I’ve written a book called How to Write for Magazines. It’s flying off the shelves in Amazon’s Kindle store, where you can grab it for a measly $9.99.

[Don't have a Kindle? No worries. Amazon is all about access to books. You can read it on the free Kindle app on your smartphone or tablet . . . the Kindle reader on your home computer . . . or read it anywhere on the new Kindle Cloud.]

The book spells out the precise steps to take if you want to to make a living as a magazine writer. I spill every secret (almost) I’ve discovered over the course of 30+ years of writing for national magazines.

But first:

“Bob, you fool! They say magazines are dead. Print is dead.”  

Who the heck is they?  I’m not here to tell you about how I still love the experience of reading magazines, love their browsability, love the discoveries and inspiration I draw from them, love how easy they are on the eyes. I’m not here to tell you how irrelevant “navigation” is when you’re reading a magazine. (Uh, just flip the pages.)

Because none of that means a whit if the genre is dying.   But guess what? It isn’t dying! They are wrong.

And that’s not just my opinion.

A few tidbits from the 2011/12 Magazine Media Factbook, published by the MPA (the Association of Magazine Media):

Magazine media audiences are growing and young adultsread heavily: Adults under 35 years old read more issues per month than adults over 35–93% of adults overall, 96% of adults under age 35, and 97% of adults under age 24 read magazines.

The number of magazine readers has grown over the past five years.

Magazine media engage readers: Magazines continue to score significantly higher than television or the Internet in “ad receptivity” and other engagement dimensions.

Everyone loves magazines: Reading a magazine is an intimate, involving experience, which is one reason the average reader spends 42 minutes reading each issue.

Magazines reach more adults and teens than television [does].

And dig this tidbit:

Magazines rank highest in interest in advertising compared to all other forms of media.  

In other words, magazine readers don’t mind ads. In fact, 49% of them feel that ads provide useful information about new products/services.

Magazines rank higher than television or the Internet for influencing purchase intent.

That’s huge!  You can be sure advertisers are paying attention.

And advertising is (duh) the engine that powers the magazine business.

For writers, this all means that magazines will continue to need us. Our writing. Writing that attracts and engages readers.

So don’t listen to doom-and-gloomers. Magazines are going to be around for a long time.

I love exploring new avenues, new markets, new media.  But I’ll probably always be a magazine guy at heart.

That’s why I wrote a book about magazines.

Check it out (I think there’s a little ad for it over there to the right), and let me know what you think.

Even turtles can fly.

I just wrote a short ebook about time management.

You can fill out the form over there to the right to grab a copy for yourself. And I believe a version of that form should magically manifest on this page any second now.

But between you and me, the whole subject of time management makes me a bit crazy. Measurements of time are pretty arbitrary to begin with. The whole hours and minutes thing is really just a way for two people to get to the same place at the same, uh, time. And that’s fine.

But it takes serious hubris to think you can manage time. If you buy into the whole time concept, you know that clocks tick and Earths turn with or without our intervention.

And it takes really serious hubris to tell other people how they should manage time. Before I wrote my little gem I looked at a bunch of books on the subject. Oh, lordy. The Oprah-ready clichés. The “now let’s get ourselves organized” systems. Systems! One system told me to create a time journal. Say what? Take the time to write about the time I just wasted? What a waste of time!

Sure, I found good stuff in every book, really helpful chestnuts like “Don’t procrastinate.” All dragged out over the very time-consuming course of 300+ pages.

Mine’s 28 pages with a lot of white space.

In the end, I fell back on my own experience along with advice I’ve gleaned from a cadre of really successful entrepreneurs.

See, I’ve been on an eye-opening journey the last few years, learning about Internet marketing from supersuccessful dudes like Chris Farrell, James Schramko, Yanik Silver, Jeff Johnson, and Eben Pagan, and copywriting from John Carlton and Robert Gibson.

These guys make most freelance writers I know look like distracted slackers—and the freelance writers I know are a hard-working bunch.

But times have changed, in case you hadn’t noticed. Writers can’t just trundle off on an assignment, write it up, move on to the next one, and call it a living. The pitch-and-pray model of freelance journalism is dead. We can either starve while we wait for overworked editors to ignore our pitches, or take matters into our own hands.

That’s what this blog and my little ebook are all about.

We’re entrepreneurs now. We’re small businesses.

We need to learn about focus, audacity, and vision from entrepreneurs who parlay those traits into big bucks.

