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Publish Your Personal Essay: 22 Magazines and Websites

by Farrah Daniel | Sep 11, 2023

Writing is a solitary act, but the importance of sharing your work can’t be overlooked. A personal essay can endear you to an audience, bring attention to an issue or simply provide comfort to a reader who’s “been there.”

Journalists might find it difficult to steer away from research rituals to talk about themselves, but think of it this way:

“Writing nonfiction is not about telling your story. It’s about telling interesting and worthy stories about the human condition using examples from your life.” Ashley C. Ford, an essayist who emphasized the importance of creating a clear connection between your personal experience and universal topics

When writing personal essays, imagine you’re writing through yourself, instead of about yourself—worry less about writing something that seems thrilling or heart-wrenching, and more about your truth and human experience. Believe it or not, someone out there needs your story more than you know. “It’s worth it to write what’s real,” says Ford. 

Plus, there’s a bonus: You can get paid to publish your personal essay

Table of contents, where to submit your personal essays.

Once you’ve read other personal narrative examples and penned your essay, which publications should you contact? Where should you try to sell that personal essay?

“You might be tempted to focus only on magazines, but there are some great websites that run essays.” Amy Paturel, who has taught an online personal essay writing course for a decade. To help her students get published, she compiled a list of 130+ editors who accept (and pay for!) personal stories

We’ve all heard of The New York Times’ personal essay column— submit to Modern Love is probably already on your to-do list—but there are many other publications that publish personal essays.

To help you find the right fit, we’ve compiled a list of 22 publications that will consider your personal narrative essay, as well as tips on how to pitch the editor, who to contact and, whenever possible, how much the outlet pays.

Here are 22 places to submit your personal essay.

1. Boston Globe

The Boston Globe Magazine Connections section seeks 650-word first-person essays on relationships of any kind. It pays, though how much is unclear. Submit to [email protected] with “query” in the subject line.

You  can also submit to Boston Globe Ideas , which accepts pitches and submissions for first-person essays ranging from 650 to 1,000 words. All pitches and submissions should be sent to [email protected] .

Must-read personal essay: “ Voyages of Imagination ” by Peter Schmidt, or “ The Gift of Anger and Brokenheartedness ” by Greg M. Epstein

2. Extra Crispy

Send your pitches about breakfast, brunch, or the culture of mornings to [email protected] or the editor of the section you’re pitching. Average pay hovers at about 46 cents per word .

Must-read personal essay: Gina Vaynshteyn’s “ When Dumplings Are Resistance ”

3. Dame Magazine

“For women who know better. Smart, fast-paced news and opinions on what matters most in our lives — That’s DAME .” 

If you’re up for the challenge, send your pitch to [email protected] . Aimed at women in their 30s, the publication covers politics, race, civil rights, disability, class, gender, sex, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues and much more. Rates are based on type of features, but they typically pay $200 for essays.

Must-read personal essay: “ I Wanted Joan Didion’s Heart to Be Messy” by Lauren Sandler

4. The Christian Science Monitor

Have an upbeat personal essay between 400 and 800 words on everyday life, like travel, parenting, home, family, gardening, neighborhood, or community?

Submit to The Christian Science Monitor’s Home Forum . Send your completed essays to [email protected] . They accept essays on a wide variety of subjects (and encourage timely, newsy topics), but steer clear of topics like death, aging and disease.

Must-read personal essay: “ Two Crises, Two Gardens ” by Perdita Buchan

Want to write for this Jewish parenting site? To submit , email [email protected] with “submission” somewhere in the subject line. Include a brief bio, contact information, and your complete original blog post—you can either attach it as a Word document or paste it into the body of the email. Suggested word count: 500-800. Per a well-loved private Facebook group for freelance writers, pay is about $50.

Must-read personal essay: Faith Gabby-Kalson’s “ I’m a Black and Jewish Woman. My Identity Matters. ”

6. The Sun Magazine

Publications in The Sun Magazine have won Pushcart Prizes and been selected for Best American Essays—so if your story gets chosen, you’ll be in good company. And since the editors “tend to favor personal writing,” that I-driven nonfiction essay might just be the perfect fit. (Fiction and poetry are also accepted.)

Pay ranges from $300 all the way up to $2,000 for accepted personal stories and fiction prose. The easiest way to send your story is online through Submittable, but check the guidelines first before submitting.

Must-read personal essay:   “The Ramshackle Garden Of Affection” by Ross Gay and Noah Davis  (Editor’s note: The Sun puts its stories behind a paywall, which is why they can afford to pay their writers so well!)

7. New Statesman

This U.K. magazine has a helpful contributor’s guide that explains, among many other things, what they’re looking for: Great writing and original reporting that explains and analyses the world today. Unsolicited submissions, while rarely accepted, are paid; if an editor likes your pitch, you’ll hear back in 24 hours. Email [email protected]  to get started.

Must-read personal essay: “ Personal Story: How to Lose Your Head ” by Emily Bottle

8. The New York Times

The popular Modern Love feature accepts submissions of 1,500 to 1,700 words  at [email protected] . Include a Word attachment, but also paste the text into your message. Consult the Times’ page on pitching first (and note that submissions during July and August aren’t considered!), and “like” Modern Love on Facebook for even more insight. Payment is $300, The New York Times writes on its Facebook page .

This column is famous for helping writers get book or even film contracts. One example is Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose essay, “ You May Want to Marry My Husband ” ran in 2017 and prompted a lucrative film rights bidding war ultimately won by Universal Pictures.

Want to up your chances of getting your submission selected? Check out these Modern Love Column submission tips .

Must-read personal essay: “ Relationships Move Fast on a Slow Cargo Ship ” by Dev Aujla

9. Creative Nonfiction Magazine

One unique aspect to Creative Nonfiction Magazine is their high acceptance rate of unsolicited pitches. It’s a great stop for blossoming writers, as well as those with more experience.

To submit online , a $3 reading fee is charged to non-subscribers (and the magazine no longer accepts paper submissions). The fee ensures you will be paid if your work is accepted, which typically adds up to a $125 flat rate plus $10 per printed page. Plus, they often run essay contests with prizes ranging from $1,000-$10,000 per winning entry, and reading fees help offset that expense. Read over their submission calls before pitching since each issue sticks to a theme and may have different guidelines. 

