Conversio Virium

CV Blog Submission and Publication Guidelines

Conversio Virium would like to encourage its members and affiliates to participate in as much discussion about BDSM and related topics as we can. To that end, the blog on this web site serves as an alternate venue of the discussion spaces provided by our meetings and events.

Just as our meetings have rules, so does what we deem acceptable for publication. These rules and suggestions are detailed on this page. The Conversio Virium blog editors reserve the right to reject any submission, to request modifications to submissions from the submitter, and to edit any submission to correct spelling errors or modify the final HTML markup.

All submissions are presumed to be submitted under the same licensing agreements as the rest of the Conversio Virium web site, which are declared at the bottom of every page.

Submit appropriate subject matter

The Conversio Virium blog is like a mini-magazine. Like a magazine, the subject matter of published articles should all be related to the publication’s overarching purpose. In the case of CV’s blog, this means only submitted pieces with a clear relation to BDSM and sexuality will be considered.

Such pieces may consist of opinion shorts (“op-ed” style submissions), descriptions or commentary of upcoming area events (example), recent local or national news items (example), or other kinds of material.

Provide additional value

There are thousands of sexuality-related items appearing on the public’s radar every day. Conversio Virium does not attempt to be a repository for every one of these sightings. Instead, we prefer to be an insightful or thought-provoking source of commentary on these sightings, so we look for submissions that provide some value in addition to a web link as part of the piece.

Additionally, though we place no arbitrary value on a piece’s length, we do find richly layered, concisely written pieces to be preferable over longer, more languid pieces. Such rich pieces can always stimulate further discussion in the form of commentary, and we would prefer to encourage as much of this kind of back-and-forth dialogue as possible.

Write with the Web in mind

While there is no requirement for you to be a professional writer or web designer to submit material to the Conversio Virium blog, it is still important that you be mindful of the fact that your writing will be published on a web site—not in a traditional media outlet—and thus your submission will be of much higher quality if you write with the Web in mind.

Some general suggestions to consider while composing your pieces include tips from the following list.

• Summarize key points first. Providing titles and headlines (“microcontent”) that summarize the rest of your writing helps readers accurately determine their interest level in your piece ahead of time. This is especially important for any piece that references an event, a news item, or anything that links to another web site. Some people may recognize this technique as the inverted pyramid.
• Use language that a large audience will understand. Writing in clever metaphors may be cute, but the likelihood of miscommunication rises with each ambiguity you leave unexplained. This does not mean that you should “dumb-down” your writing style. Instead, it means you should aim to use a well-established vocabulary when one already exists, which will improve reader comprehension as well as make your piece show up more often in search results.