Rocky Mountain Fly - Submission Guidelines

Rocky Mountain Fly is dedicated to providing the most informative and entertaining articles about fishing the Rocky Mountain region and the best angling photography on the Web. We are most interested in submissions from fly tyers, guides, and others in the industry. At the moment, we do not provide payment for photos (though a byline is provided), and for article submissions we provide a banner link to the author's site. We hope to one day provide monetary payment, but as we are a new market, we simply can't afford it.

We update our site quite regularly, and are always interested in working with new authors, so if you're looking to write something to get your name circulating, we're an excellent market.

Editorial Guidelines

Since we are an e-publication, the range of article lengths we can publish is not dependant on page space. Therefore, we will gladly accept pieces between 500 and 4000 words. We are interested in a variety of pieces, ranging from fly fishing fiction to reflective pieces to how-to and where-to pieces to interviews with industry professionals. We accept reprints and simultaneous submissions. We ask for rights to post pieces as feature articles for two months and archived in various sections of our site indefinitely, though other arrangements are possible as requested. The best guides to the pieces we're interested in publishing are the pieces we've published. Some examples include:

"A North Yellowstone Primer," a how-to piece on the north end of Yellowstone Park
an interview with a Bighorn River guide
a humor piece on what "fly shop dudes" do to stay sane on rainy, slow days
a profile of the Henry's Fork of the Snake
a description of conservation efforts on a Colorado River

In general, our "Fly of the Week" and "North Boundary: Reflections on Fly Fishing" columns are staff-written only.

Please query JD Miller, Managing Editor at jd@rockymtnfly.com with potential article ideas. Please be specific in your query. Try to state your angle; make things interesting. Also include relevant clips. Once an idea is approved, send your piece to Walter Wiese, Editor, at walter@rockymtnfly.com in the body of the e-mail or as a .txt or Microsoft Word .doc file. We only accept e-submissions at this time.

If you send your file as an MS Word file, please put your submission in standard manuscript format (12 point generic typeface, double spaced, etc. Check the web). Also, please DISABLE Autoformat! Many autoformat options do not display correctly when copied to the web. To disable these options, click in the following pattern: Tools---->AutoCorrect Options--->Autoformat as You Type. Disable every option under the "Replace as you type" heading.

If you have photos to include, please send them as well. See photo guidelines below.

Photographic Guidelines

We accept digital images, either in conjunction with editorial submissions or as separate files. We offer a community photo gallery as well as photo features. We highly encourage amateurs to submit, since we do not offer payment for photos at this time --though we do offer bylines.

Please submit images in the highest quality jpeg format your camera can manage. Please do not crop or otherwise edit images, except for inclusion in our user-created photo galleries. For images used editorially, we will crop and post-process as needed. We are looking for sharp, well-saturated pictures of fish, fly fishing scenes, flies, aquatic insects, and essentially any scene which may be of interest to anglers.

There are three options for image submission. The first, and easiest, is to post your photos in our community gallery. This is an option open to any Rocky Mountain Fly forum member. The second option is to include images with written submissions. Please see above for query requirements –note the availability of images in your query, then send them along with your response to an improved query. The third option is to submit photo features as a complete package. Contact JD Miller for approval. Other contact details will be sent to you then.

We "buy" one-time photo rights, though as noted above, features to which our photos are attached may be archived indefinitely. If requested, we will strip written features of their photographic support after 2 months.

For approximate formatting guidelines, though they're aimed at print publication, see http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html.