Must-read personal essay: “ The Dark Month ” by Christopher Collins

“Slate,” according to its own submission guidelines , “is known for making smart, witty, persuasive statements.” So if you’ve got something to say, email your pitch (not a vague, one- or two-sentence pitch either) to the appropriate section editor, which are all listed for you on the submission guidelines page.

Send personal essays to [email protected] . Average reported pay is about 24 cents per word .

Must-read personal essay: Andrea Silenzi’s “ My Decade in Online Dating ”

Each print issue has a specific cultural theme and welcomes both fiction and nonfiction—and even poetry! Stories and essays of 5,000 words max earn up to $400. Review periods are limited, so check their submission guidelines to make sure your work will be read with the next issue in mind. The easiest way to send in your work is through Submittable .

Must-read personal essay: “ Fire Island ,” by Christopher Locke

12. Motherwell

Motherwell is a publication that aims to tell all sides of the parenting story. They seek evocative parenting-related personal essay submissions of up to 1,200 words, and all contributors are paid.

Submit a full piece online via Submittable ; for time-sensitive pieces, send an email to [email protected] with the word “timely” in all caps in the subject line..

Must-read personal essay: “ The Irrational Hope of An Infertile Woman ” by Amy Gallo Ryan

13. The Bold Italic

This publication focuses on California’s Bay Area, and it’s deeply interested in the people who keep San Francisco going. Strong POV and a compelling personal writing style are key. Typical pay is $50 per article , though higher rates can be negotiated for “complex” pieces.

Send your personal essays that will make these editors weep, cry, laugh or want to eat a burrito to [email protected] with the subject line  “Pitch: [Name], [Article Title].”

Must-read personal essay: “ How I Came to Respect Chinese Food—and My Heritage ” by Eric He

Submit essays about health, mental health, relationships, and identity to the appropriate editor at this lifestyle site geared toward women. 

For lifestyle pitches, email [email protected] ; for fashion and beauty pitches, email [email protected] ; for entertainment pitches, email [email protected] . And note that the editors only want pitches, not full drafts. Pay averages about 12 cents per word . 

Must-read personal essay: “ How My Chronic Eczema Tore Down & Built Up My Self-Esteem ” by Tori Zhou

15. The Rumpus

Focuses on essays that “intersect culture.” Submit finished essays online in the category that fits best, but wait at least  three months before following up.

Payment is lean , but possible: Eligible contributors can opt in to receive an even share of the $300 budget the publication sets aside monthly.

Note the regular reading periods for essays: September 1 through October 31, January 1 through February 28, and June 1 through July 31. Timely essays can be sent to [email protected] ; all other essays should be sent through Submittable during open reading periods.

Must-read personal essay: “ Dancing Separate, Together ” by Russel Janzen

16. The Penny Hoarder

This personal-finance website welcomes submissions that discuss ways to make or save money. Read the guidelines before emailing your submission to learn what kind of stories they typically look for—human interest stories, success stories and unique job ideas, or your stories of eating, traveling and doing life on a budget. Articles should be between 700-900 words, and an editor will discuss payment with you if your pitch is accepted. 

Must-read personal essay: “ How This Woman Bought Her Dream Home While Making Less Than $60K ” by Jen Smith

17. Vox’s First Person

The First Person section of Vox.com publishes personal essays “with unique perspectives on complicated issues.” Submit pitches or completed drafts to [email protected] .

They are open to a variety of topics, but claim past success with pieces on parenting, relationships, money, identity, mental health, and job/workplace issues—“but we’re always looking for new topics to cover, so if you have a pitch that doesn’t fall into any of these categories, don’t let that stop you from sending it along.” Pay varies.

Must-read personal essay: “ Black Kids Are Watching This Moment. What Will It Teach Them? ” by Kelly Glass

18. Narratively

Narratively accepts pitches and complete pieces that tell “original and untold human stories.” In your story, there should be a “clear narrative arc that shows you developing a new or different perspective by the end of the piece.” Submit online in the category that most closely fits your essay, which should be between 1,500 and 4,000 words. Pay averages 9 cents per word .

Must-read personal essay: “ My Father, the QAnon Conspiracy Theorist ” by Reed Ryley Grable

19. Mask Magazine

Mask Magazine is an “experimental publication in the age of late capitalist world-weariness and discontent.” The story you pitch and submit should be expressive and about an experience, adventure, or tribulation that you learned from, and you don’t have to worry about restricting your creativity to a word count. For pitching, they only accept full submissions—feel free to send a pitch, but you won’t get the greenlight until editors see an early or complete first draft. Pay is between $50 and $200.

Must-read personal essay : “ Fevered Reading ” by Ryan Richardson

20. The Smart Set 

A journal of arts and culture, The Smart Set accepts submissions and pitches on a rolling basis. Pitch your personal essay of 1500 and 3500 words to [email protected] — don’t forget to format your submission as a Word document with Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced. The last reported rate for The Smart Set was 20 cents per word . 

Must-read personal essay : “ White Chapel ” by Eric Bryan

21. PULP Magazine

Before you pitch this magazine , ask yourself: How does this relate to sex or one’s personal/societal perception of sexuality and/or reproductive rights? A “multimedia sex, sexuality, and reproductive rights publication celebrating this human coil hurtling through time and space,” PULP only accepts fully written pieces via Submittable , and they pay $250 for original content. Heads up: Because they’re a small pub that wants to pay their writers, there’s a $3 reading fee to submit your work. If you can’t swing the cost, let them know ( [email protected] and [email protected] ) and they’ll work something out with you.   

Must-read personal essay : “ Not a “Real” Survivor: The Price Of Opinions In The Anti-Trafficking Movement ” by Laura LeMoon

22. The Virginia Quarterly Review 

The VQR strives to publish the best writing we can find, whether it be from accomplished and award-winning authors or emerging writers. They’re looking for essay submissions that “look out on the world, rather than within the self,” between 3,500–9,000 words. The pay for prose is generally 25 cents per word, depending on length, and they only accept submissions via Submittable . Note that they read unsolicited fiction, poetry, and nonfiction submissions from July 1 to 31. 

