International Living 

Note: This market purchases ALL rights - you as a writer should carefully consider if that suits you. 

Address:     International Living 
                    Agora Ireland Ltd. 
                    St. Catherine’s Hall 
                    Catherine St. 
                    Waterford 
Country:     Ireland 

Contact:      Jennifer Stevens, Editor 
                    Deirdre Gough, Assistant Editor 
Email:         Intlliv@compuserve.com 
Webpage: 
Guidelines: 
Phone: (353) 51-304-557 
Fax: (353) 51-304-561 

WRITER’S GUIDELINES 

We’ve been working hard in the last few months to give International Living new editorial direction—to make it more a forum for exchange of information and less a “journalistic” report. And though we won’t be using freelance writers as often as we were to produce full-length pieces, we’re still very eager to work with you. Here’s how: 

We’re interested in the very valuable information you can share with our readers about destinations as diverse as Madagascar, Germany, or Thailand…anywhere, really, you may find yourself living and traveling. What we’re looking for is intelligence from the field. 

We’re working to create an extensive network of contributors like yourself who live all around the world and who can shoot off to us every few weeks or months, notes about what's going on. We’d like to think of you as a correspondent, an ear-to-the-ground. 

But we don't want you to think about writing for IL in a formal way...instead, we want you to put us on your standard email list...send us the notes you send to your friends about a new shop that opened up, about the latest past time among locals, an idea for a business your city (or a city you’re visiting) is just primed for, the restaurant where you ate the best meal you’ve had in the last ten years, a little out-of-the-way hotel readers ought to know about...a place where real-estate is surprisingly undervalued… 

We’d like you to send us the sometimes informal—but always very telling—details and recommendations that you pass along to people when you're talking to them face to face. If you go on a trip somewhere, you invariably come back and tell your friends about two or three really interesting things—perhaps news about how a place has changed. Or,
on a very practical level, recommendations for where to stay or eat or something they simply must do if they ever visit there themselves. That's the information we want. 

As we said, don't go the trouble—and struggle—to write it all up in a formal way. Just send us in an informal way, the gems you've discovered and continue to discover. We’re looking for 50-200 words...though feel free to send much more than that. And you can submit your notes by email, fax, or mail (whatever is most convenient for you). Please include on each submission your name and address (and SSN if you are a U.S. citizen). 

We hope you're as eager as we are to work this way. We're really trying to make IL less of a tool for reporting in the traditional way, and more a forum for an exchange of the kind of useful intelligence you learn from people really in the know, in the trenches, on the ground. 

We like to think of it this way...if we’re traveling to Paris, we could pick up a guidebook, look through the list of 30 restaurants listed by price range, pick one, and figure we’d have an OK dinner. But we'd much prefer to call our IL correspondent there and ask him to recommend two places we should try while we’re in the neighborhood. No doubt, we’d eat better, avoid the hordes of tourists, and get a much more authentic view of the place. 

That's what are notes are meant to do...replace that phone call and simply deliver to readers the discerning, opinionated recommendations that are always, in the end, much more useful than a journalistic report on a place. In addition to notes that make a specific recommendation, you might send along an update about a place you’ve recently traveled to.

 Here’s one we received recently from a correspondent in Ecuador: 

I spent last week in Quito, Ecuador during a declared state of
emergency—which wasn't nearly as bad as that moniker makes it sound. Farmers and taxi drivers had erected road blocks I spent the better part of one day navigating around en route to the city center from an outlying village...but it was more like a party atmosphere than a protest. Entrepreneurs had set up shop at the various blocks and were selling fruits and vegetables. Smiles all around. Banks were closed, and
lights were out early at night. But I never felt I was at risk. 

– John Doe,
Quito, Ecuador 

International Living will pay $25 for each note submitted by the above writer that is accepted for publication and appears in an issue of International Living. Payment, along with two copies of the issue in which the piece appears, will be sent to the writer within a month of publication. 

By this agreement, the author warrants to International Living that the notes from the field do not infringe on any existing copyright or other intellectual property right and warrants originality and accuracy. 

International Living retains the right to publish these notes in any of its affiliated publications, including but not limited to the U.K. and German Editions of the newsletter as well as the World Wide Web. We buy all rights to every piece we publish. 


Last updated on 1 July 1999 
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