Small Town Life Magazine

Small Town Life Magazine

Contributor’s Guidelines

Last Updated May 2002

Overview

Small Town Life Magazine a friendly, general-interest magazine dedicated to people looking for warm, fuzzy, positive stories. Our headquarters is located in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and we have a branch office in Indiana, PA. Our distribution by retail store is mainly located in Indiana, Jefferson, Clearfield, Clarion, Elk, Cambria, and Armstrong Counties in Pennsylvania. Our distribution through subscriptions and sales over the Internet reach across the United States.

Small Town Life Magazine is sold in stores for a retail price of $2.95 per issue. A 12-issue subscription is $30 which includes mailing to anywhere in the continental United States.

Contributors Welcome

One of the items in Small Town Life Magazine’s mission statement is “to provide a publication where new writers, photographers, and artists can come to get their work published.” We encourage people to submit items for publication in Small Town Life Magazine.

This does not mean that it is easy to get published in Small Town Life Magazine. We receive submissions every week from people all around the country. It takes time to review submissions. It may take several weeks to hear back from us regarding a submission. When you do hear back, you will either be told that we can use your work or that we can not use it and the reason why. If you are turned down, we encourage you to take the comments we provide seriously and try again. If you are serious about wanting to be published, we will do our best to work with you so we can use the submission.

Things You Should Know

At this time, there is not a budget to pay contributors for unsolicited work. So if you are published with us, you may have the benefits of “fame” but not cold hard cash. Published contributors are welcome to use Small Town Life Magazine in their portfolios and to use the magazine as a reference as they apply for work at other publications. We love seeing our contributors do well.

We request that you submit to us only work that has not been previously published. By submitting to us, you are giving us permission to publish your work both in a single issue of Small Town Life Magazine and in any future publications that feature items from Small Town Life. This may include compilation works, web page summaries of the

magazine, etc. Although we are retaining the right to use your work, we do not take complete ownership of it. In other words, even if you are published in Small Town Life, you have the right to submit your work to other newspapers or magazines as you see fit.

Please note that some media sources require that your work be “not previously published.” If you do get the opportunity to publish your work a second time, Small Town Life Magazine would appreciate being listed as the original publisher of the work: for example, “This article was originally published in Small Town Life Magazine in May of 2002.” Please note that this is requested but not required. We encourage our talented freelancers to actively pursue their careers. We want to help your career, not limit it. If you have any questions on this or any other topic, feel free to send them to the editor at .

Theme and Tone

All articles submitted should be “positive” in tone. We are not a hard news or investigative reporting magazine. We are not looking for journalistic articles about controversial subjects. We are looking for articles that leave readers “feeling good” after reading the magazine.

We encourage all writers to have their names listed with their articles. We discourage pen names and anonymous articles. Part of the appeal of the magazine is having the reader recognize both the subject of the article and the author. We also invite new contributors to send us a photo and bio to be used on our contributor’s page (page 40 of every issue) where we introduce some of the people who have contributed to that issue.

Editing

So you have spent hours on your submission. You have agonized over every word and punctuation mark – and we accepted your work. Congratulations! Now, prepare to be edited. It is a simple fact of life that everyone gets edited. It doesn’t mean that you are a bad writer or that you made a mistake. Editing can be done to correct mistakes, to make the article easier to read for our audience, or just to fit into the space we have available.

Speaking of editing, Small Town Life is proud to have an excellent Editor In Chief working with our freelance writers. We encourage all of our writers to work closely with our editor. Remember that the editor has the power to approve or disapprove your article. It is in your best interest to take her suggestions to heart. Please keep in mind that the editor’s goal is to produce a finished piece you are proud of, while maintaining a high standard regarding the readability, appropriateness, and quality of each article in Small Town Life Magazine.

Remember that if we agreed to publish your work, we considered you to be a talented writer. If you are not prepared to have your work edited, please do not submit your work to us. It will save us all a lot of time and aggravation.

What are we looking for?

Most of the reoccurring columns in Small Town Life Magazine are written by our own columnists. However, we do keep 3 columns open for new writers. The easiest way to get published in Small Town Life Magazine is to submit an article for one of these columns.

Why I Like Living in a Small Town

This is a one-page essay about why you like living where you do. (Note: our premise is that small town living is about how you live not where you live. A city could have a small town “feel” to it. )

About 500 – 750 words and 1 to 3 photos.

Just for Laughs

Any humorous article.

About 500 – 750 words. Graphic or photos optional.

Pet Tales

An article about an animal. Any kind of animal.

About 500 – 750 words and 1 to 3 photos. Graphic or photos optional.