Must-read personal essay : Hananah Zaheer’s “ After the Old City ”

A final word of advice on where to publish personal essays

Find yourself sending pitch after pitch only to never get published? Make sure you’re not making one of these mistakes with your essay .

“Submit to the places you love that publish work like yours,” essayist Ford advises, but don’t get caught up in the size of the publication. And “ recognize that at small publications you’re way more likely to find someone with the time to really help you edit a piece. ”

The original version of this story was written by Lisa Rowan . We updated the post so it’s more useful for our readers.

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80 Best Magazines & Websites That Publish Personal Essays

Well, you’re in luck because you’ve just found a list of magazines that accept essay submissions around pop culture, personal finance, personal stories, and many other topics. If you’re passionate about crafting personal essays and your work typically falls within a range of 600 to 10,000 words, consider submitting your essays to the organizations listed below. They generally offer compensation of $50-$250 for each accepted essay. After this guide, you may also want to check my list of the best essays of all time .

Here are the top magazines and publications that publish thought-provoking essays:

1. the new york times – modern love.

“Modern Love” accepts essay submissions via email at [email protected] with the essay subject or potential title as the email subject line. Submissions should be original, true stories between 1,500 and 1,700 words, sent both as an attached Microsoft Word-compatible document and pasted into the body of the email. The team collaborates with writers on editing, and authors are compensated for published work. Submission info .

2. The New York Times – Opinion Essays

To submit an essay to this publication, fill out the provided submission form with the essay and a brief explanation of your professional or personal connection to its argument or idea. The essay should include sources for key assertions (either as hyperlinks or parenthetical citations). Although all submissions are reviewed, the publication may not be able to respond individually due to the high volume of entries. If there’s no response within three business days, authors are free to submit their work elsewhere. Submission info .

3. Dame Magazine

DAME is a women’s magazine that prioritizes accessible and intersectional journalism that dives into context rather than breaking news. Their stories are unexpected, emotional, straightforward, illuminating, and focused on people rather than policy. They aim to reveal new or surprising information, provoke action or empathy, simplify complex issues, introduce fresh ideas, and foreground the people most affected by discussed topics. Submission info .

4. The New Yorker

5. the atlantic.

The Atlantic is keen on high-quality nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Familiarity with their past publications can guide your submission. All manuscripts should be submitted as a Word document or PDF. They only respond if they’re interested in discussing your submission further. Separate submission channels exist for fiction and poetry. Submission info .

6. The Globe and Mail

7. the guardian.

To contribute to this publication, you should identify the most relevant section and contact the commissioning editor with a brief outline of your idea. You may be invited to submit your work speculatively, meaning payment will only be provided if your contribution is published. It’s important to note that your contribution should be sent electronically and will be published under standard copyright terms with payment at normal rates unless agreed otherwise before publication. Submission info .

8. Los Angeles Times

9. the sun magazine.

The Sun publishes personal essays, short stories, and poems from both established and emerging writers globally, particularly encouraging submissions from underrepresented perspectives. Their contributors’ work often garners recognition in prestigious anthologies and prizes. The Sun seeks personal essays that are deeply reflective, celebrating hard-won victories or exploring big mistakes, aiming to make newsworthy events feel intimate and wrestle with complex questions. Submission info .

VICE is primarily interested in mid-length original reports, reported essays, narrative features, and service journalism related to contemporary living and interpersonal relationships. They welcome stories informed by personal experiences and insight but advise writers to consider what makes their story unique, why they’re the right person to tell it, and why it should be on VICE. While all stories don’t need to be tied to current events, a timely element can distinguish a pitch. They also accept quick-turnaround blogs and longer features. Submission info .

12. Vox Culture

14. buzzfeed reader, 15. the boston globe, 16. the bold italic, 18. refinery29.

ELLE’s annual talent competition is back for, seeking out the next superstar in writing. The winner will have their 500-word piece, inspired by the hashtag #RelationshipGoals and focusing on a significant relationship in their life. Submission info .

20. Cosmopolitan

22. the walrus, 23. autostraddle.

Autostraddle welcomes pitches, works in progress, and completed submissions. Any issues with the submission form should be emailed to Laneia Jones with the subject line “SUBMISSION ERROR”. Questions about the submission process can be directed to Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya with “SUBMISSION PROCESS” in the subject line. Please note that pitches or submissions sent via email will not be accepted. Submission info .

24. Narratively

25. catapult, 26. jezebel, 27. bitch media.

Bitch Media seeks pitches offering feminist analysis of culture, covering a wide array of topics including social trends, politics, science, health, life aspects, and popular culture phenomena. They publish critical essays, reported features, interviews, reviews, and analyses. First-person essays should balance personal perspectives with larger themes. Both finished work and query letters are welcome. However, due to the volume of submissions, they cannot guarantee a response or that every pitch will be read. Submission info .

28. Broadview

29. briarpatch magazine, 30. maisonneuve, 31. room magazine, 32. hazlitt.

Hazlitt is currently not accepting submissions but it might reopen soon. They seek original journalism, investigative features, international reporting, profiles, essays, and humor pieces, but they are not considering unsolicited fiction. Pitches with proposed word counts are preferred, and they have a section called “Hazlitt Firsts” for reviews of experiencing mundane things for the first time as adults. Submission info .

33. This Magazine

34. geist magazine, 35. discover magazine, 36. eater voices, 37. the temper.

The Temper is an online publication focused on sobriety, addiction, and recovery, challenging drinking culture. They seek diverse and intersectional stories written through the lens of addiction, covering various topics like sex, food, relationships, and more. Submissions are currently closed, but they are especially interested in amplifying voices from marginalized and underrepresented groups. Submission info .

38. Chatelaine

39. conde nast traveler, 40. boston globe ideas, 41. babbel magazine, 42. huffpost personal.

HuffPost seeks to amplify voices from underrepresented communities, including BIPOC, LGBTQ, and people with disabilities. They accept freelance pitches on a wide range of topics, providing clear guidelines for submissions. They also encourage visual creatives to submit their work, and all published contributors are paid for their work. Please note that due to the volume of submissions, individual responses may not be possible. Submission info .

