The Postcard Club 101

Hello, if you’re here, it means I contacted you to be a contributor to The Postcard Club! So first, thank you for your interest and I’m glad you are on board 😃

You’ll find below a description of the project and some guidelines for contributors.

Table of Contents

• The Project

• Guidelines for Contributors

• Examples

The Project

I decided to create The Postcard Club after a trip to Mendoza in Argentina (full story here). I had been looking for a new way to share travel memories with my friends and family (and being able to archive them), other than just publishing stories on Instagram or sending the same photos to different WhatsApp groups.

I already had a publication on Substack and I thought it would be a great platform to share my travel stories. Unfortunately, I don’t travel every weekend so I quickly came to the conclusion that the publication could be a collective one, inviting contributors for one-off publications or recurring ones.

This is how The Postcard Club came to life, with three main goals :

• Discovery: putting forward unique places, experiences and encounters.

• Authenticity: sharing authentic travel experiences, focused on the writer’s own experience and not just “top 10 things to do” lists.

• Community: constituting a network of travelers-writers around the globe and promoting their own work.

At the moment there is no business plan or marketing idea behind this Substack. I have my own job in Santiago de Chile and am very happy about it. My only personal interest would be to make new friends around the globe and maybe visiting some of them one day!

I hope you like this project. Below are the guidelines for contributors.

Guidelines for Contributors

Below are some general guidelines that I have set in order to keep a consistency between each publication. ⚠️ These are only guidelines, they are not rules to comply with. I want every contributor to keep their own style. So feel free to adapt them if you think it’s better for your contribution.

• Word count: between 500 and 1000 words

• Structure: divide the publication in 2 to 5 sections. It could be one section for each day of your travel or a more thematic approach: arriving at the place (why ? how ?) / people you’ve met / highlight of the travel / thoughts about the place / what the experience brought you / etc.

• Photos: between 3 and 6 (or more if it’s in Gallery setting), it could be of landscapes, places, buildings, people you’ve met. Ideally, try to keep them in landscape format.

• Tone: the concept of the Postcard Club is to share your own and authentic experience in the place you visited and not to list the top 10 things to do there. You could share not only the good parts but also the challenging or unexpected ones, even the things you disliked. Share also how you like to travel and how your experience was unique.

• Writer bio: please include a short bio of yourself that I will insert at the top of the publication, for example : “John Smith is a 34 years old native of London. He writes “John’s Susbtack” where he shares his travel experiences in Southeast Asia and his passion for Asian food…”

• Promotion: I encourage you to share what you do in your life, what you write on Substack, to include links to one or several of your articles in the text so the reader can get to know your work! In the beginning of the publication you could write for example: “After an eventful experience in Ireland last month [include a link to your publication], I was headed to Glasgow for a couple of days…”

• How to share your contribution with me: at the moment, Substack does not allow another writer to access to one draft publication alone without accessing to the dashboard, settings, archives etc. So the best alternative is to list you as a guest writer on the publication. You will have to accept the invitation through an email you will receive from Substack. As a guest writer you cannot access the draft publication. So please share with me the text via Google Docs or other online text editor. You can give me the rights to put comments on the document if you want my feedback. Photos can be shared via Google drive or Wetransfer. Before planning the publication I will send you a test version of it and make sure you are okay with everything.

Examples

If you need more information, feel free to let me know through Substack.

Martin