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There are far more small circulation magazines and websites in the world than large ones and the one thing that they all have in common is that they need articles. As a writer this is the opportunity you have been looking for. These magazines pay less than others, sometimes not paying at all, they will be seen by less people and your friends aren't going to be nearly as impressed by seeing your name in it. They also aren't inundated by submissions meaning that they will look at your work more carefully, they will be more likely to accept a query from an unknown voice and they are almost always excited and interested in the subject of their magazine.

The first thing to do is to understand what you are interested in and know about. There are markets for just about everything ever thought of by humanity. The more excited you are about a subject the better you will write about it. Think about the magazines you already read, the part of the newspaper you go to first, the conversations you start with your friends. Then look for the magazines that will pay you for that knowledge.

Finding smaller markets to submit to isn't as easy as the larger ones. The magazines often aren't at your local book store and the submission pages on many of their websites are nearly impossible to discover. Your best choice is to buy "The Writers Market" Or to subscribe to their webpage. This isn't the only possibility though. There are people all over the internet who have put together lists of markets in specific categories if you spend some time looking.

One of the best ways to get a huge advantage over your competition with any magazine is to read the magazines. This is doubly true of smaller markets because they are far more likely to get articles that were written for the higher paying markets. Learn the style of any market and your odds go up, learn the style of a small market and it goes up a lot.

The biggest thing that a small market can give you, even more than money is clips. Gathering together those first few published articles isn't always easy and getting someone at a large to accept your query without any clips is next to impossible but many small markets will read your article without a query or take your idea on spec.

Getting paid twenty dollars for a published article may not sound like a lot but as a necessary first step the actual value of the article is worth far more than the dollars they pay you. Each clip is a step up the ladder and soon you will be in those larger markets that pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars just don't forget where you came from.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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