Writer’s Market is here
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, Uncategorized, Writer's Market, Writers Market online | Tags: finding markets for writing, market listings, Poets & Writers, The Writer, Writer's Market Leave a comment »My copy of the new Writer’s Market arrived yesterday. This fat volume is loaded with information, advice and places to send your work. I can’t remember when I first started getting this book, but I believe it’s essential for anyone writing for publication. Its publishers, Writer’s Digest, also offer an online version, writersmarket.com, which is also handy. In fact you can buy the deluxe package and get both for a year, or you can try writersmarket.com for a modest monthly fee.
Why get the book when you can read it online? Well, I’m the kind of girl who likes to take the book to the beach or crash on the couch with Writer’s Market in one hand and a pen in the other. But writing is an online business these days. Writersmarket.com allows you to search for specific topics and publications, then follow the links to the publications’ web pages, where you can peruse the content and read their submission guidelines.
I don’t want to spend my blog advertising Writer’s Digest, but they do seem to have set the gold standard. You can also find market listings at websites operated by The Writer magazine and Poets & Writers, among others. The latter tends toward literary magazines. I’ll give you some more places to find markets next week.
These market guides are a wonderful place to start if you don’t know where to send your work. They offer names, addresses, lists of what the editors are looking for, the percentage of freelance vs. staff writing, and more. But they are just a start. We need to go beyond the listings to read their guidelines, usually available online. And then, we need to look at the publication. At least peruse what they post online.
Best case, read the magazine, newspaper or zine. Read it all, including the ads, and read as many back issues as you can find. You may find that your work won’t fit in some of the places that sounded good from the Writer’s Market listing. If it does seem to fit, you’ll have a better idea of how to entice them with your writing.
Take some time to browse the listings. They tend to spark ideas. Keep paper and pen nearby.
>Question about reselling stories to other markets
Posted: May 6, 2008 Filed under: ASJA Guide, Renegade Writer, selling article reprints, Writer's Market, writing-world.com Leave a comment »>I’m double-posting today to answer a question from a writer named Susan, who had some questions for me:
” I enjoyed reading your piece, “Newspapers: A Great Source of Freelance Opportunities.”
I’ve taken the opportunity to sell work I’ve done to newspapers, primarily because I’ve found it a very comfortable relationship.
Since I reside in both Florida and Illinois, one line in your piece was of particular interest, ” and the Chicago Tribune pays from $150 to $500 for travel articles–which you could resell to the L.A. Times or the Miami Herald….”
I haven’t written travel articles, I write health features, but why did you specifically mention the Times or the Herald for resale, and how would I go about reselling pieces I’ve done for the Trib?
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Susan
Susan,
That I mentioned those particular papers was simply a matter of having the information and being impressed at their rates. In other words, it’s a coincidence that they happen to be the papers from where you live.
That said, you can resell any type of article, not just travel articles, as long as you have not given up all rights and your story fits the mission of papers you’re aiming for.
Let’s talk about rights. Ideally, you signed a contract for your work, but if not, you should have an e-mail, letter or at least a verbal agreement as to what rights the first publication is buying. Don’t accept an assignment without knowing what rights you’re giving up. In the best situation, they only ask for first rights or claim exclusive rights for a limited period of time, which allows you to offer reprint rights elsewhere.
Some papers buy all rights. You can try to negotiate a change in that clause, but if you don’t succeed, all is not lost. You can still write a new article using much of the same information but adding new material to fit the new market. Or you can go at the story from a different angle, making it a whole new piece.
Approach the new publication in much the same way as the first one. E-mail a query or send the whole story, making sure you mention where it ran before. Most publications pay less for reprints, but it still adds to the total you can make from that story.
A couple of cautions with newspaper reprints:
Most papers put a lot of their content online. If your story is going to be on the Internet indefinitely, that may harm your chances of republishing it elsewhere.
Many newspapers papers are part of conglomerates that own several newspapers. They often share content. Try not to offer reprints to papers in the same family.
I hope that answers some of your questions. There’s more information in my Freelancing for Newspapers book, as well as in Writer’s Market, at Writing-World.com and other sites for writers. I also recommend The Renegade Writer and The ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing, both wonderful books.
>Study the paper and the guidelines
Posted: February 19, 2008 Filed under: analyzing newspaper markets, Associated Press, contributing editor, South Coast Writers Conference, syndicates, Writer's Market 1 Comment »>I taught my “Freelancing for Newspapers” class at the South Coast Writers Conference in Gold Beach, Oregon last weekend. We were blessed with sunny weather and a wonderful group of writers and presenters.
As one of my class exercises, I passed out newspapers and had teams analyze the freelance possibilities in those papers. It was an interesting experiment. If you remember back to my blog entry about the Christian Science Monitor, you’ll remember it seemed like a pretty good market. Well, the students who had that paper flipped through it and said, “There’s nothing here for us.” Not having seen the guidelines, they had no idea about the many sections open to freelancers. It really is important to look for a paper’s submission guidelines to understand the possibilities. Read the paper AND the guidelines, and you should have a clear picture of whether you can write for them.
There were a lot of questions about terms that I have known for so long that I guess I forget everyone doesn’t know them. So let me clarify for one and all:
* Staff writers are usually identified as such in the byline. Articles with no byline are either staff-written or press releases run without pay.
* If an article says “for” the Tribune or “special to”, it was probably written by a freelancer.
* If the byline doesn’t give you a clue, look for a tag at the end of the article. Also look in the masthead and see if the name is listed among the editors or staff writers. If it’s not, the writer is a freelancer.
* “Contributing editor” and “contributors” listed in a byline or in the masthead are freelancers. They are not paid staff members. The contributing editors may have an agreement to write for every issue. Contributors may write for every issue or just this one.
* Stringers are also regular freelance contributors. It’s an old-fashioned term that comes from the way editors used to measure stories by the inch, using a marked string.
* Associated Press is an organization to which newspapers belong. Most articles are written by staff writers for their own papers and picked up by the Associated Press to offer to other member papers. The articles arrive online each day, and the editors pick out which ones they want. People do freelance for AP, but it’s a hard job to get.
* News services, such as Cox News Service, are syndicates that work like AP, offering a menu of stories to member or subscriber newspapers. You can freelance for them. Check Writer’s Market for a list of some of these, but they do favor employee writers with strong track records.
If you can’t find guidelines in Writer’s Market or on the newspaper’s web site, e-mail or telephone the editor and ask: “Do you take freelance? Can I send you some ideas?”
Feel free to ask questions about this stuff, and remember, wherever you go, grab a newspaper.
>We’re in the Club!
Posted: November 7, 2007 Filed under: Freelancing for Newspapers, Writer's Digest Books, Writer's Market, Writers on the Rise 2 Comments »>I’m trying to keep the plugs to a bare minimum here, but I wanted to brag that Freelancing for Newspapers is now a Writer’s Digest Book Club selection. That makes me very happy. If you join the club, you can get the latest Writer’s Market and three other books, all for the price of one book. One of those could be Freelancing for Newspapers, right?
While we’re plugging, have I mentioned that I’ll be offering a monthly Freelancing for Newspapers challenge in the Writers on the Rise newsletter starting in January? I have a list of possibilities to start with, but I’m definitely open to suggestions and anxious to find out how the challenges work for people.
