Have work you want to submit to Blue Mirror? Read the following guidelines to make the most of your submissions. Any questions can be directed to the friendly staff at bluemirror@ncssm.edu.
General guidelines
In general, electronic submissions should be directed to the e-mail address above. Make sure to include the work’s title, your name, and the medium for art (digital photography, paint on canvas, clay and glaze, etc.). Unfortunately, we cannot accept anonymous submissions.
Art
Photography and other small 2D works
Digital photography is, hands down, the most popular medium for art submissions. You may be tempted to submit a large number of pictures in the hopes that at least one will be selected, but doing so ties up the review process and makes the editors more likely to discount all of your submissions. It’s a better idea to submit, at most, five pictures that you feel are your best.
Blue Mirror also accepts scanned versions of regular film photographs and artwork on paper. If you wish to perform the scanning yourself, read the following guidelines for technical information regarding digital copies. The art staff may also perform image scanning for you on request — send us an e-mail at the address above to set up an appointment.
We prefer that photographs be sent as TIFF or JPEG files, in that order. If you have a camera that supports raw output, convert your pictures into TIFF files using Photoshop or a similar graphics program before sending them to us. You may wish to place your TIFF images into a ZIP archive when submitting via e-mail, to reduce the file size. Do not convert photos from JPEG into TIFF; this sharply increases the file size (often by a factor of 15 or so), while providing no additional quality.
In general, images are printed at a resolution of 300 dots per inch: 300 pixels in your picture correspond to one inch on the printed page. We strongly recommend against submitting low-resolution pictures for this reason, since we must print them at a very small size or risk visible pixelation artifacts. The following table gives some common digital image sizes, along with the physical dimensions they will occupy on the printed page.
| Description | Digital size | Page size | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full page | 3150 × 2325 px | 10.5 × 7.75 in | 26.67 × 19.68 cm |
| 6.75 megapixels | 3000 × 2250 px | 10.0 × 7.50 in | 25.40 × 19.05 cm |
| 5.0 megapixels | 2576 × 1932 px | 8.58 × 6.44 in | 21.79 × 16.35 cm |
| 3.0 megapixels | 2048 × 1536 px | 6.82 × 5.12 in | 17.32 × 13.00 cm |
Digital graphics
The above format and resolution guidelines for photography apply, with one exception: vector formats, such as SVG, are preferred over TIFF and JPEG. Again, do not up-convert existing images.
Other media
Paintings on canvas, 3D works such as sculptures, and additional artwork not covered above are handled on an individual basis. Inquiries should be sent to the e-mail address above.
Prose and poetry
Text submissions should generally be sent by e-mail. We accept works in the following formats:
- (X)HTML with limited CSS
- Portable Document Format (Adobe PDF)
- OpenDocument Text (ODT; used by OpenOffice.org among others)
- Microsoft Word / Office Open XML (DOC[X])
- Plain text (TXT)
Literature will be reformatted to fit the flow and layout of the magazine’s pages unless you specifically request otherwise — using a specific style of typeface, preserving unusual indentation, etc. See the works published on this Web site for examples of how sections and headings, paragraphs, pull quotes, and stanzas are generally treated. Please note if layout is important to the presentation of your work.
Edits may be made to correct misspellings and other errors; however, you should proofread before submission, as such corrections are not performed prior to the literature review process and errors may hurt your chances of selection. We will attempt to contact you to ensure that such changes do not obviate any intentional decisions that simply appear to be typos.