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Notes for contributors

While we have a large and experienced team of freelance expert fishkeeping writers, we are always interested to hear from new writers who can produce well-written articles on their specialist subjects.

We don't accept every article that is submitted for publication, so to make your article more likely to be accepted, here are some simple guidelines on our typical requirements.

What we cover

• All aspects of tropical freshwater and tropical marine fish and inverts. Coldwater fish in ponds and aquaria.
• We rarely cover coldwater marine fish and inverts, and only occasionally cover such creatures as aquatic herptiles, bugs, insects and the like.
• We may publish general pieces on fish biology but virtually all of these are commissioned.
• We may occasionally cover "fishy days out" or "expeditions" but the vast majority of these are done in-house or by commission.
• All shop reviews are done in-house but shop and other news stories are welcome.
• We do not use verse or fiction, but we are very interested in personal accounts of fishkeeping experiences, especially successful fishkeeping projects with lots of practical detail.

What we don't cover

• We never cover reptiles.
• For legal reasons, we rarely, if ever, cover fish that require a licence to be kept, such as many North American coldwater species. Too few of our readers hold the required licences.
• We never cover crayfish, as there is only one species that can be legally kept in the UK.
• We always recommend that new water is dechlorinated. The old-fashioned method of leaving water to stand can cause problems for readers who have a chloraminated supply.
• We prefer to recommend fishless cycling techniques, but we appreciate that there are other favoured methods of maturing an aquarium.
• We don't recommend keeping goldfish in bowls or unfiltered aquaria.

Before contributing

Stating the obvious, please read the magazine. You'll need to be conversant with the style of PFK. We expect to have to do a large amount of re-writing on most features, but the closer your feature is to the required style, the more likely we are to use it in the form you submitted it.

However, if you would be very disappointed to see your feature heavily subbed you may wish to consider offering your contribution elsewhere. If making a major content change to a piece we will usually check with the contributor, but we can't promise to do this in every case.

Style tips

Practical Fishkeeping is first and foremost an instructional magazine, and techniques like step-by-step coverage of a subject are very useful. However, this doesn't mean that coverage should be dry, humourless or extremely basic. Personal experiences are often the best illustration of a point. Don't worry too much if your own experience is different to other experts. We constantly face that problem and our abiding principle is that fishkeeping is both an art and a science.

Also remember that properly explained, no subject is too difficult for our readers (as long as we can understand it!)

We use a lot of Fact Files on fish; glossaries; did you knows? etc. We can always extract these from your copy but it's a huge help if you do your own. There is no need to put a headline or standfirst on your copy (but all suggestions gratefully received).

Length is not of major importance, but features are rarely less than 500 words long, or more than 3,500. We would always rather have more information than less. A typical three page feature is usually around 1500 words.

Check your facts

Before submitting, we'd really appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to double-check that your article is still factually accurate. Nomenclatural changes mean that fish names do change, and it creates an excellent impression if you've taken the time to ensure that the names you're using aren't outdated. If your articles are factually correct and a pleasure to work with, with much more likely to commission further articles from you!

Submission method

By far the majority of our contributions now come in by email, either as straight message, or as an attached file. Like most publishing companies, we use Apple Macintosh computers, so we are not always able to read files produced on a Windows PC. When submitting documents, rich text format (RTF) files are generally the safest option.

Alternatively, send us your feature on a CD (again in RTF format) or as a clearly typed or printed manuscript which we can scan. Please don't send us a floppy! Macs don't have floppy drives, so we won't be able to read it.

These days we would only accept a hand-written manuscript in very exceptional circumstances. We rarely accept articles in languages other than English due to the time and expense involved in translation, but for very specialist material we can make exceptions.

Picture submissions

You are welcome to submit your own images. However, our photographic standards are extremely high; professional photography is one of the things that gives our magazine its polished appearance. Since our photographics standards are so high, please don't be offended if we don't use your pictures.

Much of our photography is now digital. However, our experience with digital pictures from readers has not been good. Therefore if submitting digital pictures ring for advice first as to formats. Colour transparencies or prints are both acceptable.

We can usually get pictures to illustrate most features, and the quality we demand is very high, so it may not be a good idea to waste time on photography unless you know exactly what you're doing or pictures can be used as an artist's reference.

Payment

We do not quote a standard rate for contributions as we find that the amount of work we have to put into them varies enormously as does the space that we allot to them, and how far our budget has to stretch each month may vary. We are happy to consider "suggested" payments or to negotiate payments.

The payment process is initiated as soon as we receive a magazine from the printers - usually, but not always, a few days before publication - and generally takes at least ten days to come through from our financial department. PFK is published by emap active - a large centralised publishing organisation - and we have limited control over payments once we have passed on the details.

In conclusion

Although we commission the majority of the magazine's content each month, we attribute much of our success as Britain's largest selling fishkeeping magazine of any type to our many and varied contributors. Fresh faces are always welcome, and the tradition of running this magazine with a tiny in-house editorial team means that our contributors are a vital part of the operation.