Today's Media Bistro features the fifth installment of Ad SalesRants, in which a media salesperson tells about the business from the other side of the desk. "I used to be an editor. I remember the day I switched to sales," says our anonymous correspondent. "It was when I recommended a guy I knew as a salesman for a job at my magazine. He came in knowing fuck-all about the Industry, and started off making about $40,000 more than me right off the bat -- all before he had even sold his first ad. That's when I knew publishing was a big racket. Not coincidentally, it was also when I knocked on the publisher's door to switch into a job selling ad space."

Now, I disagree with Anonymous somewhat. You can make decent money writing, and some multi-billion dollar corporations, media and otherwise, pay their freelancers and their editorial staff quite well. But the bias is always toward paying the folks who bring in the dollars, and sales people have tangible proof that they do just that.

One way to make more money as a writer is to pay attention to the ads. Is a publication adding pages, or cutting back? Who are the advertisers - glossy purveyors of cars, watches, and liquor, or drab public service announcements brought to you by the Ad Council? Hint: one publication is adding writers and increasing their pay, the other is not.

If you are trying to break into a magazine, see if you can track down the kit that it sends to advertisers. It will have a clear sense of who the readers are, what they are interested in, and what the magazine's strategy for finding them is. It might even include a calendar of upcoming seasonal and special issues, so that you can pitch smarter.