Guide to "SKY LINES" Magazine

[Snowfiend]

So what is it all about then? If you’re a GTROC member, then the chances are you will have already received at least one copy with your membership pack.

The magazine is non profit making, free to all members as part of your yearly subscription and published roughly every 3 months to give you a total of 4 issues per year. We do try to stick to this deadline but it can sometimes slip due to delays with content, printing, technical issues or the admin people trying to juggle their private, work and club lives, we hope you can understand this and bear with us during the busy times.

We are trying to keep a happy balance of topics to satisfy everyone’s tastes including shows, meets, trackdays, other events, technical, DIY, Members car features etc. We are not biased towards a particular model/colour/spec....we love all things Skyline or GT-R related. The balance of articles is more dependent on you, the people who write the articles so please get involved and get writing. We are always on the look out for new articles from a cross section of members, so don’t be shy. You will be rewarded for your efforts with a special sticker which is only available to club members who have contributed...or you can purchase one for a £1000 donation if you’re too lazy!

Also please note that we're not just looking for GT-R related articles, anything Skyline related is acceptable and most welcome. I say this because I have had a few GTS owners recently tell me they felt their cars were not good enough, this is simply not true!

Don’t worry too much if your spelling or grammar isn’t great, mine isn’t either but most software has a spell checker and everything will be proofed and edited by our resident grammar girl (Uzibat) where necessary. Writing doesn’t come easy to everyone...I certainly appreciate that, you should see how long it took me to write this post

I've uploaded some small sample spreads from the last 3 issues so non members can see what you’re missing...



















The magazine has just increased from 54 to 64 pages (as of Issue 16) including the front & rear covers and is printed on A5 sized paper (imagine your normal A4 sized piece of paper folded in half) with a staple binding so it fits neatly in your glove box.

We did produce a monster 104 page special edition, spine bound, issue for the release of the R35 GT-R and the TAS 2008 which was more like a book then a magazine but this was a one off and allowed us to indulge ourselves. Due to postage and production costs, we have to keep the mag to the 64 page limit which can be a challenge sometimes, especially with the summer edition because of all the events that occur in the warmer months.

Back copies are available to purchase from the club shop. Stocks can be limited so if there is something you're specifically after, it might be wise to purchase it before they sell out as we cannot offer reprints.

I'm often asked how much people should write for an article? Well there is no exact rule to this but we use an 'Arial' font with a size of '8.5' which allowing space for side margins, headers, footers etc will give you a rough word count per page of approx 730 words. As a rule of thumb an article of this size can take up 1-3 pages depending on the images we have available.

Images are an important part of any article, they help to make things interesting for the reader and I personally find it helps visualise what is being said as a long, plain text article can be a bit bland on its own sometimes. Again, we are always after good quality images from events and such, so if you have some please contact me. This is classed as a contribution and is very much appreciated. It is quite common for the words and images to come from two different sources so don’t worry too much if you don’t have a camera, someone else might have got some pics we can use.

They don’t need to be professional shots but for the most part they need to be as high resolution as possible (for example a 600 x 400 thumbnail from a mobile phone is not good enough for printing) as each image needs to be edited and converted from RGB to CMYK format for printing.

If possible, I'd appreciate if you could keep a few images from an event off the forum so that we can use them exclusively for the magazine article. This makes it more interesting and rewarding for you, our paying members and means it's not a re-hash of pictures that everyone has already seen days, weeks or months previously. Please do not steal other people’s images or use copyrighted images without permission as this could lead to legal complications for the club

On a final note, we can’t promise all articles will make the final cut but most will or they may be kept for use in a later issue where possible...say for example, the winter issue when a lot of cars are tucked away in hibernation and events are not as frequent.

Contacts or queries?

Giles (Snowfiend) & Dave (ATCO) for all magazine related queries and don’t forget to provide us with your full name with your article.

Robert (Robbie J) is your man on the advertisement side of things. We can offer 1/2 or full page adverts at very reasonable prices, either as a one off or repeating over a set number of issues.

[Fuggles]

Excellent review Giles, thank you for taking the time to do that

[Fuggles]

The next edition goes to print next week (yes really!) So if you have not joined you'd better do so if you want to find out all the latest info, gossip and chat on everything GTR and GTROC

[pachizeron]

Thats so cool!!!