How to Become a Freelance Magazine Article Writer

Video Transcript

"Becoming a freelance magazine article writer is actually fairly difficult if you want to make a living at it. It's not that hard if you're willing to sell an article occasionally, but if you want to make a living at it, you have to do a lot of research. You have to hone your skills. You're in a very competitive field, and if you're trying to support yourself just on writing articles, you have to be a particular voice, or you have to be able to adopt the voice of the magazines that you're trying to write for. Sometimes a magazine has a particular tone. Automobile magazines, for example, vary tremendously in how they approach the subject. Some of them are a little bit jocular, some of them are a little sarcastic, others are just straight technical down the line. You have to be able to match the tone of the magazine you're trying to hit. You have to offer them something that their staff writers can't write or aren't interested in writing. You have to provide a subject and an approach that is compatible with what they've got, but at the same time something they haven't done already. Look into your own background, find your own interests, do a lot more research. Become an expert. If you're an expert in an area, you have a better chance of selling more and more articles to different magazines, because remember: you're not going to make a living selling to the same magazine over and over, unless it's The New Yorker. But, if you want to be an expert on travel, you want to sell to all the travel magazines, not just one of them. If you want to be an expert on cars, you want to sell to as many different car magazines as you can, so that means you're going to have to be flexible but at the same time you have to be the expert, the person that they go to, when they need someone outside."