We need to embrace new technologies—notice that my latest projects are an app and a Kindle book.

We need to learn how to market our work. No, not “brand” ourselves. We need to market and sell stuff.

And if we think of ourselves as artists, fine. I appreciate that writerly measure of pride. But I’ll end this post just as I end my ebook—with a quote from Steve Jobs:

“Real artists ship.”

The iTunes Store has more than 15,000 travel apps. Look where mine is.

In the digital world, hitting the What’s Hot category in the iTunes store is like hitting the New York Times Bestseller List.

Yep, that’s my little app baby, Adventure Weekends West, sitting up there in Row 1, Column 1.

You bet I’m proud of it. But more importantly, I’m looking forward to sharing with you the strategies that led me there, from concept to execution to promotion.

Things like this don’t just happen. We make our own luck. But more than ever, we writers and Internet marketers have the tools to make furtune happen.

Sharing them is what Surefire Writing is all about.

Cozying Up to a WordPress Theme

Killer theme.

I’m not in love with too many software programs, but one I’d be happy to escort to the prom is Thesis, the theme I use for this WordPress blog, for my homepage, and, well, for pretty much every website I own.

Part of Thesis’s appeal is its idiotproof versatility. Mere mortals unschooled in the arcana of html can work with the simple tools Thesis provides to twiddle your blog into life. You get to be Dr. Frankenstein with a friendly monster. A click here, a choice there, hit the Big Ass Save Button, and you’ve got a spiffy new look for your blog.

Best of all, you can websiteify your blog using Thesis—i.e., make a mere blog look like a for-real website. I’m sure a pro could work greater wonders with my authorial homepage, bobhowells.com, but considering I’m an utter tech layperson, I think I’ve done well with it.

Thanks, of course, to Thesis.

But my affection for Thesis goes way beyond that. Its developer, Chris Pearson, is a super creative guy and relentlessly helpful. He’s created a community around the theme where wonks and regular folks alike hang out and answer questions. I’ll never forget the time one of my sites vanished before my eyes. I sent a desperate e-mail to Chris on a weekend, and I was up and running again in minutes.

And the Thesis blog is a fount of free information and inspiration—useful stuff that can help you with your business if you use the Internet in any form.

More about that later. For now, I just wanted to say, Well done, Thesis.

Oh, yeah: There’s a Big Ass Link over there in my right sidebar if you want to sidle over to Thesisville to have a look.

Or, Bob Learns How to Publish an App

I just published my first app.

It’s called Adventure Weekends West,  and I’m dang proud of it. It covers all sorts of quick-escape adventures in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, with a Baja sojourn tossed in for a bonus. Every adventure has a brilliant write-up (heh), a slide show, videos, maps, and one-touch phone calling and web links. It’s great armchair reading, even if you don’t happen to be longing for a bit of recharging. That’s an allusion to my tagline:

We’re All Rechargeable

I gotta tell you—I loved the whole app process, from conception (hey, that’s always fun!) to execution to promotion.

Are you surprised to hear that from a guy who writes for national magazines?

Don’t be. I’m all about writers taking charge of their lives and careers. I love writing for magazines. But the app is mine. All mine. Well, I have a publisher—Sutro Media. It would have been mind-bogglingly difficult to do this app without their resources. They provided the content platform, but gave me a long leash to develop the app as I saw fit. Once completed, they armed me with marketing tools and put me amid very good company—their considerable travel-app library, 200 or so strong.

But a lot of the promotion is up to me, and I’m having a blast getting it out there.

I’ll be sharing herein what works and what doesn’t. And stay tuned for more take-charge-of-your-writing life adventures, including how you can publish an app.

Lots more coming.

Till then, go out and get recharged!

In my last post, I wrote about a writer who toils for a content mill called Demand Studios. She called it “like working at McDonald’s, but for writers.” Yet she defended the practice.

A friend of mine whom I respect, a veteran editor/writer, also writes for Demand. She confirms that it’s burger-flippingesque, and swoops in with some strong opinions, though she prefers not to be quoted by name. Doesn’t want to risk her shaky relationship with Demand. I feel for her. A lot of writers feel stuck. They go for what seems like easy dough. They find it’s not easy at all, but feel uneasy about letting go.

