A Guide for Submitting Articles

This guide describes the process for submitting material to LayStar for publication.

Index

What?s It All About?

What to Write About

Location, Location

Illustrating Your Article

Formatting Your Article

Uploading Your Article

And Finally

What?s It All About?

LayStar welcomes material from writers. We accept a wide range of topics to support a diverse readership.

We recognise the frustration of many writers that contribute enormous effort and dedication in the pursuit of being published. LayStar is an opportunity to be published and to be visible while developing writing concepts or perhaps testing new ideas or writing styles. All material that is published is listed in our magazine for anyone to read. Writers need to tempt our visitors into reading their material. The more hit-counts (downloads) an article attains, the more popular it is.

We do not pay for published material, but neither do we charge writers to submit their articles.

There are a few simple rules for articles that you submit to LayStar:

Do not copy the work of other people - images and text must be produced by you. You may have someone submit your material to LayStar on your behalf.
Images or text shall not be vulgar, distasteful, libellous, obscene, racist or sexually explicit

Further detailed terms and policies are available from the links at the foot of this page.
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What to Write About

With LayStar you can write about anything that appeals to you. Provided you keep to the rules (above) the sky is the limit.

You can try your hand at poetry, or perhaps write a travel guide for somewhere you have just visited. You can write as a journalist and have your say about something or, ?tell it how it is?. You could provide our readers with a guide on how to fix minor faults on a car or how to fix dinner! If you are a budding novelist, you may like to try a short story.

So, get writing!

Location, Location

LayStar is location-based. This means that you will need to select a location before the submission link is displayed to enable you to upload material. The article that you are submitting may not lend itself to being location-based and this is not a problem. The ?coverage? category is used to determine whether the article is suited to all readers (National) or to readers in a particular county, postcode area or specific to a town or village.

Example: if you write a travel guide for a location in the UK, you might first find or register the location you are writing about and then upload the article as part of that location. You may set the coverage to, County, so that visitors looking at any location in that county will see your article.

When our readers first come to LayStar they are shown only the national coverage articles, which are selected randomly and placed on the front cover of the magazine. As the reader homes in to a location, then any articles covering that location, if any, are displayed along with the national articles.

Illustrating Your Article

We allow one image to be uploaded with each article. The image can be a photo or it can be a digitally scanned drawing or other artwork that can be used to illustrate your work.

Our method of uploading allows you to determine where your illustration will be best placed in the article.

The digital image or photo must be converted to a JPG or JPEG format and must be no greater than 300KB in size. There are many software packages that allow you to manipulate photos and scanned work, many of which are free to download on the Internet. If you are unsure about this, perhaps you could seek some help from the computer boff in your family or up your street.

Formatting Your Article

We provide an on-screen editor in which you can paste your text and then format it to the way you like it. It is easy to user, having similar formatting capabilities of most popular word processors.

If you have a pre-formatted article in your favourite word processor, you might first need to save your document as a text article or copy and paste it into a text editor like Notepad.

Any image that you upload will also apprea in the editor for you to format it to your page layout.

There are further help links for each stage of the upload process.

Uploading Your Article

If you haven?t already registered with LayStar, you will be prompted to do so or to log in before you can upload your article. This enables us to associate articles with their owners.

The upload process:

Step One: see if there are any articles already uploaded that you may wish to update. Else, create a new article, which is the route we will follow here.
Step Two: follow the online guidance and complete the form with the title, author, blurb and a category that best suits the article.
The blurb is what you find on the back of a book to tempt people into reading it. We allow only 300 characters, including spaces. Also, only the first 100 characters are displayed with the article titles on our front page and contents area. It pays to be punchy and to the point.
Select the coverage to determine whether the article is associated with the location you have chosen, an area around the location or if the article is location-independent (national). For example, an article on the Fruit & Veg Show in Bridgend is likely to appeal to the people of Bridgend, while an article on the Rise of Gordon Brown to Prime Minister has a national identity.
Select an article status. The field defaults to ?pending?. This allows you to get the article looking the way you want it before coming back later and selecting ?ready to publish?. Changing to a publish status generates a series of actions, including sending your article to the Administrator for review before it is fully published.
Finally, enter an author profile. This is a bit about the author, and it is used for this article and any other articles that you may go on to submit.
Stage Three: the screen reflects what you have entered so far, and enables you to find and select one image file for uploading, if you want.
Stage Four: edit your article within our editor. When you are finished, you can view what you have uploaded and check the format.
You can change anything at this stage, or at a later date.

Once you are finished there is a link to take you out of the upload area and back to the magazine pages. You can come back at a later stage and upload more work or amend what you have already submitted.

You should note that it may take a couple days, sometimes longer, to replicate your article across all of our servers. Your work is only partially published at first to limited users. We undertake checks on your material before we fully publish.

And Finally

Thank you for sharing your work with LayStar and our readers. We hope that your article attracts readers and, in so doing, boosts your confidence as a writer.

LayStar