Build Your Writing Career from Small Beginnings

Would You Go Straight from a Moped to a Ferrari?

Sometimes writers get discouraged early on in their writing career because they expect to achieve too much too soon. They think that their very first short stories or articles will be snapped up by national magazines and they'll be raking in the money.

Some people might be very lucky and have their work accepted by the big boys very quickly, but most of us need to work our way up. Would you expect to go straight from riding a moped to driving a powerful Ferrari? Expecting to have sizeable pieces published or commissioned by one of the nationals is just as unrealistic.

A few people might be lucky and hit the big time straight off, but for most of us it's better to progress slowly and surely. Not so much moped to Ferrari, but moped to motor bike to mini to hatchback to family car to Ferrari.

Readers' Letters and Tips - a Good Place to Start

One of the easiest ways to start seeing your work and your name in print is to write letters to newspapers and magazines. It doesn't take long to write a piece and you may even be able to submit them by e-mail to some publications, so it wouldn't even cost you the price of a stamp.

Useful Market Study

Studying a publication and trying to figure out what sort of letters it usually chooses to publish is a very good way of learning to study your prospective markets. You can put the knowledge you acquire to good use later when you eventually start submitting fiction or articles. Your name will start to become familiar to the editors, which will be very useful when you want to stand out from the thousand other writers whose work is in the magazine's pile of unsolicited manuscripts.

Publication Means Prizes or Payment

It will really give you a boost to see your name and your words in print, and often there are quite good rewards for readers' letters, tips, and photos. Some magazines will pay £50 just for a tip which lasts one or two sentences, which means you'd be getting an excellent rate of pay per word! Others offer prizes for letters published or the letter of the week.

I remember getting all sorts of things when I was starting out, including a caddy of tea and a very handsome Schaeffer pen, which I still use today. I had all sorts of things published, anecdotes from my family or odd things that I overheard when I was out and about.

You don't even need to buy the publications regularly to check whether your letter is in. I used to spend a little while browsing in a big newsagent's and look at the letters pages of the magazines I'd sent things off to. Then I'd buy the magazine if my contribution had been published that week.

How to Work Out What Gets Published

The important thing is to study three or four recent copies of each publication you are targetting so that you can identify the readership of the magazine and the sort of things they like to publish. Some magazines love little anecdotes and pictures of children and grandchildren. Others like to publish letters in which the reader says how much she identified with an article in a previous issue because they'd had a similar experience.

One more thing to remember is that you mustn't send the same letter to more than one publication at a time as editors hate it if they publish something which ends up in another magazine around the same time.

But if several months have passed and your letter still hasn't been printed, you'll be safe to send it somewhere else, possibly adapting it slightly for your new target publication.

So get writing - and good luck!