INTRODUCTION
I find many of my magazines by telling people I know, and some I barely know, that I am always looking for odd magazines. I ask my dentist, my doctor, my friends, complete strangers. I check the library's stacks for odd magazines. Not all of them are useful but in every stack of useless magazines, I find one that could buy my writing.
THEORY
When I first began writing, I was a devotee of both The Writer and Writer's Digest. I dutifully clipped the market information and set up an index card system. I never had more than 100 potential markets in my card files and I couldn't manage to follow through on more than a dozen or so. Oh, the guilt. So, you ask, if I cannot handle a few dozen markets, what's the point of having access to information on thousands of markets?
For me, the magic is that rather than trying to mold my kind of writing to the markets I read about, I can find sufficient markets in my field of expertise. Writing what I know makes me a more efficient and effective writer. I used to leaf through the index cards and study a market that was actively seeking writers and wonder, can I learn enough about the automotive industry to sell to this magazine? I knew I couldn't so I'd put that card to the back of the box. I'd dither my way through the rest of the cards and eventually become discouraged.
As the Internet explodes with information, more and more magazines are going on-line. I have an appointment every weekend with the World Wide Web. There are a number of search engines. My personal favorite is Metacrawler. I type in keys words such as "health magazines" and am rewarded with pages of links to web sites that mention health magazines. Sometimes, magazines include their writers' guidelines and fee schedule on their web site. They often display sample articles from recent issues.
This latter is invaluable. I don't believe it is possible to write for a magazine sight unseen. There are editorial nuances in every magazine and reading the articles they print is the best guideline a writer can find. Now I have a database of nearly 300 magazines and all of them are tailor-made for my kind of writing. As I leaf through my current market database, I am enthused by the possibilities before me. The markets were hand-picked by me from a massive source and each one of them is in a field I know and love.
