Submissions and Contact
Updated October 27th, circlenine

Pat writes and maintains the Final Fantasy Retrospective on this site. Send all inquiries regarding these articles to him, please.


Submission Guidelines

Submitting content to SMPS is usually a pretty straightforward affair and I'm pretty lax with what I'll accept so long as I like it and think others would enjoy reading it as well. I'm not a stickler, holier-than-thou dickhead trying to enforce rules on others with these guidelines, but a few recent submissions (and a ridiculous spike in viewership/interest in submitting to my site) have urged me toward setting up some guidelines that I'd like to be followed before submitting. It's all fairly common sense, but let's just get it all out here in a nice place so that when I turn someone down (which I've still yet to do) I can say it was here.


I - CONTENT
A common misconception is that SMPS is a games site, but there's a lot of stuff that tends to be covered. Games just end up taking up most of it, because that's what I like writing about as do most of the people who submit content.

I'll give any idea or article a read once and I'm always open to ideas. If there's something you wish to write about, either do it and send it to me or contact me about the idea first and we can go over it. Or if you just wanna write a game review, have at it. Whatever's clever.


II - CLARITY
Proper grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation go a long way toward getting your article up faster and giving me less of a headache. From this point forward, I will reject any article that is just too damn hard to read or one that I have to edit to make readable. I'm not asking for perfection here, as I know I'm not the greatest when it comes to these things, but I really need you to put effort into making sure what you write is readable.

Try to avoid massive blocks of text. Large paragraphs are fine, but an entire article that's just one big block paragraph probably needs some breaking up. Nobody likes walls of text.


III - PRESENTATION AND PACKAGING
A. Document
Beginning October 27th, 2009, Socksmakepeoplesexy.Net will only accept articles and reviews in the form of plain-text .txt files. If you send a document to me in any other format (such as .doc, .rtf, etc.) I will reply asking you to correct the issue and re-send.

Over the years it's become quite a pain dealing with various incompatabilities and inconsistencies in other formats which just means that your content takes longer to get up. Accepting only .txt documents from now on just makes everyone's job easier.

If you know what you're doing with basic HTML stuff and need to bold, underline, strike, link to, or italicize things, go ahead and include those tags in your work. I'll handle everything else unless there's something we need to work out. In that case, just email me.

B. Images
There's no limit or pre-requisite for number of images you can use in an article or review. No images is a bit of a turn off for most people, so just keep that in mind. If there are too many images to fit in the article in a tasteful manner, I may have to cut them. If it appears this may be a problem for the article as a whole, I'll contact you about it.

An image to be displayed in the article itself can be no larger than 650px in width. Height is whatever. There are no restrictions on images that you wish to have hotlinked from an article to appear in another window.

If you need images placed in a specific part of your article, make note of it in the document with as much detail as possible and I'll do my best to work it in there where it's needed.

C. Pack It Up, Send It Out
.rar or .zip your images and document up using your favorite archive software and send it off to one or both of the following addresses:

IV - THE WAIT
Once you've sent your submission, you just have to wait for me to get back wtih you. I try and check my SMPS mail every day, but I get a tad busy sometimes and can miss a few days, so give me a bit of time to respond.

When I do read your submission, I'll get back to you right after and let you know if I'll run it and give you a rough estimate of when it'll go up, though if you've followed the guidelines things should go smoothly and I can usually get it finished and up in under 24 hours after checking it. If it's too long feel free to yell at me.


V - THE END
I think these are pretty easy to follow guidelines and just as "common sense" as I stated in the beginning. As always, if you have any other questions you can contact me at either of the above addresses.