Thirteen Lucky Tips

Crossing the magazine article minefield

   It’s high fashion to put out helpful lists of How To Be a Writer, but will advice like “write, don’t “write,”” or, “fuck every publisher you meet,” butter your turnips?

   Here are 13 lucky tips, based on my experiences writing way too many magazine articles, for surviving your own assignments. I use each one for every piece I write.

   My tips kick in right after you’ve successfully pitched your idea to a magazine editor.

1.    Start a bulleted list of everyone you need to talk to. Collect the following: name, job title, company name, landline and cell number, email address and company website. Every time you email someone, chat, leave a message, or they reply, note it, with the date, in that person’s bullet. Make note of action items here too; e.g., “telinter set for 0900h 25.6.13.” Keep this list forever.

2.    Begin contacting people today. Preparing an article is a marathon of mostly small acts that usually takes weeks to finish. Never underestimate how long this process is.

3.    If you don’t get a reply to an email after a day or two, phone. The email could be in their spam box or lost in the ether. The recipient could be on vacation, crazy busy, incompetent, no longer with the company or deathly ill.

4.    Prepare a question list for each interview. Writing questions organizes your brain and helps you visualize what your story might look like. Interviewees hugely appreciate getting questions in advance. It helps them organize their brains. If you don’t know what to ask, you’re not thinking hard enough and you need to do more research and get curious.

5.    Your editor will likely expect you to bum photos to decorate your article. Go learn what constitutes a publication-quality photo. The techno-jibber boils down to this 98% rule: get jpegs that are at least one megabyte in size. Always cite the techno-requirements to your askee. Most people, including photographers, and especially PR people, don’t understand publication requirements. Ask early and be prepared to ask repeatedly for better images.

6.    Write your own cutlines (photo captions). Some writers don’t, which is stupid. Write them to roughly the same length as ones in your target magazine.

7.    Go to company websites and double check company names, locations and anything else that could go wrong. Interviewees and you both are quite capable of making mistakes.

8.    Always offer to send your interviewees your draft for a check of technical accuracy. Emphasize that corrections and additions need to be done using Word Track Changes or using CAPS, so you can see them. If you can’t imagine why now, you sure will the first time you get a 2,000-word draft back and you have to do a line-by-line comparison with your original draft to find the changes.

9.    It’s rare, but some interviewees will stand on your shoulders, rewrite your draft and shuffle everything around. Ignore that. You’re the pro, or the crappy writer, but it’s your show. On the other hand, don't reject a good correction or clarification. There are excellent writers out there, at least on a line-by-line basis.

10.Write to length. If your deal is to write 1,200 words, try writing 1,200 words, not 1,201 or 1,199. You editor will be impressed, and it’s good practice. But if the story simply doesn’t deserve the agreed-upon word count, never add fluff. Don’t worry about drafting out long. You will easily shave off hundreds of words by removing redundancies, your darlings, less relevant stuff and information-weak quotes.

11.Speaking of quotes, avoid “mom and apple pie” garbage like “We’re proud to be on the team that developed this massive machine.” Refuse to use them. If you have to go to someone for a short quote, remind them, “No mom and apple pie quotes, please.” They’ll always know what you mean.

12. If you haven’t already offered, tell your editor that you would be happy to review your story layout for mistakes before it goes to the printer. Editors make editing mistakes, and the worst of them make a lot. Layout people also make mistakes, oh yes they do; e.g., making text vanish and putting cutlines under the wrong images.

13.Always submit your invoice with your article and images, unless you have to wait for billing information, such as how many of your photos the editor chooses and will be paying you for. Understand what your magazine’s payment terms are; e.g., upon acceptance or upon publication. If your think payment is late, resend the invoice and ask your editor to check into its status. Invoices do get lost, usually by editors.

Copyright © Carroll McCormick 2013

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