Presentation And Organisation Of Material

Once you have made decisions regarding content, you can think about how items are to be presented.

There are no hard and fast rules about presentation, but it should fit well with your purpose, your style and your content. Some factors to take into account are:

• having a clear and interesting layout so that items can be found and read easily and willingly
• having a logical grouping of items so that any that relate to each other can be found together

• having a balance of items, so that the whole publication comes across as a coherent entity, rather than a collection of disparate sections
• having a consistent placing for regular items or features so that readers know where to find them

There is more on this topic in Chapter 4, ‘Deciding on style, frequency, format and design’.

Selection And Rejection Of Items For Publication

The editor’s decision on what to include is usually final. If this is your first venture into publishing, you may wonder on what basis you can, or should, include or reject items; you may also wonder how to communicate rejection to hopeful contributors.

Inclusion should depend on the extent to which material meets your publishing objectives, which should have been stated in your business plan. You should also consider the overall balance of any particular issue. In addition to these two points, some criteria for selection or rejection are as follows:

• Is the item of interest to most readers, or to only a small minority of them?
• Is the item well written and structured, or is it rambling and hard to follow?
• Is the item an appropriate length, or is it too long or too short?
• Is the item balanced and factually correct or is it biased and misleading?
• Is the item novel, or does it duplicate material already published?
• Is the item informative or is it simply promotional?
• Is the item a useful follow-up to earlier contributions or is it irrelevant?
• Is the item relevant to a particular ‘theme’ or is it unrelated?
• Is the item generally acceptable or is it likely to give offence to some readers?
• Is the item original or is it plagiarising (using another person’s material under your own name)?

If you have a list of criteria for acceptance, by definition you also have criteria for rejection; i.e. the contribution fails to meet one or more of your criteria. So, when rejecting an item, you can say why it has been rejected. Of course, some of the reasons are easier to communicate than others but, if you can accompany the rejection with some constructive advice, it makes it easier to accept. For example, you could say: ‘If you submit this at half the length it would be more acceptable, because we don’t have space for such long items’, or ‘We ran a very similar item to this last month, so it will be a while before we can cover this particular topic again’.