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Login or Sign UpPathways to Family Wellness Author Guidelines and Information
Thank you for your interest! We very much appreciate the opportunity to consider your writing for Pathways. We welcome unsolicited articles, and we encourage you to familiarize yourself with what our goals are for the articles we publish.
Our main goal with Pathways is to empower parents and professionals, by inspiration and information. It is a publication for creative change, personal growth, health awareness and informed choice. Articles that challenge and confront as well as articles that support and nourish are the sorts of pieces we are looking for. We invite readers to move into new perspectives or support them in areas they wish to know more about. We like articles that are challenging and from the heart, with supportive research, information or references. We publish articles in relation to other articles we have published on the subject, how current the topic is, if it is new to us, and if the presentation is unique in some way.
It is good to familiarize yourself with Pathways and helpful if you are a current subscriber. Check out our website to have an understanding of our direction and mission.
Pathways is published quarterly. It has an international circulation. Currently, readership is estimated at about 12,000. Copies are subscribed by parents and practitioners in North America, Europe and Australia. Our readers are most concerned with making informed health care choices for their families.
Topics to consider when writing:
Our primary goal is to inform parents about the Family Wellness Lifestyle. This of course includes information on various modes of care for all family members: the whys, the successes, the importance of care, however the vitalistic philosophy for life is a natural wellness philosophy and includes more than the modality. This then incorporates many facets of wellness. Below are topics related to the Family Wellness Lifestyle. Each of these topics is pertinent to our readers:
Feature: Health information pertinent to the family wellness lifestyle empowering parents to make informed health care choices. Articles on: parenting, pregnancy, birth, infant care and issues of health throughout childhood are welcomed. Our magazine explores new approaches to
health care for the whole family. A wide range of topics and approaches is possible in this section, and we encourage articles presenting options to make informed health care choices.
Parenting and Education: Focuses on how we see and relate to our children in the home and in their educational environments. Ideas, philosophies, spiritual inspirations and real life stories that help us to be the best parents we can be.
Pregnancy and Birth: A place of inspiration and also a place to confront the growing “norm” of technology in child birth. We look for articles to help mothers and fathers to be armed with knowledge and offer them tools to successfully accomplish new modes natural living for their families. Articles from birth care providers supportive of natural childbirth are welcomed.
Mind Body: This section includes articles that focus on the mind body connection in any aspect of healing or wellness.
Nutritional Nuggets: Practical guidelines, suggestions about nutrition.
Wellness Lifestyle: This is where we talk about dynamics within families. We encourage articles that challenge readers to see perspectives that offer possibility for more nurturing relationships in their families. Length is not a significant consideration. We accept articles from 900-2,000 words. Do not let length be a limitation. Say what you have to say. Longer, better referenced articles tend to become our feature article.
Work must be submitted in Microsoft Word format through our online submission form.
Please do not format in any way. At the top of your piece please put the following information:
- Your name
- Date submitted
- Your mailing address
- Your email and/or phone
- The word count
- A 50 word personal bio (to use if we print your article)
We welcome and appreciate accompanied photos. Photos should be high-contrast, 5″ x 7″ black-and-white prints or color prints. If you email them (preferred), please send high-resolution (300 dpi) photos in jpeg or tiff format.
If you mail photos for the articles, please adhere to the above specs. Please let us know if you have already submitted elsewhere and advise us of the date you are free to publish elsewhere.
Payment: We are in the early developmental stages of Pathways and also in the rare position to be a reader-supported magazine with self-imposed, limited advertising and are dependent on subscriptions for our operating expenses. This is a unique situation in the magazine business, but we like it this way as it means the reader dictates the content rather than the advertiser. This also means that our current budget does not allow for payment of writers. Currently, we rely on the generosity of contributions to keep the vision of Pathways alive. Your contribution will be a part of supporting an important movement among parents and families and media. If your piece is published, in exchange we will give you a free one-year subscription, plus two copies of the issue that features your article. Upon publication, the rights to the printed article revert to the author. This is normal procedure for a magazine of this size. We are very grateful for your support and look forward to moving up into another type of payment strategy as we grow.
Publishing your article: We find that our desire to publish something is only the first part to the actual publishing of an article. There are lots of other unrelated contingencies that effect which articles go in and when, so it can sometimes seem like a very long time before it gets in, especially as we are just a quarterly.
Our procedure is to read and consider all articles and to respond within three weeks of receiving them. Certain built-in processes can cause delays, however. Remember that we are extremely small-staffed, being a fledgling magazine. It can seem like a long wait to hear from us, especially if you are eager for a reply. Please be patient. If you wish to inquire about your manuscript before hearing from us, please do so by email.
Once an article is received and we retain it, we will usually want to retain it for the next 3 issue deadlines. This way, if it does not fit into the immediate issue, it can be reconsidered for the next one. Final decisions are made only after all articles on hand are evaluated; yet even when an article is selected for an issue, it may be pulled for lack of space at layout time. These uncertainties make it difficult for us to be as specific in our acceptance as we would like, and we appreciate your understanding of this creative process. We try not to keep an article longer than 6 months to a year because, although we may like it, we feel it should have a chance in another market.
Copyright Protection
The copyright for all of Pathways articles is maintained by the author. By submitting an article to Pathways, you are granting permission for its reprint in the magazine, Pathways and that it will be archived on the ICPA/Pathways website for viewing. Readers will be able to order previous issues and individual articles of Pathways online and may use them for distribution in their communities or as references on their websites. When used in either way, all credit to author is required with links back to both Pathways and your website.
Rejection: Our hardest task is returning articles that we cannot use. We try to be honest in our replies, but it is not always possible to provide in-depth feedback. We evaluate all articles in light of the other articles we have on hand, when last we covered the subject, and our readers’ interest in the subject matter. We retain only about 1 out of every 50 articles we see and then must select again from this smaller group. Returning a manuscript is not a personal rejection; it is a practical consideration.
We consider all submissions on a speculative basis. That is, even if we have expressed an interest in, or a go-ahead on, a proposed article, we cannot guarantee its publication.