Lesson 1: What Should I Write About?
Lesson 1: What should you write about? In this lesson you will discover how to find ideas and markets, and how to match ideas to markets.
Lesson Objectives and Glossary
OBJECTIVES AND GLOSSARY
The objectives of this lesson are to give you a clear picture of how to find ideas; how to judge whether an idea is marketable; how to research markets and most crucially, how to match your ideas to markets. The resources I will use are: Michael Perry’s Handbook for Freelance Writing and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freelance Publishing. Another helpful book which I will quote from is Writing for Magazines by Jill Dick.
Glossary
Angle: the theme or argument of your article. This should be fresh and original.
Clips: these are samples of your writing.
Queries: these are letters summing up the themes of your articles to see whether they are suitable for your intended markets.
Markets: these are the magazines in which you would like to be published.
Sample copies: these are issues of the magazine. Sometimes you can find free issues, but often you have to buy a sample copy.
Writer’s guidelines: Many magazines publish writer’s guidelines. Some are very detailed but others are unfortunately very vague. Usually, however, they will say what kind of articles they want, whether they are accessible to freelancers, the style of the articles that they want, and the word length they require.
