by Brian Lamacraft

Created on: July 10, 2009

The handbook of magazine article writing answers writers questions about submitting articles for magazines. The book covers many topics from writing a query letter to planning and conducting interviews. This is a nicely presented book that nay freelance writer should have in their collection.

Contents

This book has a number of informative sections that will help any writer understand how to go about submitting articles to magazines. The book helps writers to find ideas, query editors, reprints and rewrites, finding potential markets, researching, interviews, writing techniques, working with an editor and the business side of writing. You will find a bundle of useful information contained in this informative book.

Review

As a writer I found this handbook well written and presented in a clear and logical fashion. The section on writing query letters was well done with a nice graphical sample of a typical query letter. The first 18 or so pages helps the writer form ideas about what to write about. I thought this section could be a little more in depth . The book doesn't give you a list of magazines to submit your work to, but goes over the general process of submitting work to various types of magazines such as trade publications, health, and women's magazines. The interview section was very helpful for me as a new writer since I haven't conducted an interview before for my writing. I feel confident that if I used the tools presented in this book I could conduct one. Included in the book are some good tips when you are working with an editor and how to negotiate contracts. Writing techniques for articles are also covered and shows you ways to structure your article with a good organization, ways to grab a reader's attention and how to write a successful lead.

Despite all the information included in the book, I think a few writing samples would be a nice addition to this book. Perhaps a sample showing a well constructed article and a poor one. The book does include a sample query letter and a cover letter but it needs more than those two samples to make it a really successful book on writing for magazines. Samples would give the readera clearer picture about what the author is trying to say and might even help the writer improve his or her articles. I also wish the author included a larger section on e-zine writing for those who want to submit articles to online magazines. The author does provide some websites for reference, but I think more is needed in this area of writing for magazines.

Conclusion

I look forward to the next release of this book and hopefully the author will continue to update and improve the book with more up-to-date information about magazine writing for today's writer. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in improving their article writing for magazine publications.

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