What goes in the guidelines?

Before we can start soliciting manuscripts, we need to write our guidelines. We've already nattered on just a bit about what we might we looking for. This post is about what goes in the guidelines more generally.

We plan to spend some time looking over other magazine's guidelines, to get a better idea of what they cover. And, of course, we've looked over many, many guidelines over the years, in the course of submitting our own stories, so we've got some idea. But still.

Here's a first pass as to what we think a set of guidelines needs to cover:

  1. What we want. This will talk about what kinds of stories we want.
  2. How to submit it. This will talk about manuscript format and what tool to use to submit it.
  3. What we'll pay. We're hoping to pay pro rates, but there will be budget constrains that might affect that.
  4. What rights we want. For a web magazine we'll want first internet rights, exclusive for a period of time. We may want other rights, if we have a plan for them (maybe a yearly paper anthology?), but we'll make a point of not scooping up rights we don't have a plan to use.

What are we missing? What else is important to include in a magaine's guidelines?

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