Electronic blurbs can often be much easier to deal with than paper blurbs - certainly making changes becomes infinitely easier, and it avoids the whole issue of taking a paper blurb and scanning it or retyping it. It gives you as a writer the chance to be fairly explicit about how you want your blurb laid out with a good chance of the booklet editor being able to replicate it with minimal effort.
However, there are pitfalls to avoid and things to do to make electronic blurbs much, much easier. We've tried to list a few things that will make it easier for us to take your blurb and put it in the booklet. Mostly its guidelines - if you're not sure about something, let us know, as soon as you can.
Hardcopy blurbs are still very welcome for Arcanacon, and should be given to an organiser or sent via the post to
Before submitting your electronic blurb, make sure it is complete, just as you would for a paper blurb. For Arcanacon, that means your blurb has:
Production team listing (eg: Blah Productions) are welcome, but will not be accepted without an author name as well. We suggest putting this into your blurb in a way something like:
When you submit your blurb, we also need other information about your game. Let us know which sessions you're able to run it, and when you'll be unable to run it. It can help if you can provide contact details to the organisers (not for the blurb) so we can find you and let you know about anything that comes up between submitting the blurb and running the convention. Also if you have any special requirements, like a particular sort of room, or certain facilities, letting us know early means we're far more likely to be able to accomadate you.
File formats
Everyone has their preferred writing program of choice(tm), and anyone using something different is obviously a freak. Arcanacon is able to accept a large variety of formats, but it isn't infinite, and some programs are just too uncommon to allow us to convert from them. The following list is not complete, but represents the easily usable file types (in no particular order):
If you have a particular font or font style in mind, we might be able to accomodate you, but it can be a fairly touch-and-go process,
Requests for reasonably common fonts or font styles like Utopia or sans serif style are easily satisfied. Asking for a particular font like Rudelsberg or Tibetan Beefcake AOE becomes a bit more problematic. It would help if you let us know the name of the font (including size and weight) and the names of some alternatives, in case we can't get it. Including a screen grab of the font might help us get as close as to your desire as possible.
Often public domain fonts are not exactly right - they will work in some limited cases (same OS they were written with, usually) but not for all situations - this can be something as simple as they appear jaggy, or as final as they simply don't work at all.
If you can't live any longer without the exact fonting that you have on your machine, consider creating a graphic of your blurb instead of submitting it as text (see below).
Like most material, adding graphics to your blurb adds another dimension to the information you can convey. However, a convention booklet isn't exactly a high quality production - often it will be massphotocopied from originals made with a desktop printer. So there are some general dos and don'ts with graphics which can help you produce something that still looks good after its has been printed in the a5 con booklet.
Firstly, consider the fact that the booklet will be black and white. Not colour. Not grey. Black and white. Look at your image in black and white. Does it work? Print it out and then photocopy it - can you still make it out? Take the photocopy and photocopy it. Can you still make the image out? Ok, you're onto a winner then.
Secondly, have a look at the size of your image. You might only have an A6 size of paper worth of space for your whole blurb. Take an A4 sheet, tear it in half across the short axis. And then again. Now take off at least a centimetre around the edges to account for the borders of each page, and that's how much room you might have. Does your image fit in there, and still look ok? Photocopy it again, and check. If you're still happy with it, then this image will probably work in the booklet.
If you're now sitting there dejectedly with your a5 size colour photograph of the perfect image for your blurb, don't despair - think about setting up a website for your con game (see below), or submit it to us as an image for the blurb on the website.
As well as a free-floating image, there are other ways to use graphics in a blurb. You might want a background image behind your text, or a graphical heading for your game, or even want to provide a complete and ready-to-go blurb as an image. All of these require taking a bit of care, but shouldn't be impossible.
Headings are a special case of free-floating images, and only require the same care as above. Backgrounds have their own special needs - you normally need to put the text on top of the background yourself, and you definately need to be sure that once the blurb is printed, you will still be able to read the text. Test it yourself - if your printer isn't very good, it might be a good test for how easy it is to read the text after its been printed.
Producing a photoready blurb means that you need to be sure that all the elements for your blurb - from title to ratings are in the blurb image, and that it will resize to fit into the booklet while still being ready. Its probably a good idea to contact the organisers first and early to check that space is available for the size of blurb that you want to produce. If you are going to need to work on it for a while before sending it in, maybe produce a draft and give that to the organisers so that they know how much space to reserve.
Image dimensions and Quality
Unless you are supplying a postscript blurb laid out to the right size specifications, then it is likely that the editor of the Con booklet is going to have to resize your image to make it fit the booklet. You might want to try and do this yourself a few times to make sure that reducing it in size won't blur any detail, or make text fuzzy and hard to read.