43. Adelaide Literary Magazine

44. biostories, 45. quarter after eight, 46. the rappahannock review.

Allure is seeking writers to contribute pieces that explore beauty, style, self-expression, and liberation. They are looking for writers with relevant credentials and experience in the field, and they offer compensation of $350 for reported stories and $300 for personal essays. Submission info .

48. MLA Style Center

49. marie claire, 51. her story, 52. griffith review, 53. literary review of canada, 54. harper’s magazine, 55. virginia quarterly review, 56. the new england review, 57. one story.

One Story seeks literary fiction between 3,000 and 8,000 words, any style, and subject. They pay $500 and provide 25 contributor copies for First Serial North American rights. Only unpublished material is accepted, except for stories published in print outside North America. Simultaneous submissions allowed; prompt withdrawals upon acceptance elsewhere. Accepts DOC, DOCX, PDF, and RTF files via Submittable. No comments on individual stories. No revisions of previously rejected work. Translations are accepted with proper attribution. No emailed or paper submissions, except for incarcerated individuals. Submission info .

58. The Threepenny Review

59. zoetrope: all-story, 60. american short fiction, 61. the southern review, 62. boulevard magazine.

Boulevard seeks to publish exceptional fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from both experienced and emerging writers. They accept works of up to 8,000 words for prose and up to five poems of up to 200 lines. They do not consider genres like science fiction, erotica, horror, romance, or children’s stories. Payment for prose ranges from $100 to $300, while payment for poetry ranges from $50 to $250. Natural Bridge Online publication offers a flat rate of $50. Submission info .

63. The Cincinnati Review

64. the antioch review, 66. barrelhouse, 67. tin house online.

Tin House is a good company that offers a two-day submission period three times a year for writers without a current agent and no previous book publication (chapbooks accepted). They accept fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry, both in English and in translation (with formal permission). Completed drafts are required. They are particularly interested in engaging with writers from historically underrepresented communities. Submission info .

68. One Teen Story

69. bennington review, 70. epoch literary, 71. the gettysburg review, 72. alaska quarterly review.

The publication accepts submissions of fiction, poetry, drama, literary nonfiction, and photo essays in traditional and experimental styles. Fiction can be short stories, novellas, or novel excerpts up to 70 pages, and poetry submissions can include up to 6 poems. They aim to respond within 4 to 12 weeks, but authors can inquire about their manuscript status after 4 weeks if needed. Submission info .

73. Colorado Review

74. the georgia review, 75. new letters, 76. shenandoah, 77. triquarterly.

TriQuarterly, the literary journal of Northwestern University, welcomes submissions in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, video essays, short drama, and hybrid work from both established and emerging writers. They are especially interested in work that engages with global cultural and societal conversations. Submissions are accepted through Submittable, and they charge a small reading fee. Submission windows vary by genre. Submission info .

78. E-International Relations

79. longreads, 80. education week, rafal reyzer.

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Little-known secrets for how to get published

Advice from seasoned psychologists for those seeking to publish in a journal for the first time

By Rebecca A. Clay

January 2019, Vol 50, No. 1

Print version: page 64

• Peer Review

An academic who is trying to get a journal article published is a lot like a salmon swimming upstream, says Dana S. Dunn, PhD, a member of APA’s Board of Educational Affairs. “The most important thing is persistence,” says Dunn, a psychology professor at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

But there are ways to make the journey through the publication process (see The publication process ) easier. “The more work you do up front, the more you can ensure a good outcome,” says Dunn. Among other tasks, that means finding the right venue, crafting the best possible manuscript and not giving up when asked to revise a manuscript.

The Monitor spoke with Dunn and several other senior faculty members with extensive experience publishing articles and serving as journal editors and editorial board members. Here’s their advice.

■ Target the right journals. To find the journal that’s the best fit for your article, research the journals themselves. Check each target journal’s mission statement, ask colleagues who have published there if your work is appropriate for it and read a current issue to see the kinds of articles it contains. “If your work isn’t in line with what they publish, they will reject it out of hand and you will have wasted valuable time,” says Dunn.

Also examine the composition of a journal’s editorial board, which will offer valuable clues about the kind of work the journal values—qualitative versus quantitative research, for example, or single-experiment studies versus multiple-experiment ones. You can even shoot a short email to the editor briefly summarizing your manuscript and asking if it sounds like something he or she feels would be appropriate for the journal. “Editors are pretty good at saying yes or no,” says Dunn.

In addition, let more experienced colleagues assess the strength of your study and give you some ideas about possible venues, says Jerry Suls, PhD, a professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Ask how strong and how novel they think your results are and whether your study has any methodological limitations. Although your colleagues may not have a completely accurate view of what journals will and won’t publish, says Suls, it’s still a good idea to get a sense of what they think about your chances.

■ Balance ambition and realism. Aim high, but be realistic about where you send your manuscript. But don’t get too hung up on trying to figure out a hierarchy of which is the “best” journal, says Rose Sokol-Chang, PhD, publisher of journals at APA. Instead, she suggests, think about what you’re trying to achieve with your article. For example, some journals have a longer history, broader focus and higher impact factor, a measure of how often papers in the journal are cited compared to how much is published in the journal. For more narrowly focused research, there are journals focused on subdisciplines that are well-respected by experts and have high impact factors. You could also try highly specialized journals appropriate to your direct area of research, which are more limited in scope and readership. Keep in mind that APA publishes its own journals as well as many affiliated journals, which vary in their levels of specialization.

What you do want to avoid is publishing in one of the increasing number of journals—often online—that aren’t peer-reviewed, says Nova Southeastern University psychology professor Linda Carter Sobell, PhD. Junior faculty may not even be aware that these journals aren’t true academic journals, says Sobell, adding that one possible outcome is that they go up for tenure only to have colleagues point out that their articles are published in nonreputable journals. Tip-offs include nonuniversity addresses or requests that authors pay to publish their work. “You can’t trust them when they say they’re peer-­reviewed,” says Sobell. “That could mean the secretary looks at the manuscript when it comes in.”

To check rejection rates, go to www.apa.org/pubs/journals/statistics to get a sense of the odds for APA journals. For other journals, contact the editor, check the publication’s website or directions to contributors or see if your institution subscribes to the Cabells database, which offers information on both reputable journals and those it deems “predatory.”

