Wyrd Con Companion Book Style Guide

Copyright

We electronically publish The Wyrd Con Companion Book as a PDF under a Creative Commons license. This license allows everyone, for free, to copy, distribute, and transmit the work under the following conditions:

• Proper attribution as stated in our table of contents.
• No one may alter, transform, or build upon this work.
• No one may use the work for commercial purposes.*
• This is a non-exclusive right; you can re-publish your article elsewhere, as long as the original publication (WCCB) is listed.
• If you are submitting a previously published work, you must notify the Editors of this fact in your first query.
• Everyone must have all rights to their submission.

Document Format

• For text, we prefer Microsoft Word documents.
• When using MS-Word, use the “Insert Footnote” function for your footnotes, numbered continuously, at the bottom of the page.
• Include a Bibliography and Ludography of works cited at the end of the document.
• Use Chicago style for citations following these general guidelines.
• Articles should feature a maximum of 5000 words in length, though the editors may grant more words at their discretion.

Hyperlinks

This PDF will be a hyperlinked document. For journalistic articles, please include both hyperlinks and footnotes. Academic articles should contain mainly footnotes. Make sure the URL is publicly accessible and not part of a registration-required service.

Language

• English language only, with American spellings, e.g., “parlor” not “parlour” unless the word is part of a group name or official title.
• The word “larp” is always lower case unless the first word of a sentence.
• “Role-playing” is hyphenated.
• Periods are always inside quotes.
• Special terms should be italicized and defined.
• The following abbreviations are acceptable without definition: GM, PC, NPC, D&D, IC, OOC, OOG, IG. However, please spell out when possible, i.e. “game master” is preferred over GM.
• Err on the side of defining abbreviations and other specific terms the first time they are used in your essay. Assume the reader is relatively new to the medium, but not completely unfamiliar with it.
• For the journalistic section, first person references and accounts are acceptable, as is profanity (to a limited degree). This is not, however, a forum to disparage harangue, slander, or harass others. Endeavor to write in as formal a tone as possible.

Images

• We encourage you to submit images to accompany your contribution. We cannot guarantee all images will appear in the final publication.
• Send your images separately from your text as full resolution .jpeg or .tiff. Color images will be in the .PDF, but they will be converted to B&W for the print version if we decide to print one.
• Make sure your images have a signifying title, not something like “IMG346_1.jpg”
• With the images must also be a separate document that lists each image by file name, includes your caption describing the photo, and lists photographer credits. In parentheses, you can also suggest where you would like the image to appear, i.e. what it references in your document text. We will endeavor to follow your suggestion, but cannot guarantee exact placement.
• All authors must have full clearance to use pictures, with the name of the photographer clearly credited in a separate document. Do not send us images you do not have the right to use or are not in the public domain.

Additional Media

We have some ability to include small audio or video clips in the PDF, if less than 20MB in file size. If you are interested in embedding audio or video to your contribution, talk to your editor. In general, it is easier to upload video or audio to an independent server — e.g., YouTube or Vimeo — and link to it in the text.

Bios

Each article should include a 100 word bio for each author. Links in the bio to personal pages are acceptable as well.

Editing

Editors reserve the rights to:

• reject a submission at any time
• adjust or request additions or extractions to the text
• correct spelling, punctuation, or grammar, or to request such corrections
• remove, crop, or otherwise alter the color/contrast of submitted images
• draw pull quotes from text

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* We request that accepted contributors DO allow Wyrd Con the right to commercial exploitation of their work in a very narrow sense: Wyrd Con, at their own expense, has the right to print a maximum of 200 copies of the WCCB and sell or donate at their discretion in a manner of their choosing.