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Sending Motoring Tips to a Gardening Magazine is Silly
or how to identify yourself as being not focused

WRITING articles for nothing is good writing practice; but it will not keep the wolf from the door for very long unless the wolf likes a good laugh. A working writer needs to target a market where she will see a return for her effort. For return read money.

Novelists notoriously fail to sustain their own real-life by their writing efforts alone. A few are wonderful and make a living from writing books solely. Others even make lots of lolly. People who have not yet made lots of lolly interview them in turn and write up the result for cash or wages.

Such interviews and article writing are good potboilers for the writer working towards seeing her name in lights, or at least on a webscreen near you.

You can write an article about almost anything and have it published somewhere for payment. Where and for how much depends on your marketing skills as a writer.

For marketing skills read common sense. It makes most sense to offer a product for sale to a market that will pay for it and that wants it, now. The product is the article you have produced. The market is an editor who wishes to show your work to her readers for their entertainment or information, or both.

So, it follows that the commonsensical person will send appropriate material to an appropriate editor at an appropriate time, not the other way ‘round.

However, some writers regularly do send the wrong stuff to the wrong editor at the wrong time. They seem to hope the editor might send it on to an appropriate editor should the editor of first choice not be the apposite editor.

They are surprised when the hoped-for publication does not appear. They are even more disappointed the following month when the cheque for nothing fails to materialise.

In turn, the bank manager is disappointed that the small business that is the self-employed writer seems to be mis-firing once more.

In due course, the writer may soon see her name in print at the top of a letter from the bank manager seeking an interview with the writer.

The best way to postpone such an evil day is to sell some work for money to a few publications. And the best way to do that is to study the market for likely customers which, once identified, should be approached with some sensible ideas for articles which in the trade are known as feature articles or features. (Just so you may sound professional).

Work a few issues ahead with proposals. About three issues is a useful rule of thumb if you are known to the editor, a little earlier than that if you have yet to establish a relationship.

Try to see where the readership is going. Have a look around for timely and topical material that the editor could use. Make it competent and on-time.

Just don’t offer car driving anecdotes to a golf magazine. They may be kind and not respond.

© Brendan Nolan 2009
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