Content on Let’s Be Wild differs a bit from the standard fare published on most travel and adventure websites and in print magazines. The main focus on LBW is personal stories which offer a more intimate reader experience that really let’s people feel what you felt. Was your adrenaline pumping? We think the reader’s should be too! Whether on a trail, in a kayak, on a surfboard, or dangling off the side of a mountain, you should be able to convey to readers what your individual experience was from your perspective. Dry facts may cut it elsewhere, but Let’sBeWild is all about sharing and articulating our unique passion for the world around us.
Writing should be original and unique to LBW. Stories should be a minimum of 500 words – we don’t think a great adventure tale is defined by the word-count, but 500 words is usually a good starting length. There is no upper ceiling, although typically most stories are between 1000-3500 words. Longer stories may be split into a multi part series.
While we welcome stories from writers associated with commercial entities and adventure and travel related companies, they should be written about personal experiences. References to who you work for and the gear you use are perfectly acceptable, but a story for LBW should be about your individual adventure and not written as an advertorial or press release.
Submitted stories may be edited for content, grammar, and spelling. While editing on our end is an important part of delivering high quality content to the reader, it helps us immeasurably if you carefully edit your story prior to submission. While we love historical and background information to be included in a story (for instance if you are writing a piece about trekking along the Great Wall of China, you might include information about the Wall’s origin) all content must be written entirely by you. Please do not copy any content (besides attributed quotes & brief excerpts) from other sources such as Wikipedia.
Stories will be formatted by us prior to publication on Let’sBeWild but to make life easy, please submit all text as an .odt, .doc, or .txt file. If you aren’t able to access word processing software where you are, plain text in an email is fine as well.
While we certainly do not require that contributors be professional photographers, quality photographs are a vital part of telling a great adventure story. Stories should be accompanied by at least 4-10 photographs. The longer the story, the more photos should ideally accompany it. Photos should be a minimum of 700 pixels wide and saved as high quality JPEG images. Photos should depict a mixture of scenery shots in addition to “behind-the-scenes” type shots; setting up camp, hanging out with locals, etc… Photos should not contain any visible watermarks or signatures – all content on LBW is credited to its creators, but watermarked images with logos and signatures detract from the content continuity of the site.
As the content creator, you retain all copyright to your work, both written and visual, but by submitting content to Let’sBeWild you grant us the right to use (with credit and attribution) the content on the website and elsewhere to promote the website, your story – and you.
Submissions should be accompanied by a small photo of yourself and a brief bio or list of relevant information about you as well as the links to any of your social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr that you would like linked to. Let’sBeWild is a high traffic website which receives thousands of visitors from over 115 countries each week and we feel that it’s important to use this traffic to promote the individual websites of our loyal contributors.
We don’t want you to waste your time & energy – if you are unsure if your story idea would be a good fit for Let’sBeWild, please query us first at [email protected]
