Guide to Magazine Article Writing Review: Get This Book

A couple weeks ago, Angela introduced us  to, and gave two lucky Muffin readers a chance to win, the Writer's Digest Guide to Magazine Article Writing by Kerrie Flanagan. Angela had all kinds of wonderful things to say about Kerrie and her book, including that Angela was lucky enough to write the foreword.

Let me tell you, after reading this book, it really is as good as Angela said. Kerrie did an outstanding job on covering everything you need to know about magazine article writing along with personal essay writing and writing for online publications, too. What I really love about this book is that I consider myself pretty well seasoned in writing for magazines, newspapers, and e-zines, and I still learned so much in this guide about organization, etiquette, finding ideas, research, and more.

This book goes step-by-step into the process of what to do if you want to get published in a magazine. Kerrie shares her own story, after Angela's informative foreword about her experiences, and then Kerrie gets started with how we go about finding ideas. She shows you how to take big ideas and make them into something editors might want to publish as well as using ideas from your own life.

My favorite chapter is the next one which is Chapter Three, "Studying Magazines." This is something that I have always done and have preached at writing conferences to do. But what I love about Kerrie's chapter is how she breaks it down into manageable steps. For each publication you're interested in, you need a handle on the reader, the style, the types of articles, the writer's guidelines, and what articles have been recently published. She gives several real-world examples to explain her points (in all chapters, not just this one).

After this, she writes about the next steps, such as the query letter, your contract and rights, and actually writing the article. Another great thing about this book and the examples is that many of them are also information that you need to understand how to write for magazines. For example, in the chapter on query letters, Kerrie includes an example of a Q & A article. This article is with the former children's magazine editor, Marilyn Edwards; and in the example, Marilyn gives great advice for writing queries. In other words, the examples in the book often provide information for writers as well as an example of what Kerrie is describing.

I could go on and on, but as you can see, I highly recommend this book to beginning and advanced freelance writers. There's something in here for everyone! One last thing I will mention is that Kerrie has several experts whom she quoted in the book from freelance writers to editors. These sections were also some of my favorites because there's nothing like learning from those who are in the trenches day in and day out.

So hurry now and grab Writer's Digest Guide to Magazine Article Writing. You won't be sorry.

Review by Margo L. Dill, www.margoldill.com