“Demand Studios is a sweatshop for writers, no question about it,” my friend says. “Demand demands a LOT, while giving very little to the people that are making them money. Some of its boosters claim they can make $30/hour writing articles. I have no idea how that’s possible. I may not be the fastest writer on Earth, but jumping through all their editorial hoops generally takes me a minimum of two hours, for a whopping 15 bucks. I believe that’s less than the current minimum wage. And the clips are extremely lame, as they ask you to write in these formats that sometimes bear no relationship to the topic at hand.”

That last point is a zinger. A lot of writers who sign up with content mills figure they’ll at least score some solid clips they can show to real pubs that actually pay money. But if you’re shoehorned into some goofy format, what kind of showpiece is that?

Real money-paying editors take clips from sites like Demand with a grain of salt. For one thing, what kind of credibility do content mills have as sources of information? When was the last time you went to a Demand-fed site for solid background info, or for any sort of reliable information?

Also, real editors like to know that you’ve pleased other real editors with quality writing and research.

I’ve said before, the quality of the content-mill editing generally sucks. Remember this post about the laughable editing of a couple of articles on eHow? Ironically, these were articles about writing. Bad editing hurts a good writer like my friend because she might get edited by someone with far less talent than she has. It hurts an average writer because he or she won’t get the kind of feedback from a good editor that could make a story better. Believe me, that’s a huge advantage of aiming high, of getting your foot in the door at a real publication. I learn something from my editors every time I write a story. I always get a little “try this” or “maybe you should add some info about that,” and my article always gets better.

I also hope you’ve looked at the comment my friend Carol Tice posted. Carol pointed out that Demand Studios had to release a bunch of information about their business in advance of an initial public offering they plan to file. What a world. Demand freely admits that it’s losing money—even though they pay you peanuts. Yet if their IPO succeeds, they’ll walk away with $125 million.

I don’t want to come across as a complete snob here. As I said in my last post, content mills can work for some writers, particularly those who don’t need to earn money. But as my friend who’s currently in a love-hate relationship with Demand says, “I despise companies that make money off of writers’ low self-esteem and seeming inability to demand what they’re really worth. If we all refused to work for them, they would be forced to pay a decent wage for our work.”

Amen.

“It’s like working at McDonald’s, but for writers.”

That quote comes from a recent Los Angeles Times article. The writer is talking about working for Demand Studios. She equates it with flipping burgers—but the strange thing is, she goes on to defend the practice.

Demand Studios is one of the most prominent of the so-called content farms or content mills (I like the Blakean overtones in that term) that have been attracting a lot of attention among freelance writers. In a tough market for writers, these sites are actually advertising a need for content.

Demand’s massive output feeds content-hungry sites like eHow and Livestrong. Other content mills include Examiner, Suite101, and Associated Content. Some pay by the degree of traffic your articles generate, or clicks on sponsored links that appear beside or in your articles. Others pay a (very small) flat fee per article.

In the Demand model, according to the LATimes writer (she’s a freelance contributor, not a staffer), “A mysterious digital algorithm spits out a constant flow of story ideas in a variety of categories. As a writer, I claim the ones I want, then I get to work. The pieces are short, 400 words or so.” She goes on to mention a fee of $15 and a kill fee of $3.75.

Fifteen dollars for 400 words? Come on. That’s offensive to me both as a writer and a reader.

Let’s look at it from both perspectives.

How am I as a writer supposed to make a living writing 400-word stories for $15?

A decent informative article, no matter how short, requires at least one interview and some background research unless it’s a topic to which you bring your own expertise. Even then, most writers need to investigate the latest information and cite expert opinion to bolster the article.

An earnest writer should take at least an hour researching even the simplest of topics for a 400-word story. Unless, of course, that writer simply regurgitates stuff that’s already on the Internet. Even that takes time. Then comes organizing, honing a lede, writing a draft, self-editing, revising, and then jumping through whatever editorial hoops the content mill requires. Another hour? If you’re fast.

Speaking of editorial hoops, every article for Demand is written on spec, according to the LATimes writer. “They’re returned for rewrites and rejected all the time,” she says, and all that back-and-forthing is by way of an anonymous copy editor-cum-gatekeeper.

Now, if that anonymous copy editor deems that you have made a good-faith effort to revise your story to their specifications, you MIGHT get a kill fee that amounts to a whopping 15% of the original fee. (This according to Demand’s terms of service.) That’s $2.25 for that 400-word, $15 article—and you might not get even that.

Still, the LATimes/Demand Studios writer says that “writing DS articles is weirdly addictive.”

Yeah, if you’re addicted to poverty.

