Currently, only about half of all news items submitted to this PDF news page are being approved. You may have noticed that a news item you submitted did not appear on the news page, so this short note should help to explain why.
The primary reason why news items are not approved is because they don't meet the two simple requirements for such items. The guidelines can be found by clicking on the link at the top of the news page, or in the sticky thread found in the news items forum. They consist of two things:
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. Even if Adamant makes a mistake, these days I will simply correct it and approve the item rather than immediately delete it because I appreciate the effort that Gareth makes to ensure I have less work to do.
My process when approving news items usually runs as follows: 1) I skim it for RPGNow links and delete the news item if it does not have the required suffix; 2) I skim it for images and delete it if the image is not sized and formatted correctly; 3) I approve the item if it wasn't deleted in steps (1) or (2).
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.
Basically, the more your news item looks like one of Adamant's, the more likely it is to be approved.
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]
METHOD 2 [MESSY]
A couple of other points - these aren't requirements so much as advice, but I thought people may find it useful. In my opinion, a news item will be more successful if it follows the following guidelines:
I hope this info helps - I'm not an expert on press releases, but I felt it might help to share my thoughts on how to make one work for you.
The primary reason why news items are not approved is because they don't meet the two simple requirements for such items. The guidelines can be found by clicking on the link at the top of the news page, or in the sticky thread found in the news items forum. They consist of two things:
- Use of RPGNow links; and
- Use of images
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. Even if Adamant makes a mistake, these days I will simply correct it and approve the item rather than immediately delete it because I appreciate the effort that Gareth makes to ensure I have less work to do.
My process when approving news items usually runs as follows: 1) I skim it for RPGNow links and delete the news item if it does not have the required suffix; 2) I skim it for images and delete it if the image is not sized and formatted correctly; 3) I approve the item if it wasn't deleted in steps (1) or (2).
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.
Basically, the more your news item looks like one of Adamant's, the more likely it is to be approved.
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]
METHOD 2 [MESSY]
A couple of other points - these aren't requirements so much as advice, but I thought people may find it useful. 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
- 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.
I hope this info helps - I'm not an expert on press releases, but I felt it might help to share my thoughts on how to make one work for you.
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