How to Write and Sell ‘How-to’ Articles — Part 1

Years ago, I read an article about writing ‘how-tos’ for magazines and the author stressed this point: the main requirement for selling a ‘how-to’ is first-hand experience. Equipped as I am with two left feet and no green thumb, and being somewhat math- and technology-challenged, that approach was a difficult one for me to follow.

But I am interested in people and what they do. That interest led me to an African violet expert, so I wrote a ‘how-to’ about how that woman grows prize-winning African Violets in her basement. A local home and garden publication snapped up my article.

I took on a business assignment to write a ‘how-to’ about how an employee implemented Statistical Process Control techniques in the manufacturing branch of his company. I had never heard of SPC before and considering my limitations, my article would have been impossible if the employee had not explained the process in a way that was easy for me to understand and I, in turn, could relate that to others. The company’s employee publication ran that ‘how-to’ in its next issue.

And then there was the couple I heard about who used fifteenth technology to start up and run a modern-day printing operation. Using their expertise, I was able to write a ‘how-to’ showing how to put the centuries-old process to work in a modern setting. The article appeared in a national trade magazine.

The point is this: You don’t have to be an expert to write a ‘how-to’ in areas far removed from anything in your experience. I’ve found that editors eagerly grab well-written ‘how-tos’ aimed at their readership.

So, If you’re not an experienced outdoors person but want to write in that field, find an expert who fits the category. I understand that, despite the present economic downturn, ‘how-tos’ are the best selling category for any outdoors article.

And editors of publications in other fields also eat up ‘how-tos.’ Go to any newsstand and look at the covers and contents pages of diverse publications. You’ll find many promoting articles like these:

“How and Where to Paint” (Traditional Home)
“How to Drop 12 Pounds in 14 Days” (Prevention)
“How to Fake Flawless Skin” (Home Journal)
“How to Save on the Cost of Printer’s Ink” (Consumer Reports)
“How to Find Time to Write” (The Writer)
“How to Add Realism to Your Training” (Guns & Ammo – Handguns)

Whatever your the market you want to write a ‘how-to’ for, research well. Spend time examining newsstand publications, looking especially at lesser known magazines — they may receive fewer queries than others. Be sure to read guidelines and back issues of the magazines you plan to target.

Ideas for ‘how-tos’ may come from your own and your friends’ experiences, from your children, newspaper articles, local radio and tv features. If you find things in your everyday life that don’t work and you try to fix them, that may be the basis for a how-to from your own experience. But you still may want to include advice from experts in your piece, and be sure to mention the experts you want to quote in your query. That can help to sell your idea to the editor.

Where can you find experts? The same place you find ‘how-to’ subjects — check newspapers, radio and tv shows, ask friends, relatives and neighbors, look on the internet. Try Expert.com and Profnet.com. Google your subject and see what turns up. WritersWeekly.com has a special section where you can ask for expert help for articles. If you have a college or university nearby, you may find a wealth of experts on campus.

Be sure to come back here for How to Write and Sell ‘How-to’ Articles, Part 2, where we’ll get into the specifics of actually writing a ‘how-to.’

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What Should I Write About?

Here’s a question that sometimes plagues new freelance writers. “What should I write about?”

When article ideas don’t come easily to you, when you’re not tripping over ideas with every step you take, when your creative well seems to have run dry, where do you go for help? Sometimes the answer is as easy as deciding what to fix for dinner tonight.

Scores of magazines offer recipes and menus to help you get a meal to the table on time. The same thing is true for writing subjects. The answer to “What can I write about?” can be as simple as picking up a publication or spending time at a local newsstand checking a magazine’s table of contents.

Here’s one example:

An article by writer Marge Jesberger in the March/April issue of Writer’s Journal offers this gem:

Demand is Great–You Can Supply

Every time you pick up a magazine, you see something on diet or exercise. You also see articles on flea markets in the spring and snow sports in the winter. You feel the market is glutted, so why compete? That is the best reason to submit a well-researched and up-to-date article on these subjects. If something is popular, editors and publishers are on the lookout for more of the same.

That advice holds for most any type of magazine — general interest, specialty, trade journal, health care, business, you name it. Back in journalism school, our instructors used to call the perennial sellers “evergreens.” These are types of articles — much like asters, daylillies and other perennial flowers that emerge for us to enjoy year after year— that come back regularly and never seem to go out of favor with readers.

So if you want to know what to write about next, pick up any target magazine of your choice and look for “evergreens” within its pages. Check several issues, maybe even go to the library and read back issues to find out which evergreens the editors seem to favor.

Then get busy and query with an updated version of one subject that you like. Granted this approach won’t result in blockbuster articles that fetch big bucks, but it will keep you writing, get your name and writing skills in front of editors, and probably add a modest sum to your yearly income.

I think you’ll find that editors welcome queries about the tried-and-true subjects that please their readers. And that can be a quick way to get a byline and a check — and sometimes a regular writing gig with a publication.

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© 2009 by Laverne Daley

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Guest Post: Handling Rejection

A treat awaits you below: a Guest Post by Victoria Mixon on “Handling Rejection.” Although Victoria usually blogs for writers of fiction, her unique perspective on how she handles rejection offers wisdom that we non-fiction writers can tap into as well.

Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor, working in fiction, nonfiction, technical documentation, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, published by Prentice Hall in 1996, for which she was listed in the Who’s Who of American Women. She now freelances as a fiction editor and has edited such authors as Booksense 76 Selection Sasha Troyan (Angels in the Morning and The Forgotten Island) and Pulitzer-Prize nominee Lucia Orth (Baby Jesus Pawn Shop). Victoria can be reached at: http://victoriamixon.com.
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“I must say that my rejection slips, if they fell out of the envelopes
at a rate of more than two in one day, depressed me greatly.”
– Muriel Spark, “Emerging From Under Your Rejection Slips”

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HANDLING REJECTIONS
by Victoria Mixon

One time I lost eight pounds over a weekend from shock when my boyfriend broke up with me (no, it wasn’t you, Aaron). As a weight-loss plan, I don’t recommend it.

I only mention this because I got a rejection letter yesterday. And you know what? I haven’t lost an ounce.

There’s a trick to handling rejection letters: stay in motion. Writers
are like the plastic ducks in the shooting gallery at the carnival.

Don’t be a sitting duck.

Granted, this was a particularly encouraging rejection letter. You’ll
get them too. The editor thanks you “so much” for giving them a chance to read your story, says “a lot of good writing crosses our desks that we don’t have the right spot for,” and asks you to continue submitting.

You would do well to get up the next morning and print out another story to send off to them, along with a freshly-edited copy of the first story to send to someone else.

Stay in motion.

This is the publishing writer’s mantra.

I like to launch into a bout of submissions with three to five stories.
I fire them off one at a time to three to five magazines, mark down what I sent to whom (this is important), and get right to work on new writing.

In a few weeks, when I hear back, I do another editing pass on the
stories that haven’t sold yet, rotate them around the list, and fire
them off again. And again. And again. And again. Five stories times five magazines is twenty-five submissions. Any time I have another five stories ready to go down the pipeline, I select another five magazines and start the cycle on them, too.

You know what’s very cool about this system? It eliminates multiple
submissions.

Now, some writers like multiple submissions. Some can’t do without them. Some worry obsessively that they’ll grow old and wind up shuffling around in walkers, gumming their floppy lips, before they ever get published if they do only exclusive submissions.

Lots of magazines understand this and accept multiple submissions
without a whimper. All they ask is that you notify them immediately if the story is accepted elsewhere.

‘Immediately’ is a word writers who submit multiple submissions should have tattooed on their foreheads. If that’s you, take a moment and go in the bathroom and do it right now.

But I don’t need that tattoo, because I don’t have that kind of
organizational pizzazz, the kind that allows you to keep track of not one but several submissions of the same story to a variety of magazines, along with the outcomes of those various submissions. I would like to say I do. But I don’t. You know how a fuse looks in a movie right after it’s been lit, and it’s popping and fizzing and getting brighter and quicker every second while you watch in frozen horror as it inches toward the heroine and hero? That’s my brain on multiple submissions.

So I keep moving.

And writing. Did I forget to mention that part? One story does not a
writer make. I love my early stories — I would like to have them carved on my headstone after I’m gone — and that’s the only way they’re ever going to get published. Not because they’re not full of witty asides and brilliant insights and heart-breaking characterizations. But because they’re not professional enough. I edited and edited and edited, and all my favorite parts, the unprofessional parts, are still in there. Too bad about that.

(I don’t have that problem with your manuscripts because those
unprofessional parts aren’t my favorites, they’re yours, and I have great tact and compassion that I employ in helping you face removing them — I generally call it “saving them for something even better”.)

But the more stories I wrote, the better the stories became, and these later ones are the ones editors wanted to see. So I kept writing. And the stories kept getting more professional. And I kept sending them out.

And they started getting accepted.

It’s kind of nice for the obsessive-compulsive section of my brain, the section that would like to spend a few days sorting pretty colored beads into egg cartons. One section of my brain finds that kind of mindless drudgery intensely soothing.

This might all sound like a lot of work to someone who just wants to write that break-out novel and start collecting infusions of bidding-war advances in large, unwieldy chunks, preferably by direct deposit. It is a lot of work. It’s an insane amount of work. Nobody said writers were geniuses (well, I did, but I only meant Isak Denisen and Emily Bronte). We’re not. We’re obsessive-compulsives who have chosen this particular bone to whittle into toothpicks with our little homemade hunting knives. Get the bit about obsessive compulsion. Get it.

Writing is not punching a clock.

Those of us who publish write because we love it. Most of us were writing long, long before any editor even looked in our direction, much less gave us that gold-plated nod of acceptance. We didn’t write one book and stop. We didn’t lie down and cry, stomp in circles fuming about those stupid agents blocking the doorway to fame and fortune, spend all our waking hours trading poisoned barbs on the subject of editors/agents/other writers we have known (okay, maybe a little of that). We wrote. We wrote. We wrote.

And now we also send out, send out, send out. And we rip open envelopes with our own names written in our own handwriting — stamped with our own stamps — and put those reject/accept check marks next to those magazine/story combos on those lists taped to our desks, polish up, and send out again. When we’re not either poring over the lists, or firing off our accumulated deposits to the bank with an authorial flourish, or making quick friendly little trips to the mailbox for more envelopes we addressed to ourselves…we write.

We’re busy little obsessive-compulsives. It’s kind of fun. We keep our ducks in a row.

©2009 by Victoria Mixon

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