Blurb submission guidelines, electronic form.

Introduction
Blurb Content
1. File and OS formats
Fonts
Graphics
1. Image quality and dimensions
2. Image format
Size
How and where should you send it?
Websites
And also...

Introduction

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 the orgs having to take 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.

Since you can now submit your blurb online, its even easier to get your blurb to the organisers, have them check it out and let you know that its ready to go.

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 online and in the con 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

Alex Loke
8/11 Irving Ave
Prahran 3181

Some of the checklist below also apply to hardcopy blurbs. If you are emailing you blurb, please include a cover letter with all your details. If you are logging your blurb through AON, then all your details will already be linked to the blurb.

Content

See General Blurb Guidelines for a discussion about what you need to submit as part of a blurb.

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):

plain text (aka ascii)
rtf
MS Word
html
pdf
aw (applix)
open office
latex
ps
gif, png, jpg, tif

Amiga/Mac/Apple/BeOs/C64/Stonehenge files will require a bit of jiggery pokery to get converted for 2006, but can be probably be done - please prewarn us so we can organise ourselves to get it done quickly once we receive your blurb.

Fonts

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. If its a TrueType font, and you suspect we won't have it, you can send along the .ttf file. If not, 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).

Graphics

Like most material, adding graphics to your blurb adds another dimension to the information you can convey, if you have colour images that you might want to put on the website.

However, your blurb also has to go into the Convention Book, and the 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. It should also be noted that neither the Arc site, nor the folks browsing, have an infinite amount of bandwidth.

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.

Website

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. We are more than happy to individualise blurbs on our site. We'd love to, in fact. If you have additional information that wouldn't go in a blurb, send it along.

Associated Images

As well as a free-floating images, 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 - try putting the text on top of the background yourself, to be sure that once the blurb is printed or on the site, 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.

Image dimensions and Quality

Unless you have discussed the dimensions and formatting with the Arcanacon organisers, then it is possible that the organisers who are making your blurb public are going to have to resize your image at some point. 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

The format that you send us can also affect the quality of you image. You should try and send your image in what are called non-lossy formats, like TIF, XCF or PSD (photoshop). If you save your image as a GIF or a JPG, some of the quality can be lost when you save, and it can make it difficult to resize the image. JPG images are also rarely suited to being printed in the black and white conbook unless you are working in a very clear style.

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:

xcf (gimp)
psd (photoshop)
tif
gif
png
postscript (ps preferably, eps is ok)
bmp, xbm, xpm (or various other bitmap formats)

Don't send graphics as a word document - the results are suboptimal.

Size

Disk space, that is. Magnetic home.

How big your blurb should be in a kilobyte sense can be an issue for the person putting the booklet together, or for downloading it off the website.

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.

Where and how do you send them?

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?

None of these are exclusive of the others - you could put it on a website and send the organisers a copy on a CD if you so felt the urge.

Online

Fortunately, Arcanacon now has an online blurb submission system through AON. You can submit your blurb either by typing it in, providing a URL, or by attaching a pre-written blurb. The submission system also provides for you to let the organisers know how many GMs you have for each session, any provide contact info.

EMail

If you'd prefer to email your blurb through, feel free. The best address to send it to is arc-wrangler@arcanacon.org. 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....).

Removable Media

Given that the age of the zip disk seems to have passed us by, we're probably talking about sending a CDROM, unless you have enough USB sticks hanging about that you're happy to send one to an organiser....

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 CD formatted for Macs if you haven't checked that they can read it. If you're unsure - ask.

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:

Alex Loke
8/11 Irving Ave
Prahran 3181

Websites

In this modern age of babbage machines and telegrams, with its lack of mass-distributed convention booklets, most of the advertising for Arcanacon is done online. And in this 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 sequel? Maybe have links to the previous blurb or background information?

If you don't have your own chunk of webspace, then consider sending your material to the organiser - we love anything that personalises your blurb on the site and gets more people excited about playing your game.

If you want to do it yourself, then Vurt.net is another excellent group willing to offer webspace and email to games. Just give them a yell.