Touchstone

TOUCHSTONE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES (close)

Before submitting an article, please read several copies of the magazine or a selection of the articles posted in the archives on our website (www.touchstonemag.com/archives) to see the subjects we treat and the way we treat them. Articles should be written for a broad audience of traditiona Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox believers.

Touchstone accepts original submissions for the following departments:

—Features
—Views
—Communiqués

Touchstone does not accept:

—Fiction, poetry, or cartoons
—Devotional articles or sermons
—Reviews of current or recent movies
—Simultaneous submissions
—Previously published articles, with rare exceptions subject to the following conditions:

(a) the readership of the magazine or website where the article first appeared does not overlap with ours;
(b) you are willing if necessary to rework the article for our purposes; and
(c) you own the copyright to the article.

Submitting an Article

You may also send a query to the editor (editor@touchstonemag.com) regarding an article if you are not sure that what you have in mind will work for Touchstone. Please note that a positive response to a query does not guarantee acceptance of the submitted article, which will be evaluated separately.

Articles should be submitted by e-mail, as an attached Microsoft Word file, and addressed to submissions@touchstonemag.com.

The first page of the article should also contain your name and contact information(postal and email addresses and phone number).

Articles should be accompanied by a cover letter introducing yourself, briefly describing your article, and containing your contact information (email and postal addresses and phone number). Please include a brief biographical note of 40 to 50 words that could be published with your article, specifying your profession or occupation, your latest book or other identifying mark (office in a national organization, for example), your family (if you wish), and your church affiliation. See the magazine for examples.

With rare exceptions, we do not use endnotes, so necessary citations should be worked into the body of the text (e.g., “In his book How to Train Koala Bears, John Smith argues . . .”).

The articles in Touchstone are closely edited. Submitting an article indicates agreement to work with the editor in creating an article in our style and to our standards.

Submissions are evaluated by a group of reviewers, a process that may take up to six weeks.

Articles should be of the following lengths (character counts include spaces):

—Features: between 18,000 and 28,000 characters (3,000–5,000 words)
—Views: between 5,000 and 12,000 characters (1,000–2,500 words)
—Communiqués: between 7,000 and 10,000 characters (1,500–2,000 words)

Payment & Rights

Original Features, Views, and Communiqués are given an honorarium of $125 per published page.

Authors receive two complimentary copies of the issue in which their piece is published. Additional copies may be purchased separately.

Touchstone buys the right to the first publication of an original article, with the following conditions:

—that the article not appear elsewhere (including web pages) for 90 days from the date of publication in Touchstone

—that whenever it is reprinted elsewhere (including on web pages), the following notice be included with it: “This article first appeared in the _____ issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity ( www.touchstonemag.com)”

—that we retain the right to use without further payment a portion or description of your article with your name in our promotional materials

—that we retain the right to use your article without further payment in any Touchstone anthologies, reprints, audio recordings, or electronic formats (online, CD-rom, etc.). These conditions apply to a reprinted article that has been reworked for publication in Touchstone.

(Revised December 18, 2014)

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BOOK REVIEW GUIDELINES (close)

Book reviews should be in MS Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) as attached files, or embedded in the email text, and sent to reviews@touchstonemag.com. The cover letter should include the following information:

—Reviewer's name, address, and telephone number, whether the review is full-length or review article length (see below), and a brief biographical note.

—A full bibliographic citation for the book reviewed:

Title
Author or Editor
Publisher, date of publication
number of pages, price, cover type

—Example:

The New Renan
Emil Trautt, ed. and trans.
Éditions LaGrange, 2015
332 pages, $24.95 hardcover, $17.95 paperback

Touchstone seeks reviews of books significant in their fields and likely to be interesting to its readers. Critical commentary, positive or negative, should show evidence that the work has been digested by the reviewer and understood at the level of comprehension for which it was written.

Writers should recall that Touchstone is intended to represent a "three-way conversation" involving Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox readers. This does not mean our Protestant readers, for example, may not be interested, even vitally interested, in "Catholic" or "Orthodox" subjects—we expect them to be, at least to some degree. One should, however, keep the three-way rule in mind, and be aware that the same book might be treated in one way that passes muster, or another that doesn't, depending on the manner of presentation.

Touchstone does not at this time pay for non-feature-length reviews—people write them for sheer exhilaration and the honor of the thing. Normally, reviews should be of new books—forthcoming, or with the current or previous year's publication date. Full-length reviews run a maximum of 1,500 words; short reviews run 100 to 300 words (1–3 paragraphs). The last, since they take the greatest powers of comprehension, synthesis, and execution, are the most difficult to write well, but are particularly welcome, when successful. Many books lend themselves best to brief review in the Touchstone context.

Book Notices are primarily to inform potential readers of a new book's availability. They should contain a full bibliographic citation, as above, be only a few sentences long, and summarize content with minimal, if any, critical interaction.

Feature-length reviews (3,000–5,000 words) will be considered "review articles," will be subject to the more extensive editorial review that articles receive, and will be remunerated as articles. It is important to remember the strong connection in the editor's mind between the significance of the book and the amount of space considered appropriate for its review. More than one subject-related book may be reviewed together as a review article or a full-length review.

As with Touchstone articles, appropriate documentation is required, but without footnotes or endnotes. Notes should be contained within the text and abbreviated as much as possible. For example: [J. B. Smith, Hist. Chr. Church, 1934, I: 256]—and later: [Smith, Hist., III: xviii].

The editor will attempt, on request, to obtain from publishers review copies of books potential contributors believe they are likely to review. Normally, receipt of a review copy presumes the submission of a review from the recipient. "Over the transom" reviews—those sent in with no previous communication with the editor—are welcome. The first few paragraphs, at least, will be read. If there is any question on whether a given book would be appropriate for review in Touchstone, please inquire—although it should be said that suitability is often a matter of the reviewer's art.

Touchstone subjects all accepted submissions to rigorous editing, with particular attention to clarity and economy of expression. Potential contributors should read already published reviews for examples of accepted work. The editor will send final drafts of reviews (not feature-length reviews or book notices) to contributors for approval. No review will be published that does not meet its author's approval, but if the editor and author cannot agree on the final form, it is possible that the review could die on the vine.

Contributors are expected to respond promptly to inquiries from the editor. Once a review copy is received from a publisher at Touchstone's request, the editor may ask for progress reports at three, five, and six months. If a reviewer for some reason finds a book received from its publisher unreviewable, a Book Notice is requested.

Reviewers, please include a brief biographical note with each submission. If published, however, a short review or book notice is followed only by its author's name.

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