Guidelines

Since Kitelife published its first pages in April of 1998, we’ve been blessed with a veritable army of passionate authors covering nearly every possible aspect of kiting at one time or another… In many cases it is the newest fliers and contributors who bring our pages to life, with the freshness and insight they have as newcomers to kiting.

With the easy blog format of Kitelife Magazine, we encourage participation from all manner of kite enthusiasts!

NOTE: Please let us know if you’ll be submitting your material to any other kite publications – we try to avoid duplication.

Direct Submissions

If you have experience with WordPress, just send us an email with a personal introduction and the direction you’d like to take with your article(s)… Once we review and approve your request, we can set you up for easy and direct access to the Kitelife back end – once there, you can draft, edit, save and submit articles and media for editor review.

Please note – using direct submission, contributors will need to watermark their own photos with photographer credits.

Traditional Submissions

As always, authors can send in their content by email in the following formats:

Text: .txt, .doc, .rtf

Images: .jpg, .gif, .png
(full size – multiples in ZIP file – include photo credits)

Guidelines for Everyone

By submitting photos, you are attesting that you are the owner of the images and no copyrights are being infringed… If you are not the owner of the images, please verify permission to use them, and include the photographer’s name with your article for watermarking purposes.

The suggested minimum length for articles is 500 words, and preferably not more than 5000 words, please use your best judgement. Use your spell/grammar checker, keep the workload as light as possible for our wonderful copy editor.

Again, editorial submissions are always welcome. We request an inquiry letter prior to submitting articles, outlining the general topic you have in mind. This is designed to prevent overlap and wasted time on your part.

A few suggested topics…

Interviews / Profiles
Event Reports (past events)
Press Releases (upcoming events)
Regular Columns
Photo Galleries

If you have an idea for something not listed, just let us know… Be sure to consider mentioning any event/project sponsors, volunteers and other individuals who may have helped make an event possible.

We are especially interested in event coverage, particularly for non-USA events. We can never get enough international news! Feel free to browse our archives, particularly the latest issues, for inspiration or examples of articles we’ve published in the past. If you practice a kiting discipline that you feel is not adequately covered in Kitelife, submit an article and pictures!

In all cases, keep formatting (colors, etc) to a minimum.

If you would like certain photos placed with specific paragraphs within your article, please include tags such as this wherever you would like:

<<imagename.jpg – caption>> Mr/Ms Doe did a wonderful job of demonstrating this and that, especially on Sunday when thousands of spectators stopped to watch the presentation… Our hats off to him/her!

If you are a first time contributor to Kitelife, please include a personal bio approximately 25-45 words in length, and feel free to include a URL to your own personal site.

Also, please let us know if you will be sending your submission to any other kiting publications… We do like to avoid running the same feature articles as another publication whenever possible, it can be quite embarrassing.

Deadlines… Or not!

There are none, since Kitelife has made the switch to a true “ezine” (blog) format… Although there are no hard deadlines, here are a few rules of thumbs that may be useful:

Event reports should be released within 3 months following the event being covered.
Any “column” (regular series) should typically be submitted every 4-10 weeks.