oldest NBA blogs still going. I'm proud of that.

I've also had a lot of help. Within months of starting, I was joined by my friend Ian Cameron for a couple of seasons, and eventually Kevin Sawyer and Mike Payne. When DBB joined SB Nation during the 2009-10 season, I gained a co-managing editor in Brian Packey, who had started Motown String Music several months earlier. In time, Sean Corp joined the fun, as well as brgulker and revken and Shinons* and Kriz and bunch of other contributors and guest bloggers along the way.

We've always had an informal process for adding new writers. Most of the time, we simply reached out to regular readers who impressed us in the comments (and our comments are extremely impressive). That process worked, but we want to experiment with a new approach.

Here's a little secret you might not realize: less than 5 percent of the people who read DBB actually comment. To be honest, before I started a blog of my own, I rarely commented on other blogs -- and now that social media gives everyone a creative outlet without the hassle of fighting with WordPress or paying for a server, limiting the pool of potential contributors to long-time commenters might be preventing us from finding new writers.

So, for the first time in DBB's history, we're putting out an open call for contributors. I don't know how many writers we're going to add, but we'd like to add enough new voices to continue serving fresh, relevant, interesting articles several times a day to the thousands of readers who read this site. Maybe that's just 1-2 more writers, or maybe it's 5-6. We'll find out.

To be clear, these aren't paid positions, and if the idea of staying up late writing or spending lunch at your day job pounding out a quick post doesn't appeal to you, I get that. The people who want to do that are a different kind of person. I can't explain it, except that I'm one of them, and so are the regular voices you see on this site.

If you're one of those people -- the type of person who enjoys writing for the sake of writing, who has an interesting perspective on the game, who enjoys the nervous thrill of hitting publish and waiting for the first comment to roll in, or seeing the first fave or retweet or like -- we want to hear from you.

Experience isn't completely necessary, but a commitment for the entire season is -- the ideal contributor will be someone with interesting ideas who'd like to own a specific role. If you're not a writer but would like to help behind the scenes moderating comments, copyediting, or posting on social media, we'll consider that, as well. Whatever you'd like to do, maybe DBB can be your creative outlet on the side, or maybe it's the first step to a new career.

Now your thoughts.

10/5 Update: We're closing submissions for now -- thanks to everyone who applied! It's going to take a little bit longer for us to go through all of the applications, but we'll try to reply to everyone no matter what.