The making of a magazine

(eighth in a series)

Every now and then, I receive an e-mail or letter from a potential contributor who wants his or her article to appear in WildBird, earns a spot in a future issue and then sabotages the relationship. The sour situation could have been avoided simply via certain actions.

Avoid selling similar articles to competing magazines. You might think of it as maximizing your return on the expenses from gathering story material, but you could kill the possibility of future revenue from a publication.

If an author writes an article about, say, a birding site for one magazine and writes about the same site with very slight differences in the text for WildBird, then I write that author’s name on the Never Again List. In fact, this happened to me last year, and I won't consider queries from that writer.

Editors of competing magazines want to provide unique information and perspectives to their readers. They do not want recycled copy. This is obvious, no?

Want to see the previous snafu?