Ok…email me and we’ll talk about a story line…
Let me preface this by saying that the decision to buy your story is not mine. That is the domain of the commanding officer. With the exception of a few authors that have written for the magazine for years, we don’t buy an article before it’s written. We pay on acceptance, which means that your story might not appear for months after its purchased.
There are certain things we look for in a story, especially techniques and tricks that you use that might be unique. We get lots of stories where guys pile loads of aftermarket into a kit, and we don’t learn a thing from it.
You need to take photos of every step, construction, finish, weathering, etc…leave nothing to the imagination. Yes, you’ll take 120 photos, and yes, we’ll only use 10-15 of them…but until we sit down and develop the story’s theme and edit it, we don’t know which images we’ll use.
Text…as clear and concise as possible. While this might be the greatest project you’ve ever done, the truth of the matter is that even the best authors usually only get 8 pages, max. So, 36 pages of text means that alot of your manuscript will end up cut. This has happened in the past and made some authors mad. But when you consider that 60% - 75% of the allotted pages are taken up by images, it doesn’t leave tons of rooms for text.
Images, digital are fine, try to shoot on a mono-color background (blue, gray, brown) with good lighting and focus. Don’t color correct, crop, or alter the images, since we have a staff that does that. Also…images corrected on your screen don’t always equate to images that look good in print. TIFF or JPG format, as large as your camera can produce. At the minimum, a 4 megapixel camera should be used. You can submit everything on a CD. Text should be in a Word file or plain txt, also on the CD. It’s not a bad idea to print a proof sheet of the images, even on a laser printer, that’s fine. Same for the text.
Don’t worry too much about captions, we usually take care of that here. Spell check and grammar check in Word is a useful tool…(hint hint).
I must confess that writing stories is not for everyone, because it interrupts the modeling process that we’ve become accustomed to. Stopping to take pictures every step of the way is a pain, I recommend setting up a background somewhere close to your work table so you can scoot over, take a few pics, and get back to work. A good idea is to keep a small tape recorder nearby, and tell your story as you build the model…this becomes very helpful later on when you’re trying to physically write the story and you can’t remember what brand or color of paint you used on a part…
On the green bar to the left is a link for Submission Guidelines…I recommend downloading them and taking a look at them. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email.
Good luck!
Jeff Herne
Associate Editor, FSM
jherne@finescale.com
