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Before pitching to magazines, you need to choose a few good candidates. This will boost your chances of success and help you avoid wasting valuable time.
1. Understand your potential targets
Freelance writers can tap into two potentially lucrative magazine markets: trade magazines and general-interest magazines.
Trade magazines
Trade magazines are publications aimed at specific industries from insurance to construction to teaching or virtually any other field.
Because publishers distribute trade magazines directly to subscribers, they are less visible but often pay better than other types of magazines.
Examples include:
- Education Digest
- Energy Weekly News
- Engineering News Record
- Design News
General-interest magazines
General-interest magazines are mailed to consumers, sold at the newsstand, read online via mobile apps or digital content delivery, or distributed regionally or locally. For example, when writing a travel article, try to look beyond travel-specific or travel-trade magazines to other “general interest” magazines that publish travel-related and lifestyle articles.
Examples include:
- National Geographic
- The Economist
- Time Magazine
- People
2. Create a list of targets
Compiling your best options into a list will streamline the submission process and help you stay organized. Here’s where to start your search.
Visit your local library and bookstore
Survey the types of magazines in a subject area you’re comfortable with or have written about before. Browse the magazine rack where magazine titles are fanned out across different tiers and pinpoint magazines that might publish your topic.
Browse online
There are plenty of online resources you can use to find publications that are a good match for you:
- Amazon.com: Check out Amazon.com’s magazine subscription category and search for relevant magazines. Although Amazon.com will not list all relevant magazines that are published in the US, it will aid you in finding the most popular magazines.
- Google: For example, to search for travel magazines, you can enter the search term “travel magazines,” and Google will usually list the most popular travel magazines. If you want to find travel trade magazines, you simply add the keyword
“trade” to the search phrase. - SideHustles.com: We have a huge list of submission guidelines for publications in every category imaginable. We let you know what the editor wants, what they pay, and a link to their submission guidelines which describe where and how to submit.
3. Study each target carefully
Once you’ve found some magazines to target, study each one thoroughly so you have a better chance at selling an article.
Check the submission guidelines
The first thing that you should do is check if the magazine has submission guidelines. After all, if they’re not accepting pitches, you don’t want to waste your time on any of the subsequent steps.
Review their rates and legal claims
Review how much the magazine pays and what “rights” it buys. This can help you eliminate magazines that don’t match or exceed your pay rate or which purchase “all rights” to an article (without the rights ever reverting back to you).
Read the magazine
Next, you should read the magazine, either its online or physical form. Study these key features of each magazine:
- Tone: Is the tone formal or informal? Is it conversational or serious? Is it technical or expressive?
- Audience and readership: Who reads this magazine, and why? Why are readers eager to pay for a subscription? They must know they will get some value and benefit from each issue. What is that value and benefit readers are seeking?
- Advertisers: A magazine with more advertisers usually pays higher freelance rates. Plus, the type of businesses that advertise their services or products can tell you a lot about the magazine’s readers.
- Writers: What’s their writing style? What subjects are they writing about? What are their credentials? An editor has decided to publish these writers. Why?
- Publishing history: Don’t pitch articles on topics that the magazine recently covered or that are overdone.
- Publishing frequency: A monthly or biweekly magazine needs more articles. A quarterly or bimonthly magazine needs fewer.
- Content-to-advertising ratio: How many pages are devoted to articles? This will help you judge how much content an editor buys.
Check the editorial calendar
If the magazine has a public calendar, or if they’re happy to send you one, check it out. A calendar is invaluable for knowing what the editor plans to publish in the coming months. This can help you develop a more refined pitch that is sensitive to the editor’s needs.
Judge the level of competition
If you’re a brand new writer, the chance that you’ll be able to sell an article to a widely distributed national magazine that pays $1.00 per word is vanishingly small. A new writer should aim for regional, local, or trade magazines that welcome new writers and pay decent rates.
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