This guide is for current and prospective authors of Smashing Magazine and details the process articles go through in order to be published in our magazine.
When you submit an article or outline to Smashing Magazine, you will work with one of our editors to shape the article for publication.
Your editor will be your key contact through the process; they are experienced in their topic and also have access to a panel of subject-specific reviewers whose opinion they can request.
Your editor will be asking the following questions:
You are the expert on your topic so if an editor makes a suggestion you don’t agree with you are, of course, encouraged to state your case! Sometimes an objection points to a need for clarification in wording rather than something being wrong.
To make this process easier we would ask that you submit outlines and articles somewhere that comments can be made. Great options for this are:
Before getting started, take a look at the following information:
We would suggest that you submit an outline in the first case, to check that the article is a good fit for Smashing Magazine and that no-one else is already working on a similar article.
Your outline should give us enough detail to understand the subject and your specific take on it. As a guide, please make sure to include the following information.
Send this to our contact form. If you have not written for us before, it can be helpful to include links to other pieces of writing — they could be blog posts or similar. You should then be contacted either by a subject-specific editor or by Rachel, our editor-in-chief with initial thoughts and feedback.
Once an outline has been accepted, write your first draft. The hints in our style guide give some tips as to the voice and tone of Smashing articles plus hints for clear writing. You can always share early ideas with your editor as you are working if you want or need some feedback.
Add your article to one of the tools mentioned above and share it with your editor.
How long it takes for a first draft to become a published article depends on how much work is needed regarding review and editing.
It is likely that your editor will have some suggestions to discuss with you. For a very technical article, or something outside of the core knowledge of the editor they will request help from our review panel. In that case, the editor will take their feedback and present it to you along with their own thoughts.
You will then have time to make any necessary revisions that come out of the discussions.
Once you and your editor feel the article is ready, it will be passed onto our editor-in-chief to get the green light and then go into the final production stages of proofreading and preparation for publication to the site.
Please note that final drafts will not be accepted without all of the original images. See the article template for details.
You’ll get a final chance to have a look at the article before it is ready for publication, so you can give it a final check over after small copy edits have been made in the proofreading process.
We will let you know which date your article is scheduled for. Once it goes live, you will be contacted. We would love you to share your article on social media and pop back to answer any comments from our Smashing audience!
Last updated 28th December 2017 by Iris Lješnjanin