Also, be sure to submit your work to just one journal at a time. Shotgunning a manuscript to multiple outlets simultaneously “is completely verboten,” says Suls.

■ Hone your manuscript. Give yourself time to write the best manuscript you can, says APA Board of Scientific Affairs (BSA) member Keith F. Widaman, PhD, distinguished professor of the Graduate Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. To make sure your writing is first-rate, study “The Elements of Style,” says Widaman, who rereads the William Strunk and E.B. White classic every year or two. Learn the difference between active and passive voices, the difference between “that” and “which,” and when to use commas. “There are times when you misportray the meaning of what you’re trying to get across if you write something poorly,” he says.

Before you start writing, draft an outline with subheads that mimic how manuscripts are organized in APA journals. “Carefully constructing a manuscript helps the reader follow your thinking,” he says. Also consult APA’s newly revised Journal Article Reporting Standards (APA Style JARS), which offer guidance on what information needs to be included in a research manuscript, whether your manuscript covers quantitative research or qualitative research ( American Psychologist , Vol. 73, No. 1, 2018), suggests Sokol-Chang.

Be sure to pay close attention to details such as spelling and footnotes, Widaman adds. “If a person does a crummy job with references, for example, what other details are they not paying attention to?” To this end, take advantage of APA Style CENTRAL , which offers manuscript templates, preformatted references drawn from APA’s PsycINFO database and more.

And polish your manuscript by asking colleagues—both in and out of your specialty area—to offer constructive criticism. Make sure you haven’t overlooked relevant citations, which will suggest to reviewers that you don’t know the literature and where your work fits in. Consider having a statistician double-check your analyses.

■ Be prepared to revise. Most manuscripts are going to be rejected, so don’t take rejection personally, says Suls. It’s also extremely rare for a journal to accept a manuscript as is. Of the thousand-plus manuscripts Suls saw as associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he remembers only two that received a thumbs-up without requests for at least minor revisions. “Most papers are going to be rejected or are going to be resubmitted with revisions,” says Suls. “You’re not the only one.”

Your initial reaction to reviewers’ feedback may be disappointment or even anger. Put the comments aside for a few days while you calm down. “The first thing to realize is that reviewers are not trying to do a search-and-destroy mission; they’re trying to be helpful,” says Dunn. “Often when you read the comments with a colder eye, you realize the comments are good ones that will improve your work.”

For less extreme problems, the editor may invite you to revise the rejected paper and resubmit it or suggest that you send your manuscript elsewhere. Either way, be just as diligent in revising your manuscript as you were in writing it, says Dunn. Thank the reviewers, address every comment they made and use a detailed cover letter to explain those changes, with page numbers so the editor can easily see how you’ve addressed concerns. If reviewers disagree on a particular point and the editor hasn’t chimed in, choose which side you agree with and explain why you chose that side. And if you disagree with a comment and decide to reject that advice, explain that too.

■ Gain experience. Being on the other side of the editorial process can help give you ideas about how to better craft your own manuscripts. If you’re a graduate student or junior faculty member, ask a mentor or colleague who frequently serves as a reviewer if you can become a co-reviewer. “That’s a valuable educational experience,” says Dunn. (See “ How to Review a Manuscript ” in the May 2018 Monitor for more insights.)

If you do get a chance to review someone else’s manuscript, do it well and turn it in quickly. “If it comes back in a very timely fashion and the review is a good one, that person will be used again,” says Suls. That said, junior faculty should make sure the review process does not cut into the time they devote to doing their own research and writing.

■ Keep trying. Finally, don’t give up if your article is rejected by the first publication you send it to, says BSA member Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis. As long as your research is fundamentally sound, says Zacks, “there’s usually another reasonable journal you can turn around and go to.” 

For a set of interactive modules on publishing journal articles, reviewing journal manuscripts and other issues of importance to early career academics and researchers, see APA’s Science Career Series at www.apa.org/career-development/courses .

Further reading

Managing Your Research Data and Documentation Berenson, K.R. APA, 2017

How to Publish High-Quality Research Joireman, J., & Van Lange, P.A.M. APA, 2015

Write It Up: Practical Strategies for Writing and Publishing Journal Articles Silvia, P.J. APA, 2015

Related Articles

• The publication process

Key takeaways

1: Find the right journal for your research.

2: Write carefully and double-check your analyses.

3: Be open to revisions.

4: Don’t give up after a rejection—rework and resubmit.

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How to get an article published for the first time 

Wondering how to get a research paper published? We have got you covered with practical advice – from writing a great paper, to choosing a journal, navigating the submission system and braving peer review. And of course, making sure your published article makes an impact.  

Our podcast, Getting published for the first time , hears from researchers and editors explaining their tips for getting an article published. Here, we summarize their advice and gather useful resources to help you navigate publishing your first article. 

Read the Getting published for the first time podcast transcript.

6 practical tips for publishing scholarly articles

Be properly prepared – carry out peer review of other people’s work.

Refereeing other people’s work before writing your own is one of the best ways to help you understand what makes a good academic paper (or a bad one).  

“Reviewing is something that I think everybody should do,” said David Bogle, pro-vice provost of the doctoral school at University College London, speaking on our podcast . “I give [my own students] things to referee because it makes them focus on what the point of the paper is. I think refereeing before you ever write your papers is very important.” 

Do your homework – choose the right journal

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to start writing up your research without first choosing the journal you want it to be published in.  

How you write your paper, from the style and structure to the audience you should have in mind while writing, and even the article length, will depend on which journal you’re targeting. Choosing the journal before you start writing also means you can tailor your work to build on research that’s already been published there. This can help editors to see how a paper adds to the ‘conversation’ in their journal. 

To help you with this crucial step, look at our guide on selecting the right journal for your research . 

Post information

Related posts, insights topics, understand journal requirements before you start writing.

Once you’ve chosen your target journal, you need to understand what they’re looking for in papers submitted to them. And the first place to look is the instructions for authors (IFAs). These are an individual set of requirements for a journal that help guide potential authors to construct their article in the correct way and prepare it for submission. 

