Basic Author Guidelines

The idea behind Make: Page 2 is to allow you, our readers, to contribute content to the MAKE site. Now anyone can be a potential MAKE contributor! But we obviously want to maintain the editorial quality and integrity of MAKE. Now, when you contribute to the MAKE site, three things can happen to the story you submit: 1) It meets our regular editorial and content guidelines, and our desired content mix, and gets published onto the main MAKE blog page, 2) It doesn’t fully meet this criteria (e.g. it’s a worthy project, but an area that’s already well-covered on the blog), but it’s still of likely interest to a segment of our readership. It will be fed to Make: Page 2, a secondary blog feed entirely constructed of community-contributed posts, 3) It doesn’t meet our editorial/content criteria for either feed and so it doesn’t get published. To increase the chances of getting your post on the main blog, or on Make: Page 2, here are a few helpful guidelines.

Voice:

Be yourself, be enthusiastic (but not over the top — easy on the exclamation points), be inclusive (we have a readership with a very wide range of interests and skill levels), and have fun. Try and keep the deep geekspeak to a minimum and provide parenthetical definitions and educational links (e.g. to Wikipedia) whenever appropriate. Teach as much as show. In terms of overall voice, as the Whole Earth Review used to put it: “Write like you’re writing to an intelligent but uninformed friend.”

Content:

Write about what you’re enthused about, the projects that you or others are working on that you think MAKE readers will enjoy. It’s OK to send us content about your kit, product, or maker pro venture, but we don’t want a press release. Tell us why this is of interest to makers, talk to us in your own voice (not in salespeak). Tell us a story.

Events/Announcements:

If you have an event, hacker/makerspace opening, mini Maker Faire to talk about, we’d love to have these submitted, but again, make it personal, thoughtful, not PR. The ideal posts for the main blog are ones that tell a story, feature a project or maker, and also include a promotion for your event. And please also submit the basic details to our Maker Events calendar (even if you submit a post).

Projects:

If you’ve done a full-blown step-by-step project, why not load it onto Make: Projects, our community-built project wiki? It will persist there much longer than a dated blog post and you can link back to your own site/blog there, if you like.

Technical Guidelines:

• We use headline case for post headlines (i.e. “All Words Should Be Capped”)
• All posts should include at least one image
• If you send YouTube vids, just include the video URL (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EGRELYjGpY), not the iframe info or other embed code
• No links to offsite images, they must all be loaded within your post
• Include a short (two sentence) bio of yourself and an image of yourself

Now, Contribute to MAKE!