People who write for you, or who take advertising in your magazine, need to know what you require from them. It is helpful to have two sets of information – one for contributors and one for advertisers. You can include some of this information in the magazine itself, you can include it in printed documents that can be sent to people, you can have it as an attachment to be sent with emails and you can include it on your website. Some sample guidance documents are given in Appendix 3.
Guidance For Contributors
Some of the information that you should consider providing for contributors is detailed below.
What Kind Of Contributions You Welcome
This should outline whether you take articles, letters, book reviews, news items, events listings, photographs or other illustrations, and so forth.
Your Copy Dates
Copy dates are the dates by which material should be sent to you for inclusion in the magazine. You may want to have the same copy dates for editorial material and for advertisements, or you may accept advertisements later than other copy. You will need to decide whether you can allow any leeway on these dates, because copy often arrives late and you should have a policy for dealing with this. Advertisements that are late can cause problems but, as they generate income, you may wish to deal with late arrivals more leniently than late editorial material.
The Length Contributions Should Be
The average person reads around 200–350 words a minute, given a type size of 10–12 points. Assuming an average A4 size magazine page contains about 900 words, it will take around three minutes to read. The longer each item
is, the fewer items you can get into the magazine, so you will need to decide if you want a small number of long items, a large number of small items or a mixture of the two – and then invite contributions accordingly. For magazines, a combination of short and longer items works well, as it gives variety and is not too demanding in terms of the time it takes to read. When inviting contributions, you should specify how many words they should contain, not the number of pages they should take up. You can be flexible with type sizes (either increasing or decreasing them) and with ‘leading’ (the spaces between lines of type) if you need to make items fit particular spaces.
What Additional Material Is Required
This is particularly important for longer contributions, when you may wish to ask for photographs of or biographical/promotional information on the contributor, additional illustrations, references, and so forth.
How To Credit Sources
Many contributors refer to material which has originated with other people and you need to give them an indication of how to credit such sources. For example, articles may contain references to other published works, to the ideas of third parties or to personal correspondence. In such instances, the principles of ‘intellectual property’, ‘copyright’ and ‘trademarking’ are relevant.
Very simply, these principles mean that you cannot use another person’s ideas, or reprint text, without permission – there are exceptions for some purposes, such as book reviews, but this is a serious issue that needs proper consideration. If you wish to be safe, you should read further on this topic, or take legal advice. See the resources list for more information on this (Appendix 4).
Who Retains Copyright
Copyright is the term used for ‘ownership’ of published material. Normally the person who creates such material owns the copyright. However, it is possible for copyright to be transferred to others – for example, if an employee writes something on behalf of an employing organisation it may be that the copyright belongs to the employer. You need to specify whether you wish to take ownership of material printed in your magazine, whether copyright will remain with the authors or whether you will both have rights over material produced. For example, you may wish to retain the right to reproduce items again – perhaps in compilations of extracts from the magazine – or the right to publish items in different forms –
for example on
your website. Again, this is a complex issue on which you should obtain proper professional advice. You will also need to ensure that contributors to your magazine confirm that there are no other, pre-existing, copyrights on material they send to you or that, if there are, they have permission to include such material in their submissions to you.