They will tell you exactly what the journal’s editorial board expects to see in articles submitted to the journal. And the IFAs will also include details of specific processes to follow to ensure there are no problems during production should your article be accepted. 

By following these guidelines you’ll know your article is in exactly the right format for submission and includes everything the editorial board would like to see. 

You can find the IFAs for any Taylor & Francis journal on the journal’s home page via Taylor & Francis Online .

Write an impactful article

It’s no surprise that to get an article published for the first time, you need to make it impactful and write it effectively. This tip sounds straightforward but it is, of course, a difficult ask – especially if you’ve never written an academic article before. There’s a lot to consider to make sure you write the best article possible. That’s why we created Writing your paper – a free guide that takes you through the process step by step. 

But what did our podcast interviewees advise? 

“It needs to be a staged approach,” explained David Bogle. “It’s easier to write the work first. So, you document what you’ve done and get that clear. That tends to make you reflect then on what’s missing. And consider the ‘so what?’ for the conclusion. Then you can write the introduction. And absolutely, definitely the abstract last.” 

Be ready for rejection, revisions, and a lot of feedback

“If you’ve taken that step and you’ve come through the electronic system and submitted your paper, the next thing that will happen is an email pings up for me to indicate that there’s a new submission in the system,” explained Catherine Harper, Editor of Textile: Cloth and Culture , speaking on the podcast. “I’m just in the process of reading a new submission. And that’s the first evaluation really, which is checking that the work itself is of a reasonable standard.” 

Once you’ve hit submit at your journal of choice, there’s still a lot to be done before your article is (hopefully) published. If it passes an initial desk assessment, it’ll then go through the peer review process.  

This experience can be both daunting and sometimes disheartening, as your carefully crafted paper receives potentially critical feedback. It’s important to remember at this point that criticism and even rejections can happen to the most experienced researchers too. While it can be tricky to manage the first time round, try to have an open mind to feedback and look for support if you need it. 

Help your research make an impact

If you’ve managed to get your article published for the first time, you’ll want it to make an impact. And you’re not alone. Every researcher wants their work to have an impact, whether that’s in the world of academia, in society, or both.

Creating a real impact with your work can be a challenging and time-consuming task. And it can feel difficult to fit into an already demanding academic career. But it’s well worth doing, as Diana Layton from Liverpool John Moores University discusses on our podcast: 

“Academic impact is driven by attention – the attention that outputs gain from the academic community and from the wider public and other organizations too. Researchers cannot ignore the indicators of attention that their work receives. It’s all part of building a CV and being able to communicate [about the impact your work has had].” 

Our free guide to Research Impact designed to help you understand what impact means for you and your work, why it’s important, how to achieve it, and how to measure it. We’ve also included inspiration and ideas to help you get started. 

Where to next?

If you’ve found these tips helpful make sure you look at:

Our podcast series for researchers – 15 minutes to develop your research career (which includes the episode mentioned in this post)

Our free guide series – packed with all the advice you need to publish and promote your research. 

Our Insights newsletter – the latest news, tips, and resources delivered straight to your inbox.

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How to Get An Article Published in a Magazine in 5 Easy Steps

by Mel Beasley | Oct 31, 2022 | Publishing

If you’re serious about making writing your career, knowing how to get published in a magazine is key to building a solid portfolio so that you can land quality writing gigs or a high-paying writing job. If your end goal is to eventually write books, having published work in magazines can also reveal a level of sincerity to literary agents that otherwise wouldn’t. 

Why You Should Submit to Magazines

Getting published in a magazine will not only boost your confidence as a writer as you work toward your long-term writing goals, but it will also build your online presence as a writer and author. Here are just a few reasons you should pursue getting published in a magazine.

It Builds Your Online Presence

Building your audience as a writer doesn’t happen overnight. Even with a bestselling book, there’s often a great deal of marketing and press that happens before an audience is built and a book even gets close to the bestseller list. Not every publishing company will have the funding to push your book as hard as larger houses, so it’s best to play it safe and start marketing yourself as a writer or an author as soon as possible. Publishing short pieces in magazines will not only get your name floating across the internet, but it will hopefully encourage readers to find you on social media so you can market to them further later on.

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Published Work Leads to Writing Jobs

If you’re looking to work for a publication in the future, or you’d like to write for a company, your college essays won’t work as writing samples. However, getting published in a magazine adds credibility to you as a writer. A published article means you are talented and professional enough to make it past at least one editor, which instills confidence in employers that you can handle a writing position. Additionally, published pieces also indicate a level of passion and seriousness that unpublished work just can’t match because it takes time, editing, and research to get published.

It Makes Your Query Letter Stand Out

While it’s not impossible to get a book published without having previously published work, it most certainly helps add credibility to your query letter. When submitting your book idea to a literary agent, you’ll need to attach a query letter that provides a bit of information about you, and a summary of your book. You’ll also send something similar to magazine publications during the submission process. Agents and editors certainly take experience into account when considering pieces to publish, and that experience paired with the level of writing you’ve attached will certainly work hand-in-hand when they are deciding to publish your writing.

Getting Published in a Magazine Boosts Confidence

Getting published in magazines will boost your confidence as a writer. Let’s be real. Getting a book published is a long, arduous process. Not only does it take months and sometimes years to write a novel or a book, but landing an agent for it can take just as long. Even if you’ve landed an agent, you still have to wait until they’re able to find the right publisher for it. And, even after all that waiting, you still have to wait at least a year to two years before your book will finally hit the shelves. It’s extremely discouraging to receive rejection letters for your book, and it can feel impossible to get your book published when the end of the tunnel is so far off. 

Getting shorter pieces published periodically as you work on longer projects will help keep you motivated and encouraged as a writer. Plus, you’ll most likely make some great contacts by interacting with editors, and potentially other writers who have been published in the same magazine. You’ll also most certainly learn a thing or two about editing your work based on the feedback you receive from magazine editors, which will only reflect positively on your other writing projects. 

Getting published in a magazine will help solidify that you’re heading in the right direction with a career in writing. It will give you a sense of dignity and pride in your work, pushing you to get better and keep writing. Not only that, but it will give you evidence that you are who you say you are, a writer inside and out. 

