Many authors are totally focused on writing books & being published. They dream of seeing their own novels in bookstores – but often overlook magazine writing, which offers many benefits and maybe often better pay.
Why write for magazines and newspapers? If you write articles, you reach many more people than with books. Your book may sell five thousand copies. Certainly, some books turn into bestsellers, but with more than 500,000 new books per year, many books are fortunate to sell even a thousand copies. With one article, you can reach millions of people.
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Writing for magazines will give you increased confidence that you can write for publication and meet word limits and deadlines. A fiction author recently pondered whether writing magazine articles was worth his time. Would his time not be better spent writing for his own blog or website? My answer was that it depends on how many subscribers and readers his website and blog had.
Should your blog have less than a million readers per month, consider writing for these magazines with enormous readership numbers:
• Huffington Post: 43 million per month
• Salon: 7.7 million per month
• Travel + Leisure: 950,000 per month
• Delta Sky: +5 million per month
Freelance Writing Wikipedia also provides a list of American and international magazines and their paid yearly circulation:
• AARP The Magazine: 21,931,184
• Better Homes and Gardens: 7,624,505
• Reader’s Digest: 5,241,484
• Good Housekeeping: 4,396,795
• National Geographic: 4,001,937
• People: 3,690,031
• Southern Living: 2,824,751
• O, The Oprah Magazine: 2,417,589
• National Trust Magazine: 2,043,876
• India Today: 1,100,000
• Australian Women’s Weekly: 470,331
• The Wall Street Journal: 2,378,827
• The New York Times: 1,865,318
• USA Today: 1,674,306
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If only one percent of this readership finds your article and the byline with your name, website, and book info, it’s worth it to write for these magazines. Authors might not be able to pay for ad space, but having a byline and often even getting paid for an article is worth sending a pitch to magazine editors.
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Preparing for Magazine Writing
Don’t expect to land lucrative opportunities right away. You will need to climb the ladder via smaller local publications, building your credibility one article at a time. Most important is to get to know and understand a magazine before you query. Read ten issues back to get a feel for the magazine’s tone and readership to ensure your query fits the publication’s style.
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Writing for Magazines and Newspapers
Also, study articles from the past two years—at least the headlines. If you find one that would collide with your own article idea, read it – sentence for sentence – to make sure your article tackles the topic from a different angle. Better yet, find a new article idea. Start at your local library to read these magazines and newspapers for free. The next step might be to subscribe.
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Magazines.com offers a huge selection of magazines, and subscription offers up to 90 percent off are available during the last weeks of the year at Amazon.com. Make a list of editors at prestigious magazines, blogs, and newspapers, and send your pitch to dozens of editors at suitable media outlets. However, editors change positions and publications with amazing speed. Call the magazine and confirm the name and title of the editor you’re pitching to.
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Leverage Your Former Writing
Many of these opportunities do not require you to create completely new stories or articles. In many cases, you can leverage your books and blogs, divide chapters, rewrite them a bit, shorten them, or add new content to repurpose your inventory. Another tactic is to use the content of your research and create new stories or articles.
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For example, you might repurpose the research and content of a novel taking place in medieval Great Britain or a travelogue you’ve written about a trip to Europe.
You could write an article about horse stables in the UK for equestrian magazines, about fantastic British gardens for gardening magazines, about travel European cities on a budget for a frugal living magazine, about bike paths in Denmark for a biking magazine, about pumpkin seed pressing in Austria for a gourmet magazine, about a historic flax or wool mill in France for a sewing or craft magazine, about how to dress for city trips without looking like a tourist for fashion or lifestyle magazines… The possibilities are endless.
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Ideas for Articles and Blog Posts Need to generate a lot of ideas for articles related to a topic? Create for example a “7 Tips” article that gives a brief overview of your chosen topic, and then create other “7 Tips” articles for each of the tips from your first article. Essentially, your overview article acts as an outline for a bunch of new articles.
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The main point you need to remember as you create each new subset article is that it must be useful even if people haven’t read the overview article. For example, if you write an article titled “7 Tips on Writing Blog Posts Faster,” each subset article you create from the tips in the first article must be independent of the other six tips.
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Another method is to go to your local newsstand. Because running a major magazine involves a lot of money, magazine editors must know what people want to read. Use this research to your advantage by studying the most covered topics. generate lots of article ideas using the magazine’s research. Look at the main features, supplementary articles, and even the ads and other content in magazines and trade papers, to generate lots of article ideas.
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Learn to Query
Most important is to learn how to write a query for magazines. Mention your background and experience and demonstrate why you’re pitching this article. Just because you find a subject fascinating, doesn’t mean the editor will too. Keep the magazine’s readers in mind as you pitch an idea. Why does this story concern them? Why will they want to read it? Including facts, statistics, and quotes or naming experts, you plan to interview for the story lets the editor know you’ve already done your homework about the topic.
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If you can’t convincingly describe your subject, your approach, and your qualifications on a page, chances are your query is too long or too general. Your topic should be narrow enough that you’re able to address it in the suggested word length. Many magazines only want queries and don’t accept completed manuscripts. Last but not least, a query should be easy to read and contain no typos or misspellings.
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Don’t forget a catchy byline at the end of the article with links to your book and website. Offer your best photographs to illustrate your articles, as well. You do not have to write totally new articles. Take what you have, rewrite it a bit, and add or subtract an introduction and conclusion. The research for your books and often parts of your manuscripts can be used for articles in a huge variety of magazines and newspapers.
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You can use published articles as clips to show to potential publishers and clients in all writing areas. You will receive traffic, money, and credibility as a writer, and you will get a huge audience that you could never have reached with your blog and social media alone.
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Read the Contract Word for Word
It’s a binding legal document, just as a home loan or an employment contract! Many writers simply accept the contracts they receive. They’re afraid to try to negotiate. While some contracts are easy to understand, most have at least one or more sections or clauses that seem designed to confuse:
• Exclusivity
• Electronic rights
• Legal responsibilities
• All-rights contracts
Contracts are written for the benefit of publishers, who will grab as many rights as possible, while you as the writer want to keep as much as you can or be paid handsomely for the rights you do assign. Once you know how to ask for contract changes, you’re more likely to get the contracts you want. Here are more resources on negotiating contracts:
How to Write a Query Letter:
http://www.worldwidefreelance.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter-wql-5/
Publishing Contract Checklist
http://www.right-writing.com/checklist.html
Six Rules for More Agreeable Agreements
http://www.right-writing.com/cruddy.html
Free Brilliant Marketing
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/ free-brilliant-book-marketing-to-a-million-audience/
http://boostblogtraffic.com/write-for-magazines/
http://money.howstuffworks.com/magazine-writing.htm
http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Magazine-Writer-from-Scratch
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/writing-for-magazines/
http://goinswriter.com/how-to-get-published-in-a-magazine/
This was an excerpt from 111 Tips To Make (More) Money With Writing
The Art of Making a Living Full-time Writing
It contains hundreds of tips on how you can use your writing skills – other than book-writing: online teaching, ghostwriting, technical writing – and yes: magazine writing.
Find all my books here:
https://www.books2read.com/ap/n4EYY8/Doris-Maria-Heilmann
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