We are always on the look out for interesting articles and contributions. If you fancy putting pen to paper, here are a few pointers and things to consider.

Writing Freelance Features
If you'd like to try your hand at writing for BOARDS, then there are a couple of feature ideas that we are always on the look-out for. Click here for more information.

If you have a good idea for a feature on some other aspect of windsurfing, please check with us first that we're actually interested and someone else isn't doing it already. This is especially important with travel features, as basically it seems that just about everyone who goes on holiday anywhere in the world has the idea of recouping some of the costs by writing a feature about it. So the chances are that someone else may well already be doing that remote island paradise you thought was totally undiscovered...

If your idea sounds good and no-one else is doing it, then we may well give you the go-ahead. However, please bear in mind that this is NOT a firm commission. As we have no knowledge of your journalistic abilities (which is NOT a prompt to start sending in examples - unless you've already had work on windsurfing published - in which case we probably know you anyway...) , we are certainly not going to commit to anything in advance. All we can say is that we will look carefully at your submission, and if we can use it, we probably will.

Copy Deadlines
We probably won't be able to give a firm date in advance as to when we can use your feature. The amount of editorial space we have to fill each month depends entirely on how much advertising we've been able to sell. So, if it's a lean month, features get held back... As we are also working on long lead times anyway, it may be many months before your deathless prose makes it in to print. Plus which, our policy is to refrain from scheduling an article into the production process until we actually have the article in its entirety (i.e. with pictures!) in our hands. This is because we have suffered many instances where a feature scheduled for a particular issue has been delayed for whatever reason (excuses ranging from work overload to broken computers to the dog eating it!), leaving us at the last minute with a hole to fill. So doing it this way saves a lot of hassle! Because of this we will not normally give deadlines as to when the feature should be submitted to us. We will just say "get on with it - send it when you can..."

Copy Format
Please send the article either as plain text via email, or as a WORD document. (PDF files or any other DTP/WP system files are NOT acceptable!). Please do NOT put in your own formatting such as font sizes, colours, styles, tables, layouts - these will not be compatible with our system or layout requirements and therefore we will just have to strip them out! We would ask that the text is spell-checked and as presentable as possible from a grammatical point of view, but we will edit your article and almost certainly make our own changes. If we end up having to change the article very significantly we will usually send the edited version back for your approval, but we cannot guarantee this.

Word Counts
We don't usually specify a word count for an article - just write whatever it takes. Best give us too much information rather than too little - let us be the final judge of what needs to be cut (if at all!). (Word counts are a bit of a waste of time - if we say 2000 words and your article falls naturally to 1500, you'll just end up putting in 500 words of padding to bring it up to the count - which we will probably then edit out again anyway! Whereas if it falls naturally to 2500 you'll have to edit out some good bits to make the count. We'd rather not stifle your creativity...)

Information To Supply
If you're writing a travel feature, please attempt to supply as much useful extra information as possible. Contact details for local tourist boards, windsurfing shops etc, plus of course the travel companies (airlines/ferries/tour operators etc) who made it possible.

Payment
The bottom line - you ain't ever going to get rich writing for a windsurfing magazine. Our rates are between thirty and fifty pounds (sterling) per magazine page, depending on how much work we have to do to the copy you supply. For example, if it isn't typed, then we're going to have to pay someone to type it - and that bill will come off your payment, etc. So don't give up the day job! Please note also that you won't be paid until after the feature has been published. Normally the payments will go out at the end of the month of the issue. So payment for a feature in the March 2004 edition will go out at the end of March 2004...

Submission Rights
We will receive any feature on the assumption that you have NOT submitted it to any other UK windsurfing magazines, and that by submitting the feature you are giving us publication rights of all the material and pictures, for use in BOARDS Magazine and on the BOARDS website. We will not use your material in any other way without gaining your permission first.

Please note that - while in some circumstances we may be prepared to publish information that has already been displayed on the Internet (be it on the World Wide Web, in forums, chat rooms, user-groups or whatever), we will not under any circumstances pay for information that is thus already in the public domain.

Pictures
Our requirements for freelance features rest primarily on the picture quality - it is the pix that sell the words, rather than the other way around. Although your text may be of good standard, lack of magazine-quality pictures will probably preclude it from use.

So, unless you have any decent pictures to go with the article, you're probably wasting your time sending it in. By decent pictures we mean well focussed, clear shots. If it's for a travel feature we're looking for a good mixture of action and scenery - don't just send us a bunch of shots of someone out on the water; that gives no 'flavour' of the location at all. For features about people, make sure there are some decent close-up mugshots and on-land shots.

Pictures can be submitted either as digital, transparency or print. Here are our views on each:

Transparency Film Pictures: Good slide film (ideally Fuji Velvia or Provia) pictures are the best possible solution. Nearly all the best pix you see in our magazine are in fact transparencies (slides). Please supply slides mounted (slide mounts are available from any decent camera shop for around £5 for 200), and write your name and a brief caption on each mount. Ideally we would prefer the mounted slides to be submitted in a plastic display sheet (again available from any camera shop). Please do not send us duplicate transparencies - originals only please!

