Writing For Magazines
If you are serious about wanting to become a recognized writer then you will have to look seriously at writing for magazines.
Writing for a magazine should not be intimidating, just remember that they are not that different from any other publication, except that they publish more often and that can be a bonus – I’ll explain why shortly.
Write what you know is the advice often given to new writers and this is especially true in writing for magazines – write about something you have a passion for, if you adopt that approach you are well on your way.
OK you have an idea of what you would like to write about, the next step is to do some market research and this involves a trip to your local supermarket. Once you are there search their magazine racks for the topic you are interested in be it sport, photography, women’s fashion, men’s fashion, or whatever
Inside you will most likely find a tab featuring the names of editors, along with a mailing address, a website and perhaps an e-mail address. Some magazines may state that they do not accept unsolicited material, leave them back, buy a few that you like, take them home and read them.
You should now have a fell for the style of the magazines you’ve bought. The next step, I suppose is the frightening step – contact the editors directly and inquire about writing for their publication. They may respond by asking you to send in some samples of your work. If you have previous published work to show great, but it is not essential, remember we all have to start somewhere. There is one piece of advice I’d offer here - have the articles ready before you contact the editor so that you can post or email them immediately. You’d be surprised at the number of people who wait until the editor contacts them before they start writing. Not a good idea!
Personally if I’m going to approach an editor I’ll buy at least three copies of that magazine, I’ll pick out the type of article I’d be interested in writing about and I’ll type at least two of them out on my computer, three if I have the time. Writing for magazines is like any other form of business you must do your research.
Next I’ll analyse the article from top to bottom. How many words in the article? Remember magazines rely on advertising for their livelihood and you have to leave sufficient room for those to appear. You also want to insure that you write enough words to fill an allocated space. Let’s say you’ve analysed your magazine and the average wordcout is 1200 then that’s what you should aim for – I certainly would not want to go more that 20 either side.
I also like to look at their paragraph structure to see if they favour long or short paragraphs, most prefer short. How many words, how many sentences per paragraph?
Editors are human, they have their little oddities and if you can spot these in previously written articles then that’s a bonus.
Spelling – oh that breaks my heart I’m really rotten at spelling – it’s important to get someone you trust to examine your spelling. Don’t rely on a spell checker, it will let you down! Here’s a great tip I picked up once – when doing your own initial proof reading read back to front – start with the last word and make your way one word at a time up to the opening word! Why?
When you read from a – z you know what you’ve written and you’ll read with the flow but if you read from z – a then all you have is a bundle of un associated words and believe me it is much easier to pick up spelling or typos when there is no flow and you’re just really looking at a collection of words. Try it for yourself.
If I were starting writing for magazines now I’d start with the smaller magazine and build up some sort of a reputation, it might even help if you send some of the smaller magazines a few free samples of your work
The reality is of course that if your are serious about writing for magazines you are going to receive rejections - and rejection hurts. Some editors will say ‘no thanks’ in a very kindly way others well they’re a bit more blunt, but been an author is like any career it has its ups and downs and rejection is one of the downs.
Always remember this there are thousands of magazines out there, most publish monthly, and they are all searching for new content, they need new content every month and that’s the bonus I mentioned earlier. Writing for Magazines can be very profitable if you go about it the right way.
