Welcome to the Magazine Publishing Blog

Posted by Mary Yerkes Dec 1, 2008

Welcome to the Magazine Publishing blog! I look forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing yours on magazine publishing.

To start, I'd like to offer a few words of advice to aspiring and novice magazine writers.

One thing that I find helpful is to subscribe to well-written magazines and to read them from cover to cover each month. I recommend The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic (formerly the Atlantic Monthly), Time, Newsweek, Writer's Digest, and a quality literary review like The Paris Review, to name a few.

But, let's be real. It costs money to subscribe to all those magazines! Many of the same benefits could be had by reading the articles online. But to gain the most from your reading experience, you may want to print out the articles that appeal to you so you can study them closely. While you're at it, scribble notes in the margin and file away copies of articles that speak to you.

Here's something that I've found very helpful in my writing education. Choose an article from one of the magazines listed above. Sit down at the computer and start to type the article, word for word. Notice how the words flow together, their rhythm and cadence. Is the sentence structure varied? What type of lead does the writer use? Does anything surprise you about the structure of the article?

Once you've typed the entire article, examine it closely. Review the process mentally. What did you learn? You'll be surprised at how much you'll glean from an exercise like this!

Do you have a tip you'd like to share with readers? What works for you?