Publication in a Magazine Makes You a Better Writer

The submission and publishing process for magazines will help get you acclimated to the process as you prepare to dive into the book publishing world. It will teach you how to handle the submission process, query letters, and how to take rejection letters in stride. You’ll learn how to professionally communicate with editors, how to receive feedback, and how to translate an editor’s feedback into your writing so that it improves it overall. Every editor is different. Some editors are gentle and encouraging with their feedback, while others are more stern and blunt. You’ll learn how to not take feedback personally, and how to have a successful, professional relationship with both easygoing and difficult editors alike. 

Steps to Getting Published in a Magazine

Submitting your writing to a literary magazine or any other kind of magazine isn’t as hard as it might seem. In fact, only a few simple steps stand between you and magazine publication, and the hardest one is writing the content. Check out the steps below. 

• Write a Solid Article: You don’t necessarily have to have a finished article before choosing the magazine you want to submit to. It’s sometimes good to have an idea of the publications you’d like to be published in beforehand so that you know what they prefer to publish. Once you have an idea of what kind of essay or article you want to write, you’ll need to get it on paper and make sure you polish it up as much as possible. Write something you have adequate knowledge about rather than something you simply researched and regurgitated. Have a writer friend review the essay or article for you and provide feedback. Revise the piece until it’s as polished as possible.
• Find the right fit for your essay or article: When you’re ready to submit your finished article, don’t just submit it to every magazine possible. Do some research to find the best possible fit for your piece of writing. For example, if you’ve written a flash nonfiction piece, you should research literary magazines that frequently publish that kind of content. Spend some time reading their content to ensure your essay makes sense. No one likes a rejection letter, so don’t increase your odds of getting rejected by submitting to places that would never be interested in your essay or article. 
• Find the submission guidelines and follow them precisely: If a publication is accepting submissions from the public, you’ll usually find a submissions page in the footer of their website or the main navigation. If you can’t find the submission page in the navigation or footer, try typing the name of the publication in Google along with the word “submission.” Don’t submit to magazines if they aren’t open for submissions. This will only annoy editors and possibly ruin your chances with them in the future.  Once you find the submissions page, you should see information about that magazine’s submission guidelines. These guidelines will usually tell you what kind of content they are currently looking for, as well as the formatting instructions. Be sure to read and reread the instructions carefully, and follow the guidelines exactly. Failure to follow the submission guidelines could automatically withdraw your chances of acceptance. Plus, it’s annoying. Whether the magazine is asking for a specific email subject line, or that you send your document in a particular file format, do exactly that and you should be fine. 
• Write a mini query letter: If you’re not familiar with query letters, this is a brief message that you’ll send along with your essay or article. Unlike book query letters, which tend to be on the longer, more detailed side, magazine query letters are a bit different. First, keep your query letter formal and brief. You’ll most likely be sending your letter as an email with your article as an attachment, so it should be short enough that your reader won’t have to scroll to finish reading it. You should say hello and use the name of one of the editors if you know it. You can find a list of staff for the magazine on the About page on most magazine websites. Next, briefly let the editor know what kind of content you’re submitting, and include a 150-word bio of yourself as a writer. It’s also a good idea to mention at least one article you’ve read from the magazine and explain why you feel your piece would make a good fit for publication as well. You won’t need to add a synopsis of your short story, essay, or article. It’s already short, so they won’t have any trouble breezing through and figuring it out on their own. 
• Use writing submission websites: There are tons of writing submission websites out there that list all the open calls for submissions from publications all over the world. If you’re not the kind of person who reads a lot of magazines, or who enjoys doing a lot of research online, it might be easier to hop on one of these websites to find open calls for submissions. 
• Submittable : This is one of the best places to seek out open calls for submissions as well as writing contests. Using this platform is free. You can create an account, fill out your profile, and then search for open submissions after that. You can submit through this platform and track your submissions as well.
• Poets & Writers : This is a great website to not only read about writing and read other people’s writing but also to submit your work. Here you can find information on literary agents, writing workshops, groups, and so much more. Not only will you discover open calls for submissions, but you can also find open writing contests that often come with cash prizes for winners. 
• New Pages : This website looks very similar to traditional classifieds and provides an ongoing list of calls for submissions, information on literary events and writing workshops, and has an extensive list of literary magazines. 

If you’re interested in getting published sooner rather than later, consider submitting to magazines. Getting published will not only boost your confidence as a writer, but it will also help you build your writing portfolio and online presence. Good luck out there!

Mel Beasley has a bachelor’s in creative writing and journalism from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He brings 9+ years of digital marketing and writing experience to the table by writing for publications such as Lumina News and Encore Magazine. He spent 2 years as a college-level writing tutor, and is a certified writing tutor through the CRLA, which is a prestigious cert recognized by the Association for the Coaching & Tutoring Profession. He is a professional SEO blogger with experience writing for brands such as Boardworks Education and The Greater Wilmington Business Journal. One of his latest website and marketing projects has been building the website for the now New York Times Bestselling author, Nina de Gramont .

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How to Successfully Pitch an Article to a Magazine (and Get Published)

Jessica Michael

So you think you have a great idea for an article, but you're not sure what to do next? In this article, we'll teach you top tips and tricks for how to pitch your story idea to a magazine and get your piece published.

Why pitch an article to a magazine?

There are many reasons to pitch an article, essay, or story idea to a media outlet.

If you're a writer, getting your stories published may be part of your income. It can help you get exposure for your work, and it can build out your writing credentials.

But even if you aren't a professional writer, getting an article in a magazine can have important benefits. It can be a great way to market your business if you write for a magazine in your industry. If you have a particular area of expertise, writing articles about your subject matter can boost your professional profile.

In addition, Some degree programs or job positions (such as those in the sciences) require or strongly encourage publication.

You may also find yourself writing an article simply because you have a good story to tell or because the subject matter is important to you, and you think people could benefit from knowing about it.

Finding the right outlet

Regardless of why you want to get an article published, the first step is figuring out which media outlets are most likely to publish your piece.

A great way to start researching what outlets to pitch is to do a Google search on your subject matter. See what media outlets have been covering it or if there are outlets specifically dedicated to the topic. You can do the same on social media by searching relevant hashtags.

