Writing for, and advertising in, the magazine

 Some, hopefully helpful, hints about how and what to submit.

General Points

 Anything you'd like to put in the magazine is best submitted as computer files.  Email these to us at editorial@nhmag.co.uk.

It is best to send us the components separately so that we can make the item fit nicely into the rest of the magazine. This is most important when you submitting article, but can also apply to adverts.  If you also send it as a picture file, or similar, so that we can see exactly how you want it to appear that would be good too, though this isn't vital.

 The single most important thing to know is that what looks good on a computer screen doesn't necessarily still look good when it's printed.  This is the biggest and most frequent problem we have with submitted material.  Look at the section lower down for information about how to make your pictures look good in print.

Remember the magazine format.  It's a US format A4 page, in full colour, currently about thirty-two pages long. 

Advertising

If you'd like to advertise in the magazine you can choose anything from an 1/8th of a page up to a full page

Remember that it is (now) a full colour magazine, so any pictures you choose must be high definition, or they will look shoddy. 

You can submit your entire advert as a "picture" file (see the section called "What type of files " below), but unless you have had your advert professionally designed you might not have it available like that. If you submit the words and pictures as separate files we will put the finished item together for you.

On no account (ooh, that sounds stern) submit a "finished piece" as a word processor document.  Pictures held in files like this are practically impossible for us to use amd the results are always disappointing.  See the section on "What types of files " for more information.

Writing An Article

We are very happy to print articles from almost any source.

We are particularly interested in articles that impart solid information, or interesting events.

We certainly want articles to help promote the writer, however we will not print what we call me me me items.  Items that only really say how fabulous the writer is and don't impart any information.  We want our readers to be impressed by your knowledge and sharing, not your PR.

Articles can be anything from a quarter page (for example a book or clinic review) to several pages which may be published over more than one issue.  Individual articles in an issue are usually a maximum of four pages long, after which point we consider splitting it over more than one issue.

Pictures are extremely important.  They break up what would otherwise be a very dense mass of type, and can of course also convey very important messages.

It is important here to re-iterate the dire warning above, since it is usually article writers who make this mistake, do not submit pictures in a word processor file.  See the section on file formats below. 

Pictures

Computer screens have a resolution of 72dpi (dots per inch).  They need to be much higher resolution than that to look good in print!  This isn't a problem for either your camera (which can easily take pictures at much higher resolutions than this unless it's in your mobile 'phone), nor your computer.  What often happens though is that to save computer space pictures are saved, and then sent to us, at too low a resolution.  Of course a picture with high resolution will make a bigger file than one with lower resolution, but a picture at too low a resolution gives the classic computer "dotty" look which will look awful in print.  The space saving, now computer disks are so huge and broadband speeds are so high, is not worth it.

As a rule of thumb, unless it's very small, if your picture file is less than 2Mb (that's 2,000kb) it's probably not a high enough resolution.  Most picture manipulation programs (eg GIMP, Photoshop, &tc) will tell you what size and resolution your picture is. Even Windows will if you know where to look!  (Ok, there's a section even further down on how to do this.)

Another format that almost qualifies as a "picture" is Portable Document Format, or pdf.  This format was designed so display the way it was designed. A word processor document or even picture formats can be made to look different by someone else, pdf files can be locked so that they cannot be re-formatted.  It is possible for us to use pdf files, but since we can't (easily) modify them the onus is completely on you make them look right.  If an item submitted in this format doesn't look right it's completely down to the supplier of it, so it's usually best to supply items in formats that we can modify.  Certainly do not supply articles in this format, they will not be included.

What type of files?

 Picture files come in many formats.  The most frequent ones in this context are jpeg (usually ending in .jpg), GIF (.gif) or TIFF (.tif).  Another frequent one is bitmap (.bmp), but this is unlikely to produce a good enough image.

For our purposes the best format is .jpg.  TIFF files are more "accurate", but they are much bigger, and don't have much more benefit.

How to find the resolution of your pictures in Windows

In Windows XP the following may work.

• Find the picture file with Windows Explorer and right click on it
• In the menu that pops up select the bottom item, "Properties"
• Select the "Summary" tab
• The horizontal and vertical resolution entries are what you want.

The size entries don't matter, we can resize images, we just can't make a low res image into a high res one.

If the size and resolution aren't immediately visible, press the "Advanced" button.