Are there specific magazines you’d like to write for? Do you yearn to see your articles published in a particular home and garden, parenting, regional, religious or business magazine, for example? Perhaps you want to publish in this magazine for the prestige or the money. Or maybe you want the publicity this magazine can offer for your book.
Whatever your reason for wanting to publish in this magazine, if the editors accept submissions, you should be able to break in. All you need is an article that is timely, appropriate and well-written. After studying each magazine’s submission guidelines and before writing the article, I suggest that you scrutinize the magazines themselves. You may be quite familiar with the magazine, but have you ever truly examined it with an editorial eye? For example:
• Study the articles in order to understand the style and focus the editors prefer.
• Review the ads so you know not to write an article that might offend or counter the advertisers’ messages.
• Read Letters-to-the-Editor to learn what readers are asking for, commenting on, interested in, etc.
• Peruse back issues (archives sometimes appear online) to discover what articles similar to yours have appeared and the focus of these articles. If you see an article similar to the one you want to write, you may need to change the scope and focus of your article.
• See if you can discover a theme running through the various issues and match your article to the appropriate issue. Some editors post an editorial calendar so writers know when to pitch certain topics.
I see a lot of articles by authors hoping to promote their books and writers wanting to start freelancing for magazines. Among them, I see many misdirected articles that will never make it to publication. The main mistakes I see among those new to the world of article-writing is:
• Poor writing skills.
• Lack of understanding about the concept of an article and its purpose.
• Writing the wrong article for the wrong publication.
Folks, successful article-writing is not a matter throwing a few words together on a subject you adore and expecting to get it published in your first choice of magazines. As you can see, it takes skill, study, thought and the willingness to adhere to guidelines.
Tomorrow I will talk about successfully earning a living or promoting your book by writing for small to medium-size publications.
For help with your next article consider reading my book, “A Writer’s Guide to Magazine Articles,”
http://www.matilijapress.com.
Sign up for my article-writing course: http://www.matilijapress.com/course_magarticles.htm