Tap Into Your Family: Parenting Publications

Recently, I taught a telecourse for the Children's Writers' Coaching Club on writing for parenting and family publications. One comment that was made during the course was from a children's writer. She said, "I never thought about writing for parenting magazines as a children's writer, but now I see how it makes perfect sense." 

Exactly. There are two things we can learn from her comment as freelancers. 1. We often get stuck in one genre or with one age group, and we don't think about how we can expand our career. 2. If you are a children's writer, there are a lot of magazines that seem to be folding up; but parenting, family, and teaching magazines are a natural audience, too. This is especially true if you are a children's book author. Who buys these books for children? Parents, teachers, and librarians--the same audience you are writing to in these magazines. 

No matter what kind of writer you are, parenting and family magazines are a big market. Go to www.thenewmagazinecity.com, and click on this category to check out the most well-known and national magazines. But besides these, almost every region has a parenting magazine like Indy's Child or Georgia Family . Here's another website to check out: Parenting Publications of America. You don't want to subscribe to the organization necessarily, but look around the site to see different names of parenting publications. Once you find some you are interested in writing for, do a Google search and find their websites to find writers' guidelines and past articles. 

Once you have your market, what do you write about? Look at your own family--you could write a how-to article about a recent problem you and your toddler solved. How about a travel article on a cheap but fun vacation in a magazine's region? Does the publication take book reviews? Do you like to read new parenting books? Then this may be the niche for you. Study your potential market carefully, and then make a list of the types of articles included in the magazine as well as topics. Use these as a starting point for brainstorming ideas. 

You have an idea, you have a market, so write that query. Make parenting publications a part of your resume, starting today!

Post by Margo L. Dill; 

Margo will be teaching FREELANCE WRITING: Querying and Writing Non-fiction Articles through WOW!'s online classroom, starting on August 19. For more information about the class and to sign up, please visit the classroom here.