While many freelance writers make consumer magazines their primary target, another set of publications often goes unnoticed. “If there’s a particular business you’re interested in or have knowledge of, writing for trade magazines can be a good way to marry that interest to an existing set of writing skills,” says Jennifer Korolishin, who has freelanced for such trades as Beverage Industry and The College Store Magazine. “[Trades] offer a way to pick up a story that’s relatively easy to work into your schedule. In many cases, trade publications have a small full-time staff and depend heavily on freelancers for their coverage, so trades offer a great deal of opportunity to freelancers, and because many prefer to assign stories rather than to accept pitches, they can offer steady work, which is particularly important if you’re trying to transition from a 9-5 job into full-time freelancing.”
Since many trades are monthlies or are published less frequently, there’s adequate lead time to work on stories. Writer Marie Leach made phone calls to sources for Vitamin Retailer while her one-year-old daughter slept, and then sent follow-up emails when time allowed. “I’m not out to be Bob Woodward or anything,” she says. “I just like writing and this was a perfect set-up, because it could be fit around my schedule and I could make pretty good money from it.”
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As with consumer pubs, rates at trades run the gamut. Bill McDowell, editorial director at Plate, says freelancers at his magazine are paid $1 a word. On the flip side, trade magazine veteran and Real Estate New York editor Paul Bubny says payment per story can range from $300-$400 to around $1,200. “The big difference in payment has partly to do with the pub’s budget and partly to do with the experience of the writer,” he says. “Less experienced writers usually start out with shorter assignments, which pay less, may write for less-recognized magazines that pay less, and are not yet established enough to charge by the word.”
Leach, who received $500 per 2,500-word article for Vitamin Retailer, sees many advantages in writing for trades. “The stories certainly didn’t take that long to write once you had all the info, [which only takes a few hours of calling and email to assemble], and worked out to be like $100 an hour,” she says. “My other freelance gigs only pay a fraction of that and it’s more work. You really can’t beat it.”
Best of all, ample work is available. “[Trades are] not as glamorous as a comparable consumer magazine, so trade editors are hungry for good writers, good reporters,” McDowell says.
An insider voice leads to regular assignments
Kirk Landers is the vice president/editorial director of James Informational Media, publisher of Better Roads and Aggregates Manager. For Better Roads, which is geared toward governments and construction contractors involved in road projects, Landers uses the same two freelancers repeatedly. “The exposure of their excellent work in our publication has stimulated a lot of new business for them, and they’ve had to raise their rates for us in recent years to justify the time our work takes,” he says.
Reaching that status takes preparation, regardless of whether a writer wants to make greater use of sources from a previous beat (e.g. food writer, technology writer) or has passion for a particular subject.
“If I get my hands on someone who shows they’re willing to really take some time to study my magazine and study the target audience my magazine is going after, and is willing and capable to modulate their reporting and writing to fit that audience, that person is gold to me,” says McDowell.
Intimate knowledge of an industry is key. “Writers who can address a particular industry with some degree of authority and ‘insider’ familiarity aren’t that easy to mint,” says Bubny. “Frequently this employability survives turnover at the magazine, because the new editor is naturally interested in turning to writers who have proven themselves reliable.”
Know the niche readership
Just because an industry has several magazines covering its ins and outs doesn’t mean they’re all the same. “Every pub, if the editor is doing his job right, has a unique point of view and market they’re serving,” McDowell says. Many trade magazines don’t cover an entire industry, but a specialized niche.
This level of specificity means a blanket approach to querying isn’t likely to score assignments. “No editor wants to feel they’re lumped in with everyone else,” McDowell says. Would-be trade writers should eschew generic cover
letters offering services or pre-written articles. “Pre-written articles would not typically include late-breaking news and cutting-edge information since they may be several months to a year old,” says James J. Gormley, editorial director of VRM, Inc., publisher of Vitamin Retailer, of his journalistic pet peeve. “Also, they are not necessarily written with each of our magazines’ specific audiences and set of information expectations in mind — not to mention they would have to be chopped or expanded in order to meet our specs.”
Bubny recalls receiving a prospective article on how commercial tenants could “exercise their rights over evil landlords.” The editor just had one problem: Most of the magazine’s readers are landlords, and none of them are tenants.