There is some value to producing a large, high quality and easily scalable image. Resizing images from too big to the right size usually causes less distortion to the image quality than having to increase the size of an image. The same applies to the quality of an image - if you produce a lower quality image and give that to the con organisers, then the image quality can only be as good as that version, even if a higher quality image could have been included in the booklet.
Formats
Graphics formats are almost as diversified as text formats, but where text information can sometimes be extracted from the most unusual file formats, graphical information is more limited.
The following formats can definately be accepted for blurbs:
Disk space, that is. Magnetic home.
How big your blurb should be in a kilobyte sense can be an issue for the person putting it together, or for the recipient of your email. It can also be a problem if the computer being used to put the booklet together doesn't have much RAM. If you think that the materials for your blurb are starting to get a bit big, its always a good idea to check with the organisers and make sure that your 6Meg tif is going to be usable - otherwise precious editting and printing time can be wasted getting back to you about and then getting a new copy from you.
First of all, there's the issue of getting them to someone. How do you know that the email address you have is valid, or that they will check it in time, or that your disk won't be magnetically scanned for bomb parts or otherwise garbled in transit?
There are really three options for electronic submissions of blurbs - you can put it on removable media and give it or mail it to someone, you can email it or you can put it somewhere so someone else can fetch it. None of them are exclusive of the others - you could put it on a website and send the organisers a copy on a CD.
Removable media
Probably one of the simplest methods of getting it to an organiser in some ways, it avoids the possibility of garbling during transit (well, in theory) or someone not getting the right URL.
The first thing to check when sending or giving the organisers removable media include making sure they can actually use it - there's no point giving someone a Syquest disk if they don't have a drive that can read it. The same applies to the disk formatting - if you want to send a Mac formatted disk, check that the organisers can read it.
The second thing is to be very clear about the contents of the disk/cdrom you're giving someone. Its probably best if you give the oranisers a clean disk, with no other files on it, to avoid confusion. Perhaps having a directory with the date as its name (depending on your filenaming limitations) to make it clear which version of your blurb it is, in case you send another version. Including a readme file of some sort on the disk explaining the contents is good too - especially what program you used to create the blurb, what version it is and maybe what the original filenames were in case they've been squashed by ancient operating system limits. Don't forget to label the disk - if the editor of the Con book has a lot of disks, you don't want yours becoming a boot floppy for their new install because the editor thought it was blank.
Physical blurbs should be sent to:
Exactly how complex emailing someone with your blurb is depends mostly on how much information you are sending. The simplest blurbs are in plain text, with perhaps some metainformation describing a preferred format. The most complex blurbs might have a couple of images, a preferred font listing and the text of the blurb as a wordperfect document.
Firstly check to see that what you're sending is not going to spam someone's letterbox - 5M is probably about the extreme end of what it is polite to email anyone, and even that is a lot. If you have a lot of information, think seriously about putting it onto removable media or onto a website. If you're not sure, email ahead of time and talk to the organisers about it.
If you're going to email the blurb to someone, it's often a good idea to cc yourself a copy of the mail, so you can see (more or less) what comes out at the far end. Check that you included your attachment, or that the URL you gave works (hint: cut and paste it into a browser. If it doesn't work for you....).
Arcanacon has an easy to use email address for blurb submissions.
Downloadable blurbs
A third method for distributing blurbs is to put the material up on a (web or ftp) site somewhere so that the organisers can download it. This won't necessarily work for all conventions, but Arcanacon has a number of organisers with a good connection to the internet, and for Arcanacon XXI, this option works well.
Many of the same cautions that apply to sending a blurb also apply to giving the organisers a URL for your blurb - you need to make it clear which files are necessary for the blurb, and dating or otherwise versioning the files can help make it clear exactly what material the organisers have got, and when it might have been updated.
In this modern age of babbage machines and telegrams, there exists an opportunity for you to provide more information to the roleplaying public about your game than your a6-a5 size blurb in a Con book. You could, if you were brave and daring enough, provide such information online.
In particular, websites allow you to self-publish the sort of information that you'd normally be handing out at the convention - character briefs, background information, pictures of your characters - so that keen will-be players can get more information about your game. You can also provide even simple things like a longer blurb than could fit into the convention booklet. How about costuming information, or which characters are still available? Is your game a sequal? Maybe have links to the previous blurb or background information?
The world lies in wait for the very first video blurb. You Know You Want To.
Sites like Geocities and xoom provide some free webspace at the cost of advertising being tagged to your page, and most ISPs also provide a small amount of space. Text takes very little space, but graphics can quickly eat up that modicum of internet presence. Sometimes the convention themselves are happy to host extra material for your game on their site, depending on their own online setup. Arcanacon has some space available, but is dependant on the generous donation of space from Vurt. Talk to us, and let us know your requirements.
As a third option, there are a couple of altruistic sites out there that want to support roleplaying by providing webspace for games, clubs and conventions.
See also