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How to submit articles
Submission Guidelines for the IPMS Stockholm's site
| Every so often we receive questions from fellow modellers
asking how to submit material to this site. Here is how.
The IPMS Stockholm site is maintained solely by the voluntary submissions of text, articles, photos and drawings. There is no editorial team in the word's traditional meaning, just a network of individuals who have been kind enough to support this project with documentation of their work. Who can contribute?Our writers come from all over the world, IPMS members or otherwise. Anyone is welcome to submit an article. You do qualify, too. There is nothing particularly difficult about submitting an article. If you can build a scale model, write some words about it, take and scan some photographs, then you can become a contributor. The most common misconception I get from people is "You have so many fine models in this magazine, my models are not good enough to write about". I can assure you that in 99.9% of cases this is not true. Most of our readers are intermediate modellers like you and me, and they do like to read about real-life modelling experiences, including all the rights and wrongs. A great article is not made by the model - however nice - it's how you write about it!
Submitting textThe text of your article can be submitted either as a plain email message, a Microsoft Word Document, an RTF (Rich Text Format) document, or HTML. You do not need to spend time doing fine text layout, mounting pictures etc. I usually do all the layout stuff. You can use italics or bold in your text if you want to emphasize certain words or phrases. The text should be written in English. If you have the necessary software, it will be appreciated if you spell-check your text before submitting it. You can make the text as detailed or brief as you find necessary. The advantage of web publishing is that we don't need to clip texts because of space limitations. The editor will read your work, check for any spelling and grammar errors, perhaps split some longer paragraphs and add subtitles, maybe develop a meaning somewhere to explain things better - that's about it. These rules are a guide, not absolute truth. For example, we have translated shorter texts from Spanish, Portuguese or Norwegian. Feel free to ask if you need any special assistance. Submitting photosA picture is worth a thousand words - this is particularly true when it comes to modelling articles. Although there are some articles where photographs may be substituted by textual description or simple sketches, you article will generally look much better if it contains relevant photos. In-progress model construction shots are also much appreciated! Photos can be taken either with a traditional camera, developed and scanned into the computer, or taken directly with a digital camera. There are also other options, I have even received model photos taken with a webcam (a small video camera attached directly to a computer), which were challenging to take, but in the end produced quite reasonable results! Your photos should preferably be 800x600 pixels in size - or larger. We can also accept 640x480, below that things get a bit difficult. There is one exception: photos previously prepared for or posted on another website can be accepted as they are. Image formats of JPEG, TIFF or BMP are all accepted. JPEG should be only moderately compressed (no visible loss of image quality). All this means that if you send us pictures directly off your digital camera or scanner, they should be just perfect. We will always process your images to optimise them for the site. The usual editing operations include resize, cropping, color correction and compression. This is why we prefer to receive your images in rather high resolution and only moderately compressed so that we can comfortably work with them. General article guidelinesWe'd be more than glad to see your personal story about the subject - there is no requirement for any formal kit reviews, previews, ratings, technical data or the like. I always encourage our contributors to make their own choices of what particulars they'd like to write about. Some focus on modelling techniques, some on history, others on the kit. Your imagination and personal interest should be the best advisors here. Just in case your imagination runs dry at the beginning, here is but one example of the questions that a model article could address.
If you want a particular placement of pictures within the text, put a little note in parentheses where they should be (like mymodel_01.jpg). As we publish our Magazine roughly once o month, we try to plan our contents 1-2 months in advance. It means that it usually takes 1 or 2 months to see your article online even if we usually try to keep this time as short as possible. Lastly, the most important thing is to just give it a try. Good luck and welcome onboard! |
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