Article writing: The magazine sleuth - a study in detection for article writers
The pages of a magazine tell you exactly what its editor needs, if you look carefully, says Clive Brooks
To stand any chance of having your non-fiction article published in a magazine, you need to become a detective and painstakingly comb your target publication for hidden clues to what the editor is likely to be looking for. But how do you go about it? Well, that’s what this guide is all about.
Assembling your suspects
The first thing to do is search out some magazines that you believe may be interested in the sort of articles you feel that you could write. The place to start used to be The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. However, now there are alternatives. My preferred method is to look online at the large magazine subscription sites such as www.magazine.co.uk. Information about hundreds of magazines can be found there, together with photographs of recent covers. The available publications are also usefully broken down into genres and sub-genres. Having identified potential suspects, one can visit the magazine’s individual website to glean more information. This further narrows the focus. Having identified likely markets, it’s now time to buy several sample copies of each publication. This remains the ONLY way of fully understanding what will required. Armed with these, the real detective work can commence.
Advertising analysis
Looking at the adverts in a magazine provides a reliable method of deducing who the target reader is and ensuring that your article ideas are written with the right reader firmly in mind.