I listened to SPAWN’s most recent teleseminar yesterday on how to make more money writing. Hope Clark of Funds for Writers was our guest speaker. What another good presentation this was! Have you ever listened to a telephone-seminar? It’s done by conference call. It’s as easy as picking up your phone and listening. Sometimes there is a Q and A opportunity.
SPAWN presents a teleseminar by a publishing/writing/book promotion professional pretty much every month. And they are FREE to SPAWN members. If you miss a presentation, you can go to the SPAWN website and download the recording. All of the teleseminars we’ve presented are recorded there for SPAWN members. Membership, by the way, is $65.00 per year. Sign up here: http://www.spawn.org.
I wanted to share something that Hope talked about yesterday. It has to do with article-writing—something I have been involved in for over three decades. In fact, I made my living through article-writing for many years. She talked about writing for trade magazines—also something I’ve done.
I want to echo her sentiments. Most of us, when we decide to break into magazine article-writing, we head straight for the high-paying slick mags—Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Woman’s Day, Family Circle and even Reader’s Digest. But there is more opportunity, thus, perhaps, more money in trade magazines and, perhaps, even in some of the more obscure magazines.
When people used to ask me what magazines I wrote for, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with one they had heard of. There were some obscure ones, such as: The Phoenix, Hope, North Georgia Journal, Home Cooking, The Quilter, National Barbecue News, Transformational Times, Sisters Today, Coastal Woman, Herb Quarterly, Young Athlete and Minority Engineering
And some of the less-known magazines pay quite well. I earned between $400 and over $1,000 for articles sold to each of these magazines: Pages, Business Start-Ups, St. Anthony Messenger, Walking Magazine, Motorhome, Becoming Family, Mature Outlook, Sam’s Club Magazine, Cats Magazine, Technology and Learning, ASPCA Animal Watch, Personal Journaling, Woman’s Life and even Writer’s Digest.
And then there was the relatively steady work with magazines such as The Toastmaster, Signs of the Times, Columbia, The World and I, Lifestyles Plus, Catholic Digest, Silicon 2.0, Entrepreneur, Executive Update and others.
If you’d like to write for magazines and you just keep getting one rejection after another—or worse yet, you are being ignored—step away from the majors for a while and focus on some of the hundreds of freelance opportunities with magazines you may have never heard of. Some of them pay quite well. Are you familiar with Wealth Manager, New Holland News and Acres, Railway Track and Structures, Teaching Tolerance, World Trade, Professional Pilot, Print, HOW, Promo, Skiing, Boat International, Outreach, Milwaukee Magazine and Organic Gardening? The average pay per article among these magazines is over $1,500. That’s the average!
Maybe this is the time—perhaps today is the day that you start earning more as a freelance article-writer. All you need to do is raise your awareness of the opportunities that abound.
For more about how to establish your successful article-writing business, sign up for my online article-writing course. http://www.matilijapress.com/course_magarticles.htm. This 6-week course is regularly $125.00 There is a 20% discount during the month of June, 2010. PLFry620@yahoo.com.