Writers guidelines

What's in it for you

We cannot offer payment on article submissions at present. Your name will always appear beneath your work and we will provide e-mailed references (upon request) for one-off contributors and a telephone number which editors/employers/tutors can call to obtain full working references for our regular contributors.

We're always trying to poach freebie products, tickets, meals and nights out for our contributors to review, so there are additional perks!

You will retain copyright on your work, and can use it anywhere that you like. Please let us know if you would like your work removed from the site at any time, and we will be happy to take it down.

The type of features we will run

We are branding ourselves as truly unisex, and therefore we don't want features that only work for men or women. We want to provide features that are appropriate for everyone to read and identify with.

We are aiming to cover a broad range of topics and have wide appeal. Our target audience is 25-45 year olds who consider themselves "in the know" when it comes to cultural and social issues. We want the magazine to read like a broadsheet newspaper Sunday supplement.

Our topics will include:-

Film/TV/DVDs
Music
Theatre & Performing Arts & Exhibitions & Comedy
Business/ Money/ Career
Property / House / Home / Electronics / Stuff to own / Gardens.
Fashion and Beauty
Food and Drink
Health & Fitness/Healthy Eating
Family/Relationships/Love/Sex
Environment/Ethical Living
Travel
Science/Technology
IT
PC and console gaming
Bars/Restaurants/Clubs

You'll notice that we do not cover News, Current Affairs or Celeb News. Other websites do this stuff much better, with bigger budgets and even bigger libel suits – we don't want to lock horns with the big boys in these areas. We will focus on providing excellent features on the above topics which will allow our offering to compete in the marketplace. If you have a strong feature that does not fit into any of the above categories, send it to us and we'll make a place for it!

Sending us your work

Send query e-mail or finished article in .doc format to submissions@ontopicmagazine.com. We are pretty flexible on word count - as a guide most reviews will be 200-600 words and most features with be 400-1000. We are an online-only magazine, so please write for the web rather than for print.

We welcome quality photographs in .jpg or .gif format. They must be your own work and any recognisable people need to sign a model release (we can supply you with this upon request).

Your work will be proofread and may be edited for any number of reasons. We'll always try to remain respectful to your original intention. Please check your facts in any factual article (remembering that Wikipedia is not the be-all and end-all in reference).

Everything must be your own work! We regularly use Copyscape to check for plagiarism.

Hello!

Well hi, everybody!

First of all, from the team at Ontopic, I would like to say a massive thank you to everybody who has been involved in getting us to this stage. You're all marvellous.

If you are one of those people, you'll probably be aware that until late last night, we weren't sure that we were going to make our launch deadline at all, following a major eleventh hour re-design and a raft of technical issues!

We're so pleased to be here, and glad that you could join us. You'll notice that the site is a little bare at the moment, but we have stacks of submissions which we are currently working through and we'll be updating the site very regularly from this point on, so do drop in again soon.

Over the coming weeks, you can expect loads of new content to appear on the site and also some improvements and tweaks that will make navigating around the site a lot more intuitive.

Our goal is to create more paid opportunities for writers and other freelancers, as well as supporting social enterprise and charitable projects, so although this means we will soon be running advertising on the site, don't judge us too harshly, as it will all be for a good cause!

If you want to get involved, then please check out our writers guidelines, we are looking forward to spending a lot more time on contributors and content editing now the major site design is out of the way, so feel free to ask us anything at all!

Enjoy!

Lauren Evans
Managing Editor, www.ontopicmagazine.com