Build Your Platform with Magazine Articles

Last week I taught several workshops at a Christian Writers Conference and also met one on one with numerous authors. As typical for these events, many of the people were at their first conference.  Because I’m an acquisitions editor at a New York publisher and we do many types of books, my schedule filled quickly with appointments where authors were pitching their book ideas.

For a few of those meetings, they were double 15 minute typical length because I was critiquing their submission (something done as a part of this particular conference). In each critique, I was asking the author questions about their publishing experience and learned they had little or almost no experience.

While we love the permanence of books, the publishing numbers tell a different story. If a traditional publisher takes your manuscript and publishes it, you will be fortunate to sell 5,000 copies during the lifetime of that book. Yes I know you want to sell more than 5,000 books but this volume is typical sales number in the publishing community and you are doing well to achieve it.

Yet within the magazine writing world, it is common to reach 100,000 or even 500,000 readers with your article. Your choices as a writer are not: books or magazines. You can do both and in fact writing for magazines will help you build your presence in the marketplace (called a platform) and sell more books.

A number of the writers I met with at the conference were writing nonfiction books. Inside their chapters, these writers were including their own personal experiences tied to the content of their book. With a little reshaping, these stories could be the elements in a magazine article. As I suggested this idea to writers, it was a new concept because they were focused on a book and not a magazine article.

How repurposing builds platform

Within the publishing world, this concept of using your writing more than once is called repurposing and a way to get more use from your stories. It is a practice that I encourage you to incorporate into your writing life. For it to work, you have to be aware of the rights you are selling to a publication. You do not want to sell “world rights” because then you give up any additional use of the writing. Instead, you want to clearly label the first page of your magazine article as selling “First North American Rights.” These words give the publication the right to publish your story. After the material is published, then the rights return to you as the author and can be used in your book.

In general, magazines are operating several months ahead. The specifics are different for each publication and you want to notice and keep track of these details so you can get use your stories in different areas,

Many publications are interested in personal experience articles. You can use your stories from your book chapters and easily rework them into a magazine article. As you get published on magazines, you gain publishing experience which is something agents and editors are looking for. You also build your presence or platform in the market. How? This exposure comes from the final part of your article: the one or two sentence bio. In your bio, you include your website which is hopefully something simple like your name or something else easy to remember.

Your magazine articles can be an on-going way to build and reach your audience. It takes some planning and intention on your part but repurposing your work can be easily accomplished with your writing.

Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. Terry is the author of How to Succeed As An Article Writer which you can get at: Write a magazine article.com. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: Billy Graham Bio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham. His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: @terrywhalin