Writers Guidelines


Want to see your work in NILE Magazine?  Please send your proposal to editor@nilemagazine.com.au.
We'd love it if you could briefly outline your story idea and include a proposed word count with a few strong clips, but please do not send full articles until requested.

In a nutshell:

NILE ARTICLES ARE

  • Carefully researched (see below).

  • Told with a strong narrative or "angle".

  • Both interesting AND academic.

  • Inclusive: they provide background and context that allow general readers to be engaged by your topic.

  • Full of "surprise and delight" nuggets of information that delight even devotees of the subject.

THINGS WE CAN'T USE

  • Fiction

  • Collections of facts without a good narrative

  • Travelogues

  • First-person essays

  • Articles that focus on pseudo-science: supernatural events, aliens, lost technology, etc.


Some guidelines:

NEITHER STUFFY NOR FLUFFY
Tell us something we don't know. Our readers are a wonderful mix of general enthusiasts and professional scholars, and we like to dance with all of them. We're looking for a strong narrative with lots of well-researched "I didn't know that" facts.

RESEARCH
What's your scholarship like? Remember, NILE readers are enthusiasts about ancient Egypt, and some may even know more than you about your topic.

We like to avoid generalisations. If you ever find yourself writing things like "it is often said that...." or "researchers have found that ...", you are being too general. We like evidence. We like accurate quotes, clear examples and stated references. It adds clarity and credibility to your writing.

If, based on the evidence at hand, you are having a leap of conjecture, that's OK - as long as you're clear about it.

QUALIFICATIONS
NILE is not a peer-reviewed, academic journal, so formal qualifications are not a prerequisite for contributing. We can happily include the musings of professionals alongside those of the armchair Egyptologists. Either way, articles should be rooted in solid research and reasoning (see above comments).

LENGTH
Contributed articles in NILE generally run between 2,000-3,500 (ish) words.

EDITING
Don't be offended if we edit your work. It is still awesome. All articles submitted to NILE are edited to bring them into line with our house style and ensure consistency in the spelling of ancient names, dates, etc. Text may also require trimming in order to fit a layout.

IMAGES
NILE is proud of its amazing photography (some would say obsessive), so if you are submitting images they should be high-res, clear and in-focus. We may make slight changes to photographs to make them clearer to readers. All images sent to us must have copyright permission and be well-captioned.

FOOTNOTES
We don’t include footnotes or a bibliography in articles.

COPYRIGHT
Copyright for articles, photographs, diagrams, excavation plans and maps remains yours. NILE requires first reproduction rights, as well as the right to use and reprint your work.

PAYMENT
Payment is made at the end of the month in which the issue carrying your article is published.

I can't wait to read your article and learn something fascinating.

Jeff Burzacott
editor@nilemagazine.com.au