28 July 06

How I started writing for magazines

A lot of people think trying to start writing for magazines is hard. A lot of people are wrong – it’s actually quite easy.

For a start, magazines are always crying out for content. They only have a limited amount of full-time writers, so they need good contract writers to fill up the gaps. I didn’t think of it like this before I started writing for mags – I thought that only the best writers would ever be allowed to contribute. And there’s me – pre-blog, hadn’t written an essay since my B in GCSE English, can’t speak proper like – even contemplating writing gigantic articles for a large magazine company.

The thing that changed my perception of magazine writing was Ryan Carson’s talk at his Future of Web Apps conference. He was talking about the business side of setting up a start-up and about how every start-up needs publicity. He suggested that start-ups should write for magazines as they’re “crying out for articles”. A voice in my head went “oh… right…”. I looked around the conference room and thinking “I’m sure I can write better than most people here”. How very arrogant of me. The voice in my head can be very arrogant sometimes, but at least you don’t get listen to it.

Next step was to get a contact, so I looked up .net’s website and found the editor’s email address and sent off this email (cut down for length).

Dear Ms Jones, I am a web developer currently working at Mook, a creative digital consultancy based in north London, with diverse clients such as PlayStation [...] and Diesel. I have had a good idea for an article which I would like to write for .net magazine, which would detail the pros and cons of Ruby on Rails. I believe that a lot of your readers would be interested in reading about this up and coming technology, and would like to know the details about it without any of the hype that currently surrounds it. In the article, I would give background about Rails, and Ruby, and how the language and framework came synonymous with “Web 2.0” along with AJAX, RSS and other crazy acronyms. Also I would give a brief description of how the language and the framework fits together, and how these constraints imposed by the framework give “beautiful code”, which is what the Rails creator calls it. I would then detail whether or not Rails will have a successful future within the web development, and why I personally think that Rails will only have a niche market compared to languages such as PHP and ASP.

It’s quite amusing for me to read that email now. My language skills surely must have improved since then (haven’t they??). Anyway. I thought she wouldn’t bother replying due to me being an insignificant sperm. The stereotypical editor is always busy. Too busy for people like me. But she did – offering me a 700 word opinion piece on Rails.

I was very smug with myself that day. Walking around, David Brent style, “guess who’s writing for a magazine?” but then it hit me. How am I going to write 700 words? I haven’t wrote that much in years!

Over the next week, I walked around with a notepad jotting down any opinion I had on Rails. In the supermarkets, walking down the street, I even had sleepless nights thinking about the pros and cons of Rails. Waking up at 2am to scribble down an idea, in the dark, which looked like an illiterate doctor’s signature the next morning.

Once I had composed my article, I thought it was in line for a Pulitzer prize. Fortunately, other people didn’t totally agree with me, and very kindly offered to help. Nat, the missus with very good essay skills, must had gone over it ten thousand times, painfully correcting my dodgy mixed metaphors. Marc, the copywriter at Mook, then added some pizzazz to it, which was very nice of him considering how busy he was. Then the article was amazing, and I submitted it to Lisa at .net who accepted it.

Then the magazine was published several weeks later and I was completely chuffed. And so was my mum who bought a copy and ended up showing everyone she knew – and people she didn’t. In fact, my mum single-handedly raised the circulation that month by 27%.

Luckily my relationship with .net grew and I ended up getting more work and bigger articles. Why anyone trusts me to write a good article is a different matter, but fortunately some did. It’s now a strange coincedence that Lisa, the editor at the time, now works for Ryan, the guy who turned me on to writing for mags.

Seriously though, give it a go. Try contacting a magazine if you honestly think you’re good enough to have your work published. It’s a lot less scarier than you may think and you may surprise yourself. I don’t claim to be anything than a slightly above-average technical writer (this is in comparison to bloggers, blogging is a lot different to writing) – if I can do it, so can you!

Enjoy this? Subscribe to the feed for the very latest updates.