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Submission Guidelines for Touchstone
General
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 traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox believers.
Touchstone accepts original submissions for the following departments:
- Features
- Views
- Book reviews
- 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:
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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.
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Articles should be submitted by e-mail, as an attached Microsoft Word file
in .doc format (NOT .docx), 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.
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)
- Book reviews: between 5,000 and 10,000 characters (1,000–2,000
words)
- Reports: between 7,000 and 10,000 characters (1,500–2,000 words)
- Book reviews should contain the following information about the book under review:
- Title of book
- Author or editor of book
- Publisher and year of publication
- Number of pages in book, price, and whether book is in hardcover or paperback
- 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.
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Submissions are evaluated by a group of reviewers, a process that may
take up to six weeks. If you do not hear from us within that time, please
write the managing editor (kuhn@touchstonemag.com) to inquire about the
status of your article.
Payment & Rights
Please note that we do not pay for book reviews.
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Original features, Views, and Communiqués are given an honorarium of
$125 per published page.
Authors receive one complimentary copy 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; and
- 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 March 5, 2009)
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