How To Sell Everything You Write To Newspapers and Magazines Over The Internet.

by Phil Philcox

If you're a writer, you do it for the love of writing and/or the love of survival. I do it for both reasons. I've been a full-time freelancer for more than thirty years and have sold more than 1300 articles to magazines like Family Circle, Consumers Digest, Writer's Digest, Playboy and others.  I've authored 45 non-fiction books (check amazon.com under my name) and if I do my writing job well, I can earn enough money to live in reasonable style near the Gulf of Mexico in northwest Florida. But earning enough money as a writer to pay your rent, eat, get medical care, buy clothing and pay your bills ain't easy. I spend as much time marketing my writing as I do writing it.

To survive financially, I spend my days dreaming up book and article ideas, researching, writing and marketing my stuff. I just recently got an agent who sold a book on legal rights for women for a $8,500 advance and that helps. In the past, I searched for a publisher just like everybody else.

I find markets much like you do. I thumb through directories like Writer's Market, Writer's Market/The Electronic Edition, read the publishers' requirements in magazines and newsletters, write queries, occasionally send the entire manuscript by mail (short articles), occasionally make a phone call, send faxes, address envelopes, lick stamps and run back and forth to the mailbox with my fingers crossed. It's a marketing madhouse and until a few years ago, I never questioned that times might be changing. This is the 21st Century and using marketing techniques that have been around since the 18th Century when writers wrote with quill pens and had their material delivered by a guy on horseback must surely be obsolete.

So, I ran an Internet marketing experiment. One day I got the e-mail addresses of ten business magazines e-mailed them all a 1300 article on hiring employees. I explained that in this day and age, it's not a good idea to just hire people who walk in off the street, submit a resume or answer a classified ad. Nobody in business could argue with that. I suggested readers run a background check on potential employees and explained how simple it was. The article covered all the potential hiring problems, gave a few horror story examples and told readers what they should do and how to do it. I included a sidebar listing the names/addresses/phones of companies that did background investigation. Surprisingly, they're inexpensive from $25 to $200, a fair price to pay to pay to avoid hiring some lunatic.

I sent the article off to ten editors via e-mail at the same time with the click of a mouse. I told them if they could use it, I'd take their standard payment. If they couldn't use it, I told them to just erase it from their mailbox. This was an experiment in mass marketing. I chose trade magazines with no overlap in readership (print shop owners don't read magazines written for pizza shop owners), so I could make some multiple sales. This has worked with travel articles sent to newspapers.

There are thousands of newspapers and magazines out there that might respond to something like this. It worked for me. Out of ten, I got three replies and two sales. No record breaker but a sale is a sale. Two said they weren't interested, two bought it and I don't know what happened to the rest (they probably just deleted it). Nobody yelled at me for e-mailing my stuff, so that's progress. The two who bought it paid me $86. I did it again a week later (I was hooked!) and sold it three more times for $140 total. I still have thousands of e-mail magazine and newspaper addresses to go, so I don't know what will happen. I'm looking over my stockpile of never-sold articles and have at least 30 that will fit into this marketing plan.

Are editors receptive to e-mail queries and article submission? I would think some are and those that aren't, aren't. If I was an editor (and I have been), I'd like to get some e-mail queries and articles via e-mail. It beats opening up envelopes, unfolding pages, reading hard copies, making a yes or no decision, writing a letter to the author, etc. An editor can set up a special e-mailbox for queries and have some lowly editor check it daily. The lowly one can pass on the good stuff and delete the rest. Lots of options. From the writer's angle, you can't sell your writing if it's sitting in a post office waiting to be delivered or in some editor's in-box waiting to be read.

In the past, I've sent out book queries to book publishing houses by mail and waited more than six months for a negative response or no response at all. I've sent out queries to some magazines and newspapers with self-addressed, stamped envelopes and never got a response. If I sat around waiting for editors to be courteous enough to respond to my material, I might never get published.

There was a time when the one-publisher/one-query technique was valid. Publishers assumed when an article query arrived on their desk, it was available if they (a) liked it and (b) the author agreed on the payment. They could even plan in advance what issue that article would appear in.  Fair enough, but a lot of publisher didn't follow the rules. They let material sit around  for months on end, tossed it without notifying the writer, or eventually sent a bad news rejection slip. If the writer was lucky, they bought it.  (bad news) or bought it (good news). I find a magazine editor who doesn't respond to a query after three months is downright rude or incompetent. I'll stretch that to 5-6 months for a book editor, and I'm not even sure I like that.

Six e-mail responses in one week must be a query-response record, so I'm sticking with this new plan. Email Publisher and World Newspapers has the information you need for e-mail submissions. The names, websites or e-mail addresses of over 10,000 publications worldwide. This e-mail thing for writers is the marketing tool of the future. It works for writers living anywhere in the world who want to try and crack the North American markets. A guy in California has sold one article over ten times to newspapers around the county using E-Mail Publisher. Another writer in New York has sold an article on how to obtain business liability insurance to more magazines than I have! One writer in Germany told me she's sold over 30 articles to U.S. newspapers on vacationing in her country. She assumes, she said, most daily newspapers have a travel section, so she blankets the e-mail mailboxes with copies of her articles and succeeds. While other writers are printing out queries on paper, licking stamps, dropping stuff in mailboxes and waiting around for an answer, you can e-mail ten, a hundred or a thousand editors in one day and really get your queries in circulation. Writers in the U.S. are discovering new markets overseas and reaching them via e-mail.

Included with EMP/WN are some interesting writing tips you can use to improve your writing and learn how to learn the new e-mail solution. Go back a notch (click here) and order your copy today. You won't regret it.