Hello everyone. I'm new here. I was wondering if anyone has advice on writing query letters to send to magazine publishers. I'm just getting into article writing, although I've been writing for a long time and would like some help with this. Thank you in advance for any help offered.
Query Letters to Publishers? Need advice
Have you tried Google? There are a lot of good resources out there. Here's one of the better ones:
poewar.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter/
The key is really knowing the publication and what types of articles they publish or if they even accept work from unknown freelancers. Tailor your query to the publication so that the editor doesn't feel like you are tossing out a wide fishing net-use a hook (with just a little bit of bait).
Some magazines appreciate writers who are also photographers. If you happen to be a qualified photographer, send along publication-worthy photos. Besides, a busy editor is more likely to glance at photos than to read an entire query or article.
Make sure that your letter is error free. Editors read like, well, editors. Any mistakes will jump out at them. Editors would much rather work with writers that don't require a lot of hand holding or editing.
Just because you write an amazing query and then the magazine publishes something similar a few months later, doesn't mean that the magazine stole your idea. Articles are sometimes assigned many months in advance or have been in the hopper. Because of this, some magazines will not accept queries from the public. Along the same lines, be very careful if you are sending simultaneous submissions to more than one publisher . . . if you do get a piece accepted, you'll need to withdraw your submissions from other publishers or risk pissing everyone off. One way to get blacklisted from a magazine/publisher is to have your piece carefully considered and then approved at an editorial meeting only to have the editors find out that the piece is no longer available because it has been published elsewhere.
(This advice comes from a magazine editor that I know)
poewar.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter/
The key is really knowing the publication and what types of articles they publish or if they even accept work from unknown freelancers. Tailor your query to the publication so that the editor doesn't feel like you are tossing out a wide fishing net-use a hook (with just a little bit of bait).
Some magazines appreciate writers who are also photographers. If you happen to be a qualified photographer, send along publication-worthy photos. Besides, a busy editor is more likely to glance at photos than to read an entire query or article.
Make sure that your letter is error free. Editors read like, well, editors. Any mistakes will jump out at them. Editors would much rather work with writers that don't require a lot of hand holding or editing.
Just because you write an amazing query and then the magazine publishes something similar a few months later, doesn't mean that the magazine stole your idea. Articles are sometimes assigned many months in advance or have been in the hopper. Because of this, some magazines will not accept queries from the public. Along the same lines, be very careful if you are sending simultaneous submissions to more than one publisher . . . if you do get a piece accepted, you'll need to withdraw your submissions from other publishers or risk pissing everyone off. One way to get blacklisted from a magazine/publisher is to have your piece carefully considered and then approved at an editorial meeting only to have the editors find out that the piece is no longer available because it has been published elsewhere.
(This advice comes from a magazine editor that I know)
Some excellent advice from Eric. You might also want to head to your local library and check out some of the many, many books available on breaking into various writing markets. While you're at it, you could even pick up some back issues of magazines you might be interested in writing for, so you can get an idea of what they are looking for.
