This section will be revised at the beginning of 2006

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We are always happy to read your submission of publishable material, either rules or supporting material. We will look at your submission and comment on it but we don’t guarantee to publish it. In general you will need to have at least 16 sides of A4 in 9 point to make a financially viable product. Small items of general interest, for example scenarios, extra rules, tactics, may be not worth printing but could, by agreement, by put onto our website. If you really want to get into print, here are some guidelines.

Initially send a brief one page synopsis of your proposed work. We will then assess the ideas and comment. Once this synopsis is approved you can go on to a first draft, rewrites etc. Please don’t write anything that you wouldn’t use yourself, and test it as far as possible, and be prepared to re-write.

We are looking for original, publishable material, not incomplete or vague ideas, and the body of work should be supported by data and army lists where appropriate, so that a prospective purchaser can pick up the product and play straight away. There should be liberal use of examples of play in the text. We don’t need elaborate prose, but rules should be clear, structured, tested and spell checked. Rules should be adequately playtested, preferably by a group other than your regular gamers since they will not have you there to explain the words. This is particularly important because one of the chief errors made by writers is to fail to write down tiny but fundamental parts of the rules that everyone he has played the rules with knows and understands but an outsider cannot begin to contemplate.

We will be picky! Make sure all your charts have clear contents and are labelled so that they can be identified. Modifiers to dice rolls in charts should be structured so that they are the same way round. We strongly recommend that +ve modifiers are used for good events and –ve modifiers are used for bad events. This makes it easier to remember them.

Material submitted to us for publication can only be accepted on the assumption that copyright is assigned. The work submitted must be original and must not infringe anyone’s intellectual property rights. We will retain editorial control to edit, proof-read, format and generally nit pick. Full terms and conditions may be viewed in a separate annex

We can publish your work by a number of different routes.

1. You provide all the written material and artwork, we edit, proof-read, test and format it to our production standard including the cover and introduction pages as appropriate. The management fee for such activity would be £100 plus £ 5.00 per page of the final proof document. If artwork is required this could cost between £50 and 100 as well, depending on requirements.
2. This is as 1), but we would organise printing for you, based on a print run of 100. This would be at our printers. We would charge you the fees as defined under 1) plus printing costs, which work out usually at around £1.50 to £2.00 per copy depending on page count. These costs would be estimated and quoted separately. The finished product would be forwarded to you at (your) cost. You will then be free to sell your printed work as you think fit.
3. As 1, but instead of us printing the finished work, we would just do the editorial work and return the finished document to you in a form which could be printed as you see fit. Our files for printing are normally formatted using MS Publisher. As in 2) you will then be free to sell your printed work as you think fit.
4. You provide the material, we edit, format and organise printing, but we pay for the printing and retain the finished copies to sell as part of our product range. You will then get 10% royalties on the price that we get for selling the product, in whatever form we do that. This means that we sell direct and wholesale within the UK and Europe, or licence production in other countries. You will receive royalties at agreed intervals, probably annually. Most of our authors opt for this route since, once the material is edited and agreed, they get an income stream with no upfront costs. We would aim to make a profit from this since we bear the initial costs and financial risks. We will advertise them on our website and in our usual adverts.

A cover price of work depends very much on the number of pages it consists of, and whether it consists of rules, supporting material, or both. As a guide, here are some suggested prices:

• Rules up to 32 pages normally £5.00
• Rules up to 64 pages normally £7.50
• Supplements up to 8 pages - would be made available as free bonus or placed on Website
• Supplements up to 24 pages normally £2.50
• Supplements up to 48 pages normally £5.00

Other sizes could be defined specially.

• Make sure that your rules structure is logical. There should be an introduction which defines the background, ground scales, timeframe etc. This should be followed by command structures, movement, shooting, close combat, optional rules, scenarios, points values.
• Any construction system should be correctly balanced so that the relative values of units are correct.
• Limit the choice of game dice to d10 and d6 if possible.
• Material should be submitted in MS WORD. This can be submitted on disc, zip disc or by Email.
• Text must be formatted in Time New Roman 9 point.
• Styles used must be Normal for all body text within the rules, tables, etc. This enables us to assess page count at the end. Please do not use other style names, and delete any extraneous ones before submission.
• Up to 3 Heading Levels are recommended.
• Please do not use auto-numbering, field codes, cross references etc. Any numbers in the rules should be included as part of the text. We may well choose to re-order or number items differently.
• It would be helpful if rules, army lists, data tables etc. are supplied as separate files.
• Any graphics for use in the text should be included in the text where you want it to appear and also be supplied as a separate file in a common graphic format. If in doubt use .PCX.
• Please do not double space after full stops. This creates problems with text formatting.
• Make sure you carry out some basic checks before you submit the texts. This means run a spell checker through the product, and then read the text again yourself. You will be amazed at the number of errors that can be found at this stage, often due to a rule change during development that has not been followed through the entire document.

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