Guidelines for guest posts at Book Thingo
Thanks for your interest in writing a guest post for Book Thingo. We have put together some information to help you write your post and to help us get it ready for publication.
The most important thing to remember is that Book Thingo is a place to have conversations about books, with an Australian perspective. Most of our discussions focus on romantic fiction. Posts that help readers find new books or authors they might like would work best. If you’re writing a review, there are additional guidelines further down the page.
How to submit a guest post
We’re pretty laid back about this. You can either e-mail Kat (or use the contact form) with a proposal or with your completed post. If you’d like to include any images with your post, please attach it to the e-mail, or include a link to your own server or image hosting account (e.g. Flickr).
We’ll acknowledge your e-mail when we receive it. If you haven’t received a response within three days, please follow it up as it’s likely been lost in the ether.
Byline
Please let us know the exact name you wish to use in your byline. Feel free to include a sentence or two about yourself and a link to your website or blog if you have one. If you don’t want to include a bio, a brief list of your favourite books or authors would be great. This gives readers a way to determine if you reading preferences match theirs.
Acceptance and revisions
Your post will be subedited, but if major changes are required, we’ll discuss these with you before publication. We will usually add a strap to help attract our readers’ interest.
Just because your post appears on Book Thingo doesn’t mean the site owner or editors endorse what you’re saying. We want to hear different opinions. It makes our discussions far more interesting.
Book Thingo reserves the right to refuse any contributions at its sole discretion and without explanation.
Exclusivity
When you submit a guest post, we request first Internet use rights, exclusive for two weeks. What this means is that we assume your post hasn’t already been published on the Internet, and that it won’t appear anywhere else on the Internet for at least a fortnight after we publish it on Book Thingo. During this time, feel free to promote your post by using short excerpts and linking back to Book Thingo.
If the post has previously been published, you’d be doing us a courtesy if you mention where and when it was published. We’d love to include this information in your byline.
If you’d like to negotiate different terms, please let us know before we agree on a publication date for your post.
Style guide
We follow Australian English spelling except when quoting. Direct quotes and book titles should be faithful to the spelling and punctuation of the original text.
We tend to write in the first person when reviewing books. We encourage you to do the same, but it’s really up to you—after all, the reason we love having guest posters is for the different points of view that you bring.
Don’t italicise or underline book titles. (They will be linked to a bookshop or publisher listing.) Capitalisation should reflect how the title is printed on the book cover, title page or on the author’s website.
Aussies have a fairly high tolerance for colourful language, but we’ll frown upon malicious or humourless profanity.
If you’re posting about specific books or authors, please include the URLs to the author’s website and, if available, an excerpt of the book.
Please link to or reference any sources you used to research your post.
Links should be integrated with the text of your post. If you’re working with unformatted text, just include ‘(link: http://somesite.com/)’ next to the bit of text that should be linked.
General style guidelines:
- When referring to another blog or to a username, spell the name exactly as it’s used. Keep the name in lowercase if that’s how it’s shown in the original blog, forum or website.
- Spell out whole numbers up to one hundred and larger numbers that are rounded (e.g. one million). Use numerals for numbers greater than one hundred except when starting a sentence.
- Spell out ordinal numbers.
- Use AUD currency or provide a conversion.
- Write dates as: Month Day (e.g. March 1), or shorten to dd/mm (e.g. 1/3). Include the year if it’s not the current year.
- Use AEST or AEDST timezone or provide a conversion.
- Use single quotation marks except for quotes within quotes, which use double quotation marks.
We’re not strict on these. We adapt based on what you’ve written and how it looks on the page.
Images
We like to include at least one image (if not more) with every post. For reviews, we always include the book cover. It would be great if you can include a URL (e.g. Amazon, Harlequin Australia, etc.) or scanned image with the exact cover of the book you read. We like to show the right cover with your post.
Book cover images and purchasing links will be added as part of the subediting process, so you don’t need to worry about those. Feel free to send additional images that you’d like to include with your post as long as your use of the images abides by Australian copyright law.
We will upload a copy of each image onto our servers and host it on the site. Images will be proportionally resized to a maximum height of 250px.
Book review guidelines
Read the book. If you can’t bear to finish the book, it’s fine, but we really prefer if you made it at least halfway in. If you’re posting about a DNF (Did Not Finish), it’s important that you include the reasons why you couldn’t finish the story.
Please don’t include the back blurb verbatim. This is available from many other websites and we prefer that you summarise the plot in your own words or link to a suitable blurb. This is particularly important if you’re posting a short review.
We love excerpts so readers can get a feel for an author’s writing, but we don’t want them to dominate the post. Try to keep excerpts short and meaningful for the review. If longer excerpts are available on the author’s website, it would be great if you can link to that instead.
While we don’t expect you to like every book you read, Book Thingo readers expect reviews to be balanced. If you truly love, love, loved! the book, we at least want to know if there are elements that other readers might not like. If you truly hated the book, we want to know why you felt compelled to burn it and bury the ashes in a deep, deep grave. (And in particular, keep in mind any conflicts of interest.)
If you’re reviewing a romance book, we expect you to understand the restrictions of the romance genre and, if necessary, identify any challenges to those restrictions.
Reviews should conclude with a Yay or Nay? paragraph, which summarises your overall recommendation. Book Thingo doesn’t use a grading system.
Spoilers
Please try to avoid spoilers in your post. As a guideline, if something is mentioned in the back blurb, or if it happens within the first few chapters of the book, we wouldn’t consider it a spoiler.
Having said this, if spoilers are essential to your post—for example, if you’re writing about a controversial book—then you may ignore this guideline.
If your post has major spoilers, please include a warning somewhere at the top of the post. This gives readers plenty of time to avoid them.
If a book is part of a series, you can mention spoilers for previous books. Please keep in mind that, for some romance books, the identity of the main characters might be considered spoilers. If in doubt, give our readers an opportunity to look away.
Conflict of interest
When commenting or posting, and particularly when reviewing a book, we expect that you’ll disclose any relationship you have with any person, product or company that may be construed, however tenuously, as a conflict of interest. Basically, if that relationship might cause someone to say, ‘That’s dodgy!’ then you should tell Book Thingo up front. In most cases, we recommend incorporating this information into your post or byline.
Copyright
In contributing to Book Thingo, you agree to grant Book Thingo a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish the material. You agree that we can modify it for operational, promotional or editorial reasons, and in any media worldwide. You also grant the same licence to any third parties Book Thingo uses to edit, publish, or store your material. You must be able to declare that you are the rightful owner or have permission to publish the material. If not, then you need to give full attribution to the owner and use the material in a way that doesn’t infringe on the owner’s rights.
Please note that we’re thinking of moving the site to a Creative Commons licence. If this happens, you agree to licence your material to Book Thingo under whatever CC licence we end up deciding on. If you wish to specify CC restrictions, let us know.
If you’d like to negotiate different terms, please let us know before we agree on a publication date for your post.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please contact Kat at kat@bookthingo.com.au or by using the contact form.