Print film (i.e colour negative) does not reproduce particularly well in magazine format, and cannot normally be blown up bigger than their supplied size. We cannot take pictures from negatives, so please do not send us negatives or undeveloped film. Try and avoid getting sticky finger marks all over your prints! Write your name and a brief caption on the back of each print, and then either pack them back-back / front-front or put paper spacers between them, so that the ink from the captions does not transfer itself to the next print!

Digital Pix. Pictures from digital cameras are unfortunately not quite the be-all-and-end-all that many believe them to be, from a magazine production point of view. Every digital picture has to be corrected to the magazine's printing colour space. Digital pictures are also not yet able to offer the same production quality as decent transparencies. However, we appreciate that a) most people now have a digital camera, and b) they are a really useful and convenient way of taking pictures! So we will accept digital pictures for features or news items. Please do not email us large amounts of digital images - burn them onto a CD and send that instead. NB: Please do NOT send pictures embedded in Word documents!

Bear in mind that pictures taken from websites, which display at 72dpi, are usually far too small and low-quality for us to reproduce in the magazine, which is printed at 5 times greater resolution than your computer screen!

In simplest terms - we would like digital pictures output as 300dpi cmyk jpgs with minimum compression. tiffs are theoretically better, but in practice they take so long to search through (and take up so much disc space) that they really aren't ideal, other than for small numbers of images.

If you have a decent digital camera then the 'raw' format should exportable (via the software / photoshop extensions that come with the camera) to cmyk jpegs in one simple step. Colour balances etc should be undertaken at the raw stage, before translation to jpeg, and ideally you should be happy with jpeg results (in cmyk colour space!) before submitting to us. If you are not happy with them, then go back to raw images and start again - DO NOT manipulate and resave the jpegs as this inherently degrades the image.

If all this sounds a bit fussy, please understand that our receiving uncorrected digital files is akin to getting unprocessed film from a photographer. The 'developing' stage should really be the photographer's responsibility, as it always used to be with film. For us to try and colour match your digital output, without actually having anything to colour match to, is simply impossible. (Whereas with a transparency or print it's simple for us - or more correctly the scanner operator who's undergone a 5 year apprenticeship(!) - to colour match the digital output exactly to the original trannie).

CDs of Pictures: If you're sending a CD of pictures PLEASE label the CD clearly with your name and the topic of the pictures, and avoid simply sending us large quantities of images with auto-applied digicam names (dsc0001.jpg, dsc0002.jpg etc). Please take the time to rename each picture so that we know what it is, without having to search through the entire CD each time we need a picture. If the pictures are large file sizes then it would be very useful if you can supply a contact sheet with thumbnails of the images as well.

Home Scans: We would much rather have your original pictures to scan ourselves, rather than receive home-made scans. Again, sorting out and colour correcting your home-scanned images introduces many technical problems for us!

Photo Subject Rights
Please ensure that everyone featured in your photographs knows that they are liable to appear in the pages of BOARDS Magazine! We have to assume that you have the explicit permission of everyone who is principally featured in any picture. (Obviously this does not need to apply to background crowds/action.)

Technique Features
We are not looking for any more technique writers or features at present. In fact, we are snowed under with mini-technique-sequences right now!

Press releases re events etc
We're happy to publish news of windsurfing-related events. However, please bear in mind the lead times. You should allow a minimum of six weeks of lead time for copy - working on an effective publication date of 1st of the month. So material for the October issue should be with us by the end of the second week in August, etc. In practice we tend to keep one news page open for an extra few days as there is always a fair amount of late news coming in. But you should not bank on getting in on that basis - if we only have a little space left and your news item on a car boot sale comes in alongside a late report about Nik Baker winning a PBA event, you should be able to guess which piece is going to get missed out...

Pictures are always useful too, for news events. We can't guarantee we can always use them (and there won't be any payment) but we'll certainly do our best to use them if we can. Ideally we would prefer a transparency, but a print can be used if this is all you have. The pic will of course be returned after use, but it would certainly help if the name and address of whomsoever the pic is to be returned to could be written on the transparency-mount (or on the back, if it is a print).

Press releases from Sponsored Sailors
We're not very keen on press releases regarding sponsorship deals.We get an incredible amount of press releases from wave-sailors, racers and every other form of sponsored sailor, all wanting to get their bit of publicity. There are many folk trying to make some sort of a living out of the sport! So, if we publish a press release from one then in fairness we should publish them all. But in practise there is simply no way we could do that, since it makes incredibly boring copy for everyone else. I mean, would you wade through a whole page of "X is sponsored by Y and thinks their kit is really great" type copy?

This isn't to say that we don't ever run press releases from anybody. But the onus is very much on the sailor to make their press release interesting enough to run. Good competition results are the best way of getting coverage, as people can relate to that. Superb (and free!) action pix also greatly increase the chances of a press release getting published. The only other guaranteed way of getting coverage is to do something particularly different/barmy, in which case it stands up as news in its own right, and we can include a mention for the sponsors almost as an afterthought.

Please understand that we're not deliberately trying to make life even more difficult for sponsored sailors (we're well aware how gnarly it can be to come up through that route - we've all done it ourselves!) - but with so many sailors possessing some degree of sponsorship, this is simply the only practical way to cope with the situation.