Okay, I can imagine that writing for Demand could be addictive if you don’t rely at all on writing as a source of income. Then it’s probably kind of fun to troll through article ideas and grab one for yourself. No need to research and craft a story pitch. Built-in buyer for your work.

And I readily admit that sites like Demand form a market for writing that didn’t exist a few years ago. They clearly work for some writers; witness their vast amount of content. Part-time writers, stay-at-home moms, even laid-off journalists make Demand work for them to varying extents. But that raises another question:

How am I to trust the information in an article that paid its author fifteen crummy bucks?

Did this writer interview experts, conduct background research? Did an editor challenge the writer to back up assertions, provide source material and fact-checking sources? Did the editor challenge the writer to meet basic journalistic standards of clarity, engagement, and accuracy? Or were satisfying the demands of those ominous-sounding “algorithms” more the editor’s concerns?

Is a writer staking his or her reputation on the timeliness and accuracy of his or her content?

I spent a few hours scrolling through eHow and Livestrong copy and found the quality to vary widely. Some of it appears to be written by genuine experts. A lot of it cites other websites as sources, which means you as a reader are getting exactly the same stuff you could Google and find yourself. In other words, you’re reading a vast recycling bin of already published content. A lot of it is either earnest but worthless (like a featured story on how to become a better baseball player that suggests that you should practice), or so jammed with SEO-friendly keywords that the story is unreadable. Some of the stories aren’t even bylined (e.g., “By an eHow Contributor”), but they link conveniently to someone’s blog, which perhaps suggests one reason to contribute to a content mill: self-promotion.

I’ll be writing more posts about content mills, and I’m going to check in with a writer friend who’s been dipping her toes in the Demand Studios pond. For now, I’ll say that as reader or writer, it’s buyer beware.

I mean, even a writer who’s addicted to Demand says it’s like working at McDonald’s.

How does the playing of a master soprano sax player tell us something about how to manage a freelance writing career?

Check out a few minutes of this video of Sam Newsome playing a Duke Ellington tune. Pretty unusual stuff. Whether or not you like the music, notice what’s unusual about his playing.

Got it?

He doesn’t pause to breathe.

Newsome practices a technique called circular breathing. He has the rare, but learned, ability to breathe in even as he blows out into his sax. Australian aboriginals practice the same technique when they play the didgiridoo.

It’s called circular breathing. It creates a very cool musical effect. And it’s an instructive way to look at a freelance writing career.

When you first start writing, full- or part-time, you wonder how it can possibly come together. You know you need to pitch stories. But to do that, you need to research stories and publications. But you also need to write. And you need to follow up on queries and payments. It’s a similar process for copywriters, too. You need to pitch clients. You need to work with existing clients. You need revise and rewrite one job while you’re starting the first draft of another job.

So how DOES it all come together? Circular breathing. Another term for a balanced approach to work and to life.

As a freelance writer, you can never afford to neglect any one aspect of your job. And it IS a job. If you neglect your pitching and marketing while you’re busy on a writing job, you’ll find yourself without a current assignment. Fine, you think; I’ll just use the free time to research and pitch.

Not so smart. Because a dead period now means no checks coming in a few months down the road.

ALWAYS work the marketing side of the equation. As much as an assignment can take over your life and brainpower, you HAVE to continually line up work, or you won’t have any.

You have to breathe in even as you breathe out. You have to breathe out at the same time you breathe in.

Time management, or energy management, is the key. I talk a lot about both in WRITE WHERE THE MONEY IS. I talk about what the tasks are that ensure success and how to move them all foward. Don’t let any one task dominate for too long. Keep moving. Keep breathing.

It might seem daunting at first, but the techniques are really pretty simple. Practice circular breathing. Pretty soon you begin to feel like a master musician (or, sometimes, a circus juggler). Checks arrive for old stories as you hit the “send” button on a new story. You board a plane for an assignment the day after you line up another one. It’s challenging, it’s fun, and it becomes like beautiful music.

It might even persuade you to take up the didgiridoo. You could write a story about it.

A great writer, Norman Corwin, turned 100 today, creating the perfect occasion to celebrate the beauty of words beautifully used.

If you don’t know Corwin, it’s my pleasure to introduce a living American treasure. I’m extremely proud to know him and to have spent time with him. And to have spent this past weekend celebrating his birthday.

