Writers’ Guidelines
Thank you for your interest in submitting articles for publication in Family magazine, Raising Teens, and for posting at njfamily.com. Here are some guidelines to assist you:
Our mission is to help New Jersey parents be the best parents they can be.
Therefore, the focus of any article should be: here are the facts, and here’s what you can do for your child to prevent/promote/manage/help/teach, etc. in any given situation. In other words, every article should answer the question: what can parents in north and central New Jersey DO to help their children?
The most important piece of advice for any freelancer is this: know your audience.
Family magazine’s audience is the parents of children living in north and central New Jersey. Our audience for Raising Teens is the parents of teenage children in New Jersey. Our articles cover topics that range from universal parenting concerns (health, education, development) to specific how-to and where-to-go information.
Family is like a local version of a national parenting magazine; it is not a newspaper. We do not report on daily events, and we do not summarize an event that has already happened. If a child-oriented event provides inspiration for parents to take action in the future, a tie-in could be appropriate.
For queries and submissions, please contact our editorial offices via email. If we agree to look at a manuscript based on a query, that does not mean we will accept the manuscript for publication. If we ultimately reject an assigned manuscript for any reason, we pay writers a kill fee of half our agreed-upon amount.
Most articles are about 650 to 1,200 words. We like sidebars, so try to separate out something that can run on its own. We also love it when writers deliver an entire “package,” including a short and/or clever headline and subheads to break up the text. We do not need photographs.
Please be advised that Family has had a long-standing policy regarding editorial submissions from advertisers and for-profit businesses: if you would like to submit a query or a manuscript for consideration, we welcome your expertise. However, if we accept your manuscript for publication, we will not accept your ad for publication in the same issue. We will use the same criteria to judge your submission that we use for all freelance writers, and we will not accept anything that is self-promotional. Your bio credit at the end of your article would not mention your business affiliation. If you would like to promote your business, please contact our ad sales department at sales@njfamily.com, or call 908-232-2913 x104.
Please submit your query or manuscript to: Farn Dupre (editor@njfamily.com). Please be sure to include your name, address, phone number, and email address on your manuscript and in your email.
What should you write about? Being a parent makes you an automatic expert on parenting issues. If you have other expertise, you’re a step ahead of other freelancers. Please be creative and practical at the same time. Good luck and thanks for your interest. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.
Farn Dupre
Editor of Family and Raising Teens
April 2008
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