The making of a magazine

Every now and then, I receive an e-mail or letter from a writer who wants his or her article to appear in WildBird and goes about it in the completely wrong way. Here’s the first wrong way: addressing the query (editorspeak for “a concise description of the proposed article and the reasons that the editor should pay the writer to provide the article to the readers”) to a generic entity or to a previous editor.

My inboxes occasionally include queries to the fellow who left the magazine eight years ago. Hello?

When I receive such a query, I put it aside. Harsh? Consider this: The writer just revealed that he/she failed to look at recent issues of the magazine and the websites.

Why would I want to work with and pay someone who chose not to do the most rudimentary research? To my mind, that calls into question the accuracy of the information in the proposed article.

Myriad snafus can doom a query. Want to read about more of 'em?