Norman Corwin with Westways Editor John Lehrer

Corwin was a pioneer of radio theater, and its undisputed master. He’s been called the Poet Laureate of Radio. I would submit he should also be celebrated as the Radio Laureate of Poetry. Because Corwin not only entertains, informs, and enthralls listeners, he gives readers and audiences the pleasure of beautiful language—language rendered with all the power and nuance of the most beautiful music.

His ear is uncanny—the euphony of his sentences would be the envy of Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe, two great writers he has acknowledged as influences. He writes bombast and beauty, poetry and power, like no other writer. He challenges tyrants, celebrates the little guy, extols the promise of America, and unsparingly savages anyone who would compromise the standards of anything he feels worth upholding, such as American democracy and the English language. But like a lilting aria following a fortissimo passage, he also soothes, enchants, and inspires the sweetest of reveries.

The volume and range of his body of work is breathtaking. His radio dramas were performed by the likes of Orson Welles, James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Lionel Barrymore, and Walter Huston. His more recent plays have been performed by William Shatner, Samantha Eggar, Michael York, and Walter Cronkite. His screenplay of Lust for Life was nominated for an Academy Award. He’s written erudite books, brilliant magazine pieces, a collection of letters (you’ll love the tirades against capricious and idiotic changes to his words), astounding poetry, and ribald limericks.

My intent here is not to write a biography of Norman Corwin, but to pique your interest in his work…and to suggest a few things we freelance writers can learn from this man’s bold, high standards.

Develop an Ear for Words. This is the work of a lifetime, but it’s possible to achieve some degree musicality in everything you write. Vary the length of your sentences. Use words that sound pleasing or severe to suit the tone of what you’re writing. Read your work aloud; you’ll hear the clunky phrases. Fix them. As Corwin says, “The ear is the realist. It is the organ through which we perceive the subtlest of the arts, which is music.”

Look for the Story. And the Storyline. At one of the Corwin celebrations in Los Angeles this weekend, I watched a troupe of radio players perform his play Our Lady of Freedoms, which honored the Statue of Liberty’s 1986 centennial. Naturally I was moved by the beauty of the language. But I also marveled at how he wove threads of the story together—the sculptor and his patron, the campaign to finance its delivery by way of thousands of small donations, even the way the colossus was shipped. We as feature writers and journalists aren’t writing radio drama, but we can find and illuminate compelling storylines in anything we write. Don’t take the easiest route, the face-value, encyclopedic way. Look for ways to frame your stories and develop threads that bring storytelling into your stories.

Flesh Out the Details. The Statue of Liberty play was saturated with dazzling details—how much the statue weighed, how many crates it took to ship it, that it rained on the day of its dedication, that the average donation to fund it was 82 cents. By the way, those details were always in service of the story, never merely listed or bullet-pointed.

Flesh Out the Details Part 2. Yesterday, at a screening of Lust for Life, Corwin shared a bit of revelatory news. The screenplay has always been thought to have been based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Irving Stone. But Corwin admitted he hadn’t even read Stone’s novelized life of Vincent Van Gogh when he accepted the screenplay assignment, and that he relied on the letters of Vincent and Theo Van Gogh as his primary source for the screenplay. He was interested in truth, not its fictionalized facsimile. Compare that with the lazy “surf the Web” school of research so common these days.

Pay Attention. Great Attention. I was fortunate enough to travel to Hearst Castle about 10 years ago with Norman Corwin and an editorial crew from Westways magazine. Norman was on assignment; I was along for the ride. The man was 90 years old, but sharp as an eagle. He paid attention to everything. He took nothing for granted. He let nothing of interest slide by. He asked our host countless questions, drawing out stories that otherwise would have gone untold. Face value, I must say, was pretty fascinating—the story of Hearst and how all his treasures arrived in San Simeon, all his celebrated guests of the era. But Norman dug deeper. He got stories behind stories. Needless to say, his feature was brilliant.

The delight of being saturated in the words and energy of Norman Corwin this past weekend renewed my own resolve to always reach for excellence in everything I write, whether a 200-word service piece or a 3,000-word narrative feature. Listen to and read some Norman Corwin. Slosh around a bit in this man’s brilliance. Be proud to be a member of the same honorable profession. Uphold our honor.

____________________________________

To learn more about Norman Corwin:

Visit his homepage, normancorwin.com.

Find written and audio work at Amazon.com, including the 2006 Academy Award–winning documentary, A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin.

Watch a 1996 documentary on Corwin here.

Listen to his best-known work, On a Note of Triumph, as heard by one of every two Americans when it aired in 1945.