Cohousing-L Mailing List: Call for Articles for Communities Magazine's Spring issue 2008

[Communities Magazine (communities.editor]

Hello,

Communities Magazine is now seeking articles for our Spring 2008 issue, “Women 
in Community.” The issue will be out in March 2008.

Please send me your article idea by ***Friday, Oct. 19***.

Your final article must reach me by ***Friday, November 23***.  Please note that 
this is a firm deadline as we are running under a tighter schedule than usual 
for this issue.

1. Theme articles: “Women in Community.”

Are you an elder woman, a woman with children, a single woman, a teenage woman, 
a queer woman, and/or a businesswoman with a story to tell about living in 
community as a woman, or growing up in community as a girl? Does your community 
identify as feminist or deal with gender as part of its mission? How has 
community improved or supported your career, your family life, or your 
relationships with others? What is hard about living in community as a woman? 
Why did you choose to have children, or not, in community? What conflicts have 
arisen in your community over gender issues? From your perspective, have these 
things changed over time? We want to publish your story!

We are also seeking articles about:
- Creating community in your neighborhood;
- Starting a new community;
- Process & communication issues in community;
- Seeking community to join.

Word length is from 900 to 2500 words. We’re seeking articles written in a 
reader-friendly popular-magazine style, rather than in academic style.

If you'd like to submit an article let us know and we’ll send you Writers' 
Guidelines. Contact Alyson Ewald at editor [at] ic.org or 660-883-5330.

If you'd like to submit photos let us know and we’ll send you Photo Guidelines. 
Contact Ann-Marie Stillion at annmarie [at] arttrek.com.

I. WHAT "SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE" MEANS. We will promise to read your article, but 
we may respectfully decline it and not publish it, or save it and publish it in 
a future issue. We also reserve the right to edit, shorten, or revise your 
article. Most of the time we contact authors about this ahead of time and get 
their comments, corrections, etc.

II. GETTING PERMISSION AHEAD OF TIME. Please send the article only when you have 
permission from anyone you need it from, such as fellow community members. It’s 
difficult for us to get all set to run an article only to find that the author’s 
fellow community members say No at the last minute.

III. PUBLICATION RIGHTS. Once your article appears in Communities magazine, we 
own first North American Publishing Rights. This means your article appears in 
Communities magazine the first time it appears in North America. After that, you 
own it again. If you’d like to use it elsewhere, you can, and we would 
appreciate your using an attribution line saying, “This article first appeared 
in Communities magazine, (date); for further information on Communities 
magazine: www.ic.org.”

IV. PHOTOS. We will also want high-resolution digital photos or hard-copy photos 
(including snapshots) of people and/or communities to illustrate your story. 
Please do not send photos to me directly, but to annmarie [at] arttrek.com.

We will assume that any people in your photos have already given you permission 
to appear in Communities magazine—or you already know they will be fine with it. 
If you think this will be a problem, please take care of it before sending us 
photos. Thanks very much.

We’re seeking high-contrast photos (the magazine is in black and white) of 
people, either engaged in doing things or smiling at the camera. We also use 
photos of community buildings or scenes from a neighborhood, but preferably with 
people in them.

For digital images, we’re seeking photos taken on at least a 3 to 4 megapixel 
camera (higher megapixels is better!) at the highest-resolution setting, so that 
we get photos which are at least 300 to 360 dots per inch at 5” x 7” size. (By 
the way, photos from a website aren’t high enough resolution to be used in a 
print publication.)

Our most preferred format for photos is tiff but if the images are already jpegs 
then jpegs are fine. Please send them at the highest resolution possible which 
might mean sending only one photo per email (depending on your email service 
provider's limits). Some email programs automatically reduce the size of images 
being emailed so you might check to make sure yours is not doing so.

If you have prints you can either scan them (we can give you more details if you 
plan to do this) or you can send them to the Photo Editor and we will have them 
scanned. We will return them in good condition.

If you would like to submit an article but cannot supply photos, that’s fine; 
however, you must let me know in advance. Then if we use your article we'll get 
an illustrator, but we need plenty of notice ahead of time for this. Thank you.

V. COLOR COVER PHOTOS. We are also seeking vertically oriented color photos for 
our front cover. We pay $150 for a cover photo we publish.
For a cover photo—which “sells” the magazine to newsstand browsers—we’re looking 
for five features:
(1) A vertical photo of one or two people (or even three) in the foreground or 
mid-foreground, engaged in doing something, or looking at the camera. Other 
people can be in the background, or not.
(2) The foreground or middle ground people look right into the camera (so they 
can bridge to the newsstand browser), with expressions we might call “warm and 
connected”—happiness, contentment, thoughtfulness, engagement, etc. Other 
expressions are OK as long as they don’t look unhappy, upset, frustrated, bored, 
etc. We’re also open to publishing cover photos which one might call 
“compelling” rather than “warm and connected.”
(3) The people are wearing clothes in colors that look good together (ideally 
bright, clear colors), and that don’t clash.
(4) A community-type scene is visible behind them.
(5) Something kind of blank, or relatively low contrast is in the upper right or 
upper left corner, where we can put the issue name and article titles.
Again, cover photos don’t go to me, but to annmarie [at] arttrek.com.

Thank you very much! We look forward to hearing from you if you are inspired by 
any of these feature topics, or any of our regular topics.

Alyson Ewald                            
Interim Editor
Communities Magazine                    
editor [at] ic.org