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, it's 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 it's 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.

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

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 2010, 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 it's 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. It should also be noted however that neither the Arc site, nor the folks browsing, have an infinite amount of bandwidth :)

Associated Images

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 - try putting the text on top of the background yourself, to be sure that if the blurb is printed from 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 it's 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.

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 your 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, PNG or a JPG, some of the quality can be lost when you save, and it can make it difficult to resize the image.

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 definitely 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. In a PDF document is ok, but not ideal.

Size

Disk space, that is. Magnetic home.

How big your blurb should be in a kilobyte sense can be an issue when downloading it off the website.

If you think that the materials for your blurb are starting to get a bit big, it's always a good idea to check with the organisers and make sure that your 6Meg tif is going to be usable - otherwise precious editing and printing time can be wasted getting back to you about it and then getting a new copy from you.

Where and how do you send them?

Online

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-designed image or document. The submission system also provides for you to let the organisers know how many GMs you have for each session, and provide contact info so that none of this info is missing.

EMail

If you need to email your blurb through for some reason, feel free. The best address to send it to is orgs@arcanacon.org. If possible you should put your images on a website, and send the orgs a url rather than lobbing the whole thing through email. 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 a 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. It's probably best if you give the organisers 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.

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.