published August 26 on old blog
It wasn’t the first time a manuscript or a query letter had gotten a magazine editor’s attention. It wasn’t the first time an editor had accepted an article of mine. Or even the first time I’d gotten to exchanging emails with an editor about an idea as I worked on a piece. But it was the first time I’d gotten an editor’s attention through a query letter, one of who-knows-how-many landing on his desk, and then actually sold it after he saw the manuscript. And I sold the story for my substantial sum!
I’ve had multiple query experiences lately, and even gotten to the point of writing on spec for more than one magazine—with no guarantee of course, that they’d buy the piece, just that the idea sounded good. One editor told me my query letter’s subject matter made her cry—she wrote to me within days of my query, and we batted emails around for about a week, until the editorial meeting concluded that the entire staff was not on board featuring my idea in the magazine. I was however encouraged to find a place to publish my “powerful story.”
A positive piece of knowledge is that I know that query letter was effective—I will send it out, to as many magazines as it takes, until I find the right place tp publish the piece. The success I started referring to at the opeing of this post actually wasn’t begun with a query. I sent a manuscript, and though the editor said they weren’t interested in publishing on the topic of breastfeeding at the time, he said they found my writing interesting and ASKED ME if I had any other topics I could write about for them. I felt like I’d been offered candy! I mean, I was just thinking, as I read their gentle turn-down, that if they liked my writing, it would be savvy of me to offer them other ideas and see if I could carve a place for myself. I was surprised, and honored, to have them offer outright!
I listed three ideas in reply, and the funny thing was, I almost didn’t add the third—because I recalled their writer’s guidelines saying they did not want any more articles on that particular topic of women’s health. As I listed that very “unwanted” thing, I didn’t know why I was doing so, yet left it in the list nonetheless. Against all likelihood, I got an email the next day, the editor saying he as in fact interested in that article from me. So I went back to the half finished file I’d begun and quit months ago, spruced it up, and sent it in a matter of days. Hardly more than 24 hours later, the editor mailed me a contract and told me to look for a check in 2-3 weeks!
The amount of that check surprised me too—this magazine had not published their typical payment-per-word, and it was higher than I expected. And the time frame? This was simply unheard of! Perhaps because this magazine, though having started as a traditional print magazine, has switched to an online format, they pay faster because they publish faster, more on their own terms than outside terms.
So because of this success, I try not to take too hard, or personally, the rejections I got the same week. I’m understanding that query letters have so mch to do with getting your foot in the door, but that it’s also about much more—a lot of which has nothing to do with how good I am at my craft. After making an editor respond with tears after reading my writing, I still got turned down cuz it wasn’t quite a direction the magazine wanted to go. So each article that got rejected last week (3), I’ll be sending right back out to other magazines I think may be a better fit. In fact, I already did that with one rejected mss on Friday.
And while I'm thinking how unlikely it was to get an article published on a topic that a magazine said they were expressly NOT INTERESTED in, I'm listing online articles I've written, but almost didn't, because I didn't think there'd be much interest:
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