What other types of writing will we consider?

Feature Articles

In each issue of Small Town Life, there is at least one “feature” article. A feature must not exceed 3 to 4 pages in length. Articles should be of interest to the general public. Feature articles should be informative to the reader- but still positive in tone. Feature articles must carry the author’s name and a short bio. (Author’s photo is optional, but strongly suggested.) A feature may be about a holiday or season to fit the theme of a particular issue of the magazine. Established themes for next year include:

Groundhog Day

Home Improvement

Easter

The Special Food Issue

Summer Fun

Gardening

Back to School

Harvest

Thanksgiving

Christmas

Other types of feature articles include articles written by an “expert” in a particular field. If you have a skill or “expertise” in a particular field, you may want to write a feature about that topic.

Feature articles should be between 3 and 4 pages long and have 1 to 3 photos or graphics on each page.

The Spotlight Section

In the Small Town Spotlight section of Small Town Life Magazine, which profiles interesting people, businesses, or organizations, we encourage each writer to approach the subject in his or her own unique style. We do not want each of these articles to “sound” the same in tone. Variety is the spice of life in this section. The writers should be as varied as the subjects they write about.

Articles should be 1 to 2 pages long with 1 to 3 photos on each page.

News From the Pews

Do you have an interesting story about a church or church related activity? If so, write it up and submit it with photos.

About 500 – 750 words and 1 to 3 photos.

Other items which can be submitted to Small Town Life Magazine include recipes; household hints; questions for our “advice” column, Coffee Shop Talk; genealogy questions or articles, and short filler pieces.

Photographs

Small Town Life Magazine routinely uses between 75 and 200 photos in every issue. Photos are used on the cover, in almost every story, and in our advertising. We are most interested in photos that are “warm and fuzzy” and that show “small town” images.

If you would like Small Town Life Magazine to consider publishing a photograph, please send a sample of your work and a letter introducing yourself to Small Town Life Magazine. If you would like to submit photos for us to review, please either make an appointment and walk them in or mail them with a return SASE so that they can be returned to you. We are not able to return photos which were snail mailed without a SASE. We will accept e-mail submissions. E-mail them to . We will also review photos which are posted to a web page. Just send us an e-mail introducing yourself and directing us to the web page.

We prefer to receive photo submissions on cd or zip disk in tif format at 300 dpi or better. (PC not MAC please.) Most of the photos we use are converted to black and white; but we recommend that you submit color photos and let us decide. If you have color adjusted for print before, you may submit photos in CMYK format.

For each issue of Small Town Life Magazine, we send out an update which lists the types of items that we need for the issue. If you would like to be added to that update list, please send us a sample of your work and a letter introducing yourself and requesting to be added to the update list. Once you are on the list, you are more likely to get your photos published in Small Town Life Magazine. Another very good way to get your photos published is to submit them with an article or with very detailed captions.

Art and other Graphics

We love art. Having new drawings in each issue of Small Town Life Magazine is one of our favorite elements. If you’d like to submit a drawing, painting, or other graphic, send it to us along with a letter introducing yourself. We prefer to receive graphics on disk or cd in tif format (300 dpi or better). You may also submit artwork via e-mail to . We will accept either black and white or color graphics. Graphics that fit into a theme (see paragraph on feature articles) usually have a good chance of being accepted. Also, graphics which are “warm and fuzzy” and a bit Norman Rockwell-ish have a good chance of being published.

Technical Notes

A one-page article is usually between 500 and 750 words.

Please submit articles on disk or via e-mail.

Articles should have two spaces between each sentence. This is our preference to make it easier for our readers.

All graphics and photos must be scanned at 300 dpi or better. (We can scan them for you.)

Please submit PC format files NOT MAC format. (If you need your files converted, we can refer you to someone who will help you.)

We love Quark Express, Corel Draw, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Notepad, Wordpad, Photoshop, and Paint Shop Pro. Feel free to submit work in any of those formats. If you are creating files from another program, please save graphics and photos as tif files with a 300 dpi or better. If you are sending text files from a program not listed here, you may want to cut and paste the text into your e-mail program and send it in the body of the e-mail.

Include with your submission your full name, address, telephone number, and fax/email if applicable; and, a brief cover letter telling us about yourself, how you heard about Small Town Life Magazine and why you’d like to be published.

Thank you for your interest in submitting to Small Town Life Magazine.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Small Town Life Magazine

1046 Barnett Hill Road; Punxsutawney PA 15767

2277 Philadelphia Street; Indiana PA 15701

Phone: 724-349-7366

Fax: 724-349-3290

Alternate Fax: 724-465-9865