Interested writers need to do their homework to find relevant titles, and then research them to help formulate their queries. “I know it isn’t easy getting copies of issues, but we all have Web sites and most of the sites have a pretty rich sampling of past articles,” Landers says. “Also, most of us post circulation audit statements on our Web sites and those can be extremely rich in audience demographics.”
| “Don’t bluff your way in — the editors will spot a phony immediately.” |
Writers new to trades hoping to pitch them should learn about the nitty-gritty of the target industry, especially if it’s rarely covered in news outlets. “Generally, it would really help if the industry novitiate would go through a half-dozen or so issues of industry magazines to get an idea of audience, topics, slants, and issues before pitching an idea,” Landers says.
Don’t underestimate your editor’s immersion in the subject
Don’t assume that just because its a trade magazine the editor won’t know his or her field in and out. “The first, and maybe most important, thing to keep in mind is that you should not underestimate the editor’s capacity for being quite familiar already with the ‘new’ subject matter you believe you’re bringing to the editor’s attention,” Bubny says. “The editor’s tolerance for this seeming naivet_? may be low, and he or she may not take you seriously enough to bother responding to the pitch, let alone give you the assignment. If you can actually bring something new to a pitch, great — but assume that the bar is going to have to be set very high.”
Attempts to fake your way through pitches on such specialized topics will probably emerge even more clearly for trade editors. “If you don’t know the subject, learn it and then pitch the magazines,” says Phil Hall, editor of Secondary Marketing Executive and Alternative Energy Retailer. “Don’t bluff your way in — the editors will spot a phony immediately.”
“Since trade pubs are uniquely targeted to a specific industry or specialty niche, the pitch should show a keen awareness of that niche or that controlled circulation readership and give the prospective assigning editor a confidence level that the article will deliver content that falls within a fairly narrow area of focus and interest,” Gormley says.
Use minimal ‘technical information’
Readers of trade magazines are “looking for utility and a certain return on their time investment,” McDowell says. “They’re not reading it for fun.”
However, that doesn’t mean that writing for a trade article should be a chore. “Trade magazine writing can be dry and repetitive if the writer allows it to be,” Bubny says. “The secret to not letting it get dry is to amass enough interesting material that you feel as though you have a worthwhile story to tell.”
Gormley seeks stories “that take what could be dry and technical information” but are written in a way that are “interesting, engaging, and, as much as possible, fun. Use the least amount of technical information that is needed for any given story.”
When writing for a trade audience, convincing them to keep reading is key, says to Landers. “If you want a trade magazine reader to read your second paragraph, you had best give that person a good reason in the first paragraph. So your lede has to make a promise that the reader is going to learn something they will value, and the rest of the article has to deliver.” As for colorful copy, Landers recommends “powerful verbs,” advising that extended analogies or anything else that “pads the distance” between facts could wind up edited out.
No need to be an expert if you ask the right questions
When writing stories for Vitamin Retailer?? Leach “wasn’t really bothered by the fact that I didn’t know anything about vitamins. After all, even when I was a general reporter, I had to write about things I didn’t know much about — and back in the archaic late ’90s, we didn’t have Internet at our desks so a lot of the time it was by the seat of your pants anyway. VR wasn’t any different, except I would be able to do lots of Web research on the topic to get at least a structural knowledge of things before posing questions to interviewees. That definitely helped.”
Receiving a story on a foreign topic was a challenge for Korolishin, even intimidating. For her, getting past that fear takes a “combination of asking the right questions and, really, practice.” While research and preparation help, so does not being afraid to ask for assistance. “I would sometimes say upfront, ‘I’m not an expert on this topic, so I may ask some very basic questions just for my own education, if that’s alright with you?'” Korolishin says. “Most people are pretty gracious about it, and it often worked to my advantage, as you tend to interview people for trade magazines who are very passionate about their work or their company or their industry, and they want to share that with you, so they’d help me understand an unfamiliar topic, which made the story better and added to my own storehouse of knowledge.”
Bubny, who has also edited trade publications on the natural products industry and outdoor apparel and camping goods, says there is no formula to writing a trade magazine article. “The commonality from one trade publication to another is that all involve business writing and reporting, and an ability to quickly grasp the fundamentals of the industry you’re writing about,” he says. “Once you get the hang of that, it’s a transferable skill.”
A freelance writer and film critic, Pete Croatto lives in central New Jersey. He can be reached at petecroatto AT yahoo DOT com.
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