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After more than ten years of working full time as a corporate writer and editor, I am now “getting started” myself as a freelance writer. Examples of my work, available at xx, include software user guides and tutorials, so I do have experience writing how-to content. I don’t have many published journalism clips yet, but I was recently hired to cover the San Francisco City amateur golf tournament. Here are links to two of the articles…
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I got the assignment–my first ever! So, yeah, I recommend including it.

Nancy, keep reading The Renegade Writer…we talk about the value of doing simultaneous queries instead of waiting (months) to hear back from each editor. I also follow up on queries via e-mail after about two weeks, and via phone about two weeks after that if I don’t hear back.

All editors are looking for the next great article…and if it’s someone new to them who proposes it, that doesn’t matter. Great is great. However, most editors at the glossies get TONS of queries, and they’re busy actually putting out a magazine on top of that, so they can be hard to reach. Heck, I’ve been writing for the glossies for 10 years and sometimes *I* have trouble getting a contact name, so it’s not just newbies. One trick is to figure out the magazine’s e-mail format (such as firstname.lastname@magazine.com), which you can often suss out from the magazine’s advertising page, and use that format to e-mail the likeliest-sounding editor. You can also often call after hours and use the dial-by-name directory to leave a voicemail for the editor so you don’t have to go through the receptionist.

Good luck!

You folks generously offered advice re my previous newbie question, and I’ve run into a couple more conundrums since then and was hoping for a little bit more advice.

So I sent my first query off to a national mag(I’ve been published several times in regional pubs, though a while ago). My question is: Do I really need to wait 4 to 6 weeks to hear from them?!?!? Can I send another query (or two) in the meantime to the same mag, esp if it’s to a different editor at that mag? I’m just going to get a reeeeeally slow start if I have to wait a month and a half to send another query to the handful of pubs I’ve identified as my main targets.

Also, this might sound strange, but are there national mags (I’m looking at parenting/family mags) that don’t really WANT new writers? There’s kind of a fortress feeling I get when I even try to call and get the name of the person to query (I’ve placed a few calls and have not heard back and I have no other way to contact them). It seems silly that I could’t query them just bc I can’t get an answer on who to direct my query to, but then it occurred to me that maybe some mags really have all the writers and ideas they need and that they just plain don’t want newbies bothering them.

Btw, Linda, I bought your books on Amazon and am loving them. Thanks!