We at Exmoor News welcome copy from readers and contributors alike. If you have an interesting story to tell or news or events which will be of interest to our readers across southern Exmoor we would like to hear from you. We welcome these contributions to the magazine and we print them for free.
Please limit your copy to approximately 100 – 200 words (550 words is approximately one page) and send to exmoornews@gmail.com. If you would like to be included in our email reminder sent to our contributors please email us and ask to be added to the list. The reminders go out about two weeks prior to the next deadline.
Sending copy to Exmoor News – our 9 top tips
We’re delighted that so many of you see Exmoor News as an ideal way to reach the southern Exmoor community, and we’re always pleased to receive your regular notices, event information, and articles. Our new, larger format means that each issue now includes around 30 different contributions, from short announcements to feature-length articles, as well as many advertisements for local businesses.
We do our best to check all the copy we receive but time is always tight between the copy deadline, planning and designing the layout, and sending the final version of the magazine to the printer. So it’s a great help if the copy you send us has already been checked for accuracy, is in a form that’s easy for us to work with, and reaches us in good time. With that in mind, we’ve put together our top tips for getting the best out of Exmoor News.
1) Keep it simple: send your copy either in a basic Word file or as plain text within an email.
2) Please do check spelling, punctuation, and grammar. In particular, make sure that people’s names (real or fictional) are spelled correctly, also titles of books or films, for example. If you are using a spellchecker, do make sure that it’s set to English (UK), not English (US)! And if your copy includes dates, days of the week, and times please do ensure that all are correct.
3) No fancy formatting please! Word offers all sorts of formatting (layout styles) and we know how tempting it can be to add some fancy flourishes or symbols. But these can get lost in translation by the magazine design software we use, so it’s best to leave them out – and leave the layout design to us.
4) Keep capital letters to a minimum – essential capitals only, please. A large number of unnecessary capitals in an article or a paragraph make it hard to read. Words written entirely in capitals are even harder! The same applies to text written in bold.
5) Generally speaking, the titles of books, films, plays or pieces of music etc are written in italics rather than having quote marks round them; keep quote marks for speech.
6) If we have given you a word count for the article, please do keep to this. While a few words ( a maximum of 10) above or below the word count are fine, if your article is too long, we’ll have to send it back to you for editing.
7) Read your copy out loud before you send it to us. Does it flow; will it make sense to a reader? Would an extra comma or two help?
8) It’s always hard to spot our own mistakes so, if you can, ask someone else to check what you’ve written – before you press that ‘send’ button!
9) And finally, if possible, don’t leave it until the last minute (ie the copy deadline) before sending us your article or announcement. The sooner you send material to us, particularly if it’s a long article, the more time we have to ensure that what appears in print is correct.