EN WORLD PDF/E-PUBLISHING NEWS SUBMISSION RULES
As you probably know, you are able to post your press releases and news items for free on the PDF News Page. These news items are also syndicated, appearing on various websites across the internet. However, there are a few rules directing how you do this. Unlike the main D&D/d20 news page, the PDF page is not compiled and edited by newshounds - your news items appear exactly as you post them. Because of this, there are some standards and rules required of news submitters.
These rules are strict - news submissions not adhering to them will not be approved. While this does mean you have to make a little more effort when composing your news submissions, the standards do help ensure that both EN World and your own publishing companies are presented in a professional light.
Posting Links to RPGNow
Many (if not most) of the e-Publishers posting such announcements will, naturally, include a link to RPGNow. However, there is an additional condition that I'll be making regarding such links:
You are welcome to promote and link to your products and pages at RPGNow, whether in these forums or in your sigs, but please ensure that you append &SRC=EnWorld (exactly like that - case sensitive) to your links. Please do NOT use any other &SRC suffix.
Basically, if you're going to use EN World for promotion purposes, you need to give EN World the credit for that promotion. It's a small price to pay.
I apologise if this makes things a little more difficult, but it is important (for various reasons) that this be done.
For those who are not clear on how this works, I present two examples - the first leads to EN Publishing's product page at RPGNow and the second leads to a specific product (
Elements of Magic) at RPGNow:
http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?ma...13&SRC=EnWorld http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.p...99&SRC=EnWorld Posting Links to DTRPG
See the RPGNow rules above. However, the appended suffix for DTRPG is &affiliate_id=31188.
Inserting Images
Many publishers insert images into their news items, and for good reason. You are more than welcome to do so, but please use the following method when inserting an image into your post so as to keep the PDF News Page nice and tidy.
- Keep your image to a reasonable size. 200 x 260 pixels (the same size that a product cover appears on an individual product page at RPGNow) is perfectly adequate.
- Ensure your text wraps neatly around the image. Rather than place your image above, below or in the middle of a big break of text, please use the image wrapping tags. There are two tags, one which justifies your image to the left and wraps text around it, and one which justifies it to the right and wraps text round it. The tags work in the same way as other messageboard tags (such as bold, italic, etc.), using square brackets instead of the curly brackets shown here - I have to use curly brackets or the board will interpret these as actual tags rather than textual instructions: {imagel}image-url-here{/imagel} will justify your image to the left; and {imager]image-url-here{/imager} will justify it to the right.
So, no enormous images taking up the whole page, please. No ad banners in the middle of your news item. No centralised images. No weird or wacky formatting.
Using HTML Please don't do it. Too many people are using really bad HTML and screwing up the PDF news page, forcing me to follow them round editing their posts for them. I've had to switch off HTML for this forum.
General Formatting
As a final bit of advice - the formatting of your news item also reflects on your publishing business. Using actual words as hyperlinks rather than pasting the hyperlink into the body of the text looks more professional, and it makes your press release look more professional. Below, I have presented two options; the first looks good, and the second looks messy [apologies to Bloodstone Press who, I might add, did it the first way]:
METHOD 1 [GOOD] Quote:
| Bloodstone Press has released the Bane Ledger II a collection of monsters from Earth's mythic past. The original Bane Ledger has also been revised and updated. They are both available exclusively from RPGnow for a combined total of $6.40. |
METHOD 2 [MESSY]
A couple of other points - in my opinion, a news item will be more successful if it follows the following guidelines:
- Don't let the reader see the URL of your link (see above)
- Use bullet points for lists, not stars, asterisks, hyphens or line breaks
- Write in the 3rd person
- Try to include a [correctly formatted!] image where possible
- Don't try wacky formatting, long horizontal lines made up of hyphens, etc.
- Get into the meat of your news item immediately. Only a certain number of words appear on the news page before the read more link appears, and you have to capture your readers' interest before that point. Putting the date at the top, repeating the news item title, etc. wastes your space.
So, to make sure that your news item is accepted, please do try to take care to follow the guidelines. For an example of an excellently formatted news item,
look here. I know that I don't even need to check Adamant Entertainment's news items, because they always follow the guidelines and look nice.
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