Submission guidelines

Thanks for your interest in Mambo magazine.

Mambo magazine welcomes pitches from writers, photographers, and people working with audio or video. These must be something to do with Zanzibar culture, life and travel online (except for our Travel in the Region section, which includes wider East Africa).

If you would like to pitch a written piece, then please tailor it to either:

In Deep features: These are our longer, deeper pieces that take time to explore an unusual or uncovered topic, from one of our categories: Arts and Culture, Tradition, Activities, Nature, Food and Drink, Places (these should be places on Unguja, Pemba or Mafia islands), Community and Travel in the Region.

These pieces should NOT be first-person narrative pieces, but should aim to create a window through which people can experience some insight about Zanzibar or the wider region. We prefer to take pieces from experienced writers for these features, and we do pay. Pieces should be 1,000-1,200 words. We encourage pitches rather than speculative pieces, accompanied by one or two examples of writing or links to previously published work.

Nutshell guides: These are much shorter, concise guides to a particular subject to inform travellers how to, for example, learn diving on Zanzibar, or plan a wedding. These are less descriptive and more factual than In Deep features. They are also shorter, at around 600 words.

If you are a photographer and interested in getting involved in Mambo, there are two options:

• If you would be willing to donate a photo gallery of some 12 photos or so, we can feature these and your own photo, biography and a link to your commercial site. This can help to drive traffic to your site;
• Or, once Mambo has been up and running for longer we should have the budget to pay for photos, so if you want to sell pictures, please let us know your stock and your rates and we will keep this information in mind for when we have budget.

If you make audiovisual content, the same applies - we are extremely happy to use content if it meets our editorial standards, but don't have much budget yet as we have just launched. Thus it is really up to you to balance whether the publicity from being on Mambo, which aims to soon become Zanzibar's main destination site, is worth contributing the work alongside your profile, or whether you want to let us know what material you have, and your rates, and we will get back to you.

Mambo's blogs are also very open to contributors - this section is and will remain unpaid, but is a good outlet for people with a specialist area who aren't professional writers, for opinion pieces and so forth. We also want to start to build up content in Kiswahili.

If you do want to contribute to Mambo, please email editorial [at] mambomagazine [dot] com with your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you - karibuni!