This year, I had an article published in a national magazine. The experience confirmed my decision way back when not to pursue article writing as a career.
When I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my working life at Microsoft, I tried to come up with a new career. I loved writing, and was working as a tech writer at MS, so I figured I try a career as a writer.
I was obviously familiar with technical writing. And I knew you could write books as either a fiction or non-fiction author. But I thought the only other type of writing career available, and most realistic to me, was writing articles for various publications.
I didn’t know much about article writing, but what I did know was through stories I heard: You submitted an article or an idea, hoped someone would pay you for it, then saw how little money you made vs. the amount of effort you put in.
Thank goodness I stumbled across The Well-Fed Writer book and AWAI around that time. That got me pointed in a better direction where you’d write copy for marketing material and make more than “pennies per word.”
Obviously, my career took another turn when I jumped over to design, but to this day, I still enjoy writing.
Between this blog and other outlets, I’ve developed an “article library” that I can offer to publications or other blogs. And since I don’t depend on article writing for my income, I don’t follow any “submission requirements” that a publication may have.
I simply send a quick e-mail with a pointer to the article library. If they find something they like, we take it from there. If they don’t accept submissions in that manner, fine… I’ll move on to someone else. I don’t have the time or desire to go through a formal process.
As I said earlier, a magazine decided to run one of my articles. The process gave me a brief taste of how my life might have turned out. The folks at the magazine were fine, it’s just that the article kept getting pushed back month after month due to space limitations or other issues.
After a while, I began to doubt whether it would ever get printed. It also illustrated what a full-time article writer must go through, at least in a small way. Can you imagine being at the mercy of so many things outside of your control just to get a small check whenever your article eventually ran?
I realize there are some article writers who make a good living because they’ve taken the time to establish themselves as one of the top few for their writing niche. But that leaves a lot of folks somewhere down where I was, battling against a lot of people willing to provide content for little or no money. No thanks!
I don’t have any real lesson or take-away for you… just thinking “out loud” about how thankful I am that I ended up where I did. And also thankful that I was open to other opportunities that might not have been obvious in the beginning.
Tags: article writing, AWAI, Well-Fed Writer