Wanna contribute?
Are your dreaming of having your fly pattern, your fishing pictures, your fly fishing stories, your DIY-project published on the web? Well, here's the chance. GFF is looking for contributors.
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 Press any key Martin Joergensen |
 Upcoming GFF article... maybe Martin Joergensen | |
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Write for us
That's why we appeal to you – our readers – to contribute to the site. Let us tap in on your creativity, your ideas and your time. Share with your fellow readers. Write something for The Global FlyFisher!
It's not that difficult. Even though we hold high standards, we love originality a lot more than professionalism, and you need not have any previous experience in writing. It's a benefit if you master written English at a reasonable level and an ability to shoot some decent photos, draw or paint isn't too bad either. That doesn't mean that pros are not welcome. On the opposite! We would love to have material from you people who write for a living, or at least earn money from it. As long as you don't expect us to pay you. We haven't paid anybody yet in the ten year history of The Global FlyFisher, and we don't intend to start now.
What we need
We need anything that's fly fishing related. If you'd like to read it, there are probably others who would too. The most popular stuff we publish is the fly patterns. They draw a lot of hits, and we always welcome good patterns, and if you have a surefire pattern to share, here's the chance.
But other types of material is very welcome too. You can see from our different main sections how we group things:
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 Pattern factory Martin Joergensen |
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- Tiebetter: things that improve the reader's fly tying
- Fishbetter: things that improve the reader's fishing skills or equipment, how to's
- Gallery: anything with images
- Reports: stories from fishing trips, where to's
- Global: where to's, International fishing, travel tips
- Rod building: anything related to building and maintaining rods
- Reviews: stuff you liked or disliked and why
We have lots of material that traverses these sections, so don't worry about it. We can easily have an article appear in more than one section.
Original and unpublished
We only want original material that you have created and have the the copyright to. And we don't want material that has already been published on the web or in print. We do make an exception for this rule when it regards translated material. If you have published something in your own non-english tongue, we would love to see it translated to English and published here.
| Sound and video If you want to record a podcast or do some video, we're game! We know that such new media stuff interests people, and we have the space and bandwidth to host even large productions. Drop us a line with your idea, and let's see if we can work out something. |
Dot down a few words about your idea and mail them off to me (Martin – martin@globalflyfisher.com). Once we agree on publishing your article, start gathering material and writing the text. I usually recommend looking at the illustrations first, because most manuscripts we get have great text but not that great illustrations. As you know from the site, we like lots of good images and drawings, and we'd like your contribution to have lots of great illustrations. Get photos and drawings in as good a quality as you can. We can easily handle originals straight out of a camera. Please don't do too much to them before mailing them off.
Write the text in a plain word processor or text editor, and don't do too much layout! Please don't paste the images into the text or set the whole thing up in columns and fancy fonts. Plain text is the best with bold and italics where relevant. Write links as full URL's in parentheses next to the link text. Mark the locations of the images and illustrations by writing the name of the file and a caption right where you want it to go in the text. Read this before starting,
The process
We will do all the practical editing and layout of the text and scaling of the images. The less you have done, the easier for us. Our system will provide clickable thumbprints and make sure the whole thing ends up looking nice and be as readable as possible.
You will get a link to the unpublished article and get a chance to review it before it's put online. Your name will be the byline and also in the top of the image, and the material will remain yours. We don't own it because you publish it here.
Practicalities
Please try to stick to these practical guidelines when submitting material to the Global FlyFisher. Use this sequence as you work, and we'll be happy. A manuscript with no pictures or captions have nary a chance with us:
Illustrations
One of the thing that set us apart from most fly fishing sites is that we use many, large and good illustrations. Your article should do the same. Make sure you have adequate pictures and/or drawings for your text. The more the better. Concentrate on illustrations and the rest will come by itself.
We want the illustrations as JPG's as large as you can muster them, and preferably at least 12-1600 pixels on the long side. We will scale them down and tune them to get the optimal quality.
Captions
Write a heading and a caption for each of your pictures or illustrations. That's two texts – a short one and a longer one for each illustration. And provide the name of the photographer or artist if it isn't yourself. We want to credit the right person.
Text
Write your text in your best English. If your English powers aren't strong, get a friend whose are to run through the text, or as a second option let us have the raw text and work on that. Make sure that you at least turn on your spelling checker if possible.
Send us the text as a plain text file – a simple Word-format will do, but a completely stripped txt-file is just as fine. You can also just paste the text into a mail. We want as little as possible. You can use bold, italic, chapter headings and fact boxes or side bars, but that's about it. No fancy formatting.
Start your text with a heading, then a sub heading, then the first chapter without a heading and then the remaining chapters and sidebars with each their heading.
Facts
Get a hold of facts and references for your subject. Places to call, what it costs, where to buy, references to more material on the web. If any of these things are relevant for your subject, put it in your manuscript.
If you have tabular information, supply it as a spread sheet or in a tab-separated text-file. You can use the table function of your word processor, but don't expect any fancy formatting to follow through to the publishing.
Layout
DO NOT LAYOUT YOUR ARTICLE! No columns, no fancy fonts, no pictures in the text file, no effects, no colors. We will strip it out anyway, and you will be waisting both your time and ours.
Look at existing articles, and follow the patterns you see there.
