Welcome to The Royal Articles, a subsection of The Royal Forums where Royal Forums members write and publish articles on their favourite aspects of royalty. If you aren't already a member of The Royal Forums community, we invite you to check out the forum, and we hope you'll like what you see enough to want to join us. If you're already a member, we hope you enjoy reading the articles created by your fellow members, and maybe you'll feel inspired to write one (or more!) of your own to add to the collection of articles here. I'm sure that we will eventually have a comprehensive library of articles to complement many of the discussions at The Royal Forums.

We have listed the articles under several categories. The Biography section contains articles about specific royal individuals, both historical and modern. We have tried to make these articles different in some way from the straight biographies which can be found at Wikipedia, so hopefully there will be some new and interesting information about the subjects of the articles. In the History section you can find articles about royal events and dynasties from the World War II era and earlier. The Monarchy Today section is for articles dealing with contemporary royalty, both constitutional and personal. The General Interest section has articles on a wide variety of topics that don't fit into the more specific sections. We hope in the future to add sections on ceremony and protocol, royal style and lifestyles, book and movie reviews, and other topics depending on the types of articles that are submitted.

If you have suggestions for an article you'd like to read or for improvements to the site in general, please contact one of the administrators at The Royal Forums. If you'd like to write an article (or articles) for us, please contact one of the administrators, who will put you in touch with an editor to help you prepare your article either online or offline depending on your preference.

We have some guidelines for our authors:

• The forum rules about posting and copyright issues also apply to articles.
• The article should be your original work. Material quoted from other sources should be clearly identified as such, and appropriate credit should be given.
• Articles should be about royalty-related topics and should have substantive content. We encourage authors to provide references for factual material, and facts and opinions should be clearly differentiated. Articles presenting a biased opinion, as opposed to presenting both sides of an argument, are acceptable as long as the opinion is backed up by published facts. In-depth book and movie reviews are also acceptable; short reviews belong in the relevant threads in the Royal Library.
• Articles about topics already covered by previous articles are acceptable as long as they're saying something new, since we would like to avoid having articles repeat each other and we're not planning to remove older ones. If you would like to write about a topic for which articles already exist, please contact one of the administrators to talk about your idea, and we will try to accommodate it.
• Finished articles should be in grammatically correct English, with correct spelling and punctuation and all that good stuff. Editorial assistance will be available to help authors with presentation and fact-checking. We encourage non-native English speakers to volunteer as authors if they would like to participate.
• Length should be around 1000-5000 words. This is flexible, but we don't want really short articles and we don't have the resources to deal with book manuscripts; we're looking for a happy medium. Series of articles on related subjects are welcome, but each article in the series should be a stand-alone piece of work in its own right. Titles should be concise but informative, and longer articles should be divided into sections with headings that are also concise but informative.
• Copyright of the text of the article will remain with the author; by using TRF resources in preparing the article, the author grants permission to TRF to publish the article on our site. After an article has been published, TRF has no obligation to remove it from the site at the author's request.
• Copyright of photos remains with the original copyright holders; when we request permission to use their photos in our articles, we're requesting permission to use them at TRF only. If authors subsequently wish to publish their articles elsewhere, they will have to obtain permission from the copyright holders (including other forum members as well as commercial photographers and agencies) to include the photos in their articles. While we try to publish articles shortly after they have been completed, all the editors are volunteers with real-life obligations, and sometimes there will be delays. Please bear with us if your article is held up, and feel free to contact any of the editors or admins if you have concerns.
• If you're interested in writing for us, please contact one of the admins with your idea for a topic and, if possible, a summary of what you intend to write. While we try to accommodate all our prospective authors, we're looking for subject matter and content that are consistent with the overall balance of the forum, and we may occasionally have to refuse or defer articles that don't help us achieve this aim.
• No, we aren't planning to pay our authors. You're doing this because you love royalty and the forums so much.

Finally, I would like to thank ysbel for having the original idea of starting an articles site, and I would also like to thank the owner of The Royal Forums, Andy R of Social Knowledge LLC, for the software and the technical expertise that turned ysbel's idea into reality and provided a venue for our members to present their work. We at The Royal Forums are very proud to be the originators of this idea, which is in the process of being extended throughout the Social Knowledge family of discussion forums.

Mandy
Editor in Chief