Obviously, you don't want to pitch an article about baking sourdough to a hard-hitting news journal, or a lighthearted travel piece to an arts magazine. Larger outlets will cover multiple verticals (think Conde Nast , New York Magazine , etc.), so you'll want to make sure you are pitching to the right editor for that heading.

You'll want to read some sample articles to get a sense of voice, content, and style. Even if a media outlet hasn't covered what you're writing about, if it falls underneath the general umbrella of topics they like to cover, and your writing is a good fit for their style, you may find a match.

Make sure they haven't already published a similar piece. A quick Google search of the topic plus magazine title should help with this. You may also be able to do a site search using keywords.

In addition, there are a multitude of databases and free newsletters that collate media outlets to pitch and submit to, depending on the type of writing you do. Duotrope , The Open Notebook , and Kavyar are only some of the many resources you can subscribe to in order to track the latest calls for submissions.

Print magazines

Print magazines are often considered prestige media, especially these days when most content is online. If you are able to get published in a well-regarded print publication, it can go a long way to establishing your reputation.

However, there are much fewer print magazines than there used to be which means they are often significantly harder to get accepted into. They also tend to favor staff writers, columnists, and journalists that they work with frequently. The good news is that many print publications also have an online presence, so when you submit, you will be considered for both their print edition and their online platform.

Online magazines, news outlets, and blogs

Most content is now found online, which means there is a good chance that you will be pitching to online press platforms and blogs as part of your process. Online outlets have the benefit of being numerous, so it's more likely you'll be able to find one that fits your writing and your topic. It can also be easier to get picked up as a new writer since there are more online opportunities available, which can help you build your writing credentials and have a chance to be published in bigger outlets down the line.

The downside is that they vary tremendously in quality and reputation. You'll need to do some homework to verify the legitimacy of any online platforms that you pitch to. 

Writing a Pitch

Once you've figured out the magazines you'd like to pitch, you'll need to craft a convincing pitch that catches the editors' interest and paves the way for your piece to be picked up for publication.

Most pitches are done via email, so the first thing a submissions editor is going to see is your subject line. You'll want a subject line that clearly states the topic and story angle. Many publications also require you to state that the email is a story pitch in the subject line. Check their pitch guidelines to be sure.

Once you've created an interesting and informative subject line, you'll want to write an email that keeps an editor's interest. Remember, they may receive hundreds of pitches a day, so be sure to keep it short, concise, and clear. State the bottom line and any sources or research you plan to include, and why you are qualified to write the piece.

Ultimately, you need to be able to present a unique angle--why is this interesting? Who will read it? Why are you qualified to write about it? --and to do so with as few words as possible while still explaining the gist of the article.

Be sure to begin the email with the name of the editor or editors that will be reading it. Sometimes, an outlet will have a submissions editor specifically for pitches and will include that editor's name in their submissions and pitching guidelines. If not, check the masthead or the staff list to find out which editor oversees the media vertical that you are pitching to.

Some pitches require a bio. Focus on your expertise in the subject matter and/or your writing experience. Make sure to mention any larger publications your work has been featured in (a general rule of thumb is to list no more than 3), and keep it under 150 words. If a bio isn't specifically required, you can include this information at the end of your pitch.

Make sure you end the pitch politely and with an offer to share more information if they are interested.

Figuring out a magazine's pitch guidelines

Every media outlet has its own pitch guidelines. Some magazines want you to include the entire article in the body of the email or as an attachment. Some magazines specifically ask that you don't include the completed work. In addition, some magazines work with submission websites where you input or upload your information, and others want you to pitch the editor of the vertical you are submitting to. They may also have different requirements in terms of what to include in a pitch and how long the pitch should be.

You'll need to research each magazine's pitch guidelines, and tailor your pitch accordingly. You can often find submission or pitching guidelines on a magazine's website. Another trick is to Google "[magazine name] + pitching guidelines". Submission and pitching guidelines are different but are often included under the same banner, so check both.

Should you send the whole article?

Some editors, journals, and magazines want you to have a finished product when you send a pitch their way. This can be especially true if they've never worked with you before or if you are a relatively unknown writer. However, many magazines want to hear your pitch before they give you the ok to write the article.

If the article you want to write is relatively short, we recommend going ahead and writing it out before you pitch. That makes it easy to send the finished product if your story does get the thumbs up. It can also help you refine your pitch because you know exactly what the article will consist of. That being said, it's important not to send the full article unless it's asked for.

If what you are pitching is complex, lengthy, has multiple sources and so on, sending a pitch before you write your piece can be important. First of all, it lets you know if anyone will pick up the story before you put all of the effort into writing it. It also allows the editor you're working with to give you guidelines on how they want the article written and the story angles they're most interested in. This gives you a chance to craft the piece in a way that fits best with the media outlet.

If it's an editor or an outlet you've worked with previously, getting approval for your pitch before you write it can also be a great way to make sure you write it with the magazine in mind and makes it more likely they'll publish it once it's finished.

Simultaneous pitching

Many publications allow you to pitch to more than one magazine at a time, as long as you withdraw your pitch via email or submissions manager ASAP if it gets accepted elsewhere. However, higher prestige magazines such as The New Yorker , GQ , Elle , etc. want you to pitch them exclusively.

When that's the case, they will usually provide a timeframe within which you should expect to hear from them if your pitch is accepted. If you don't hear anything within their defined timeframe, you can feel free to pitch elsewhere. 

Pitching versus submission guidelines

Pitching is basically an enquiry asking an outlet if they are interested in hearing more about your idea. It's short and informative, explaining the story angle clearly but without going into a full summary. Pitch guidelines are the guidelines an individual media outlet provides that tells you the nuts and bolts of how to pitch them.

Submission guidelines deal with how to send a completed article, including length and formatting requirements. While in this article, we're not focused primarily on how to submit a piece, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the submission guidelines of the outlets you pitch. Particularly, some outlets prefer that you submit a completed piece per their submissions guidelines rather than sending a pitch first.

Getting Paid

Generally speaking, op-eds or guest essays are usually unpaid. Print articles are usually paid. Online articles can vary tremendously. The larger and more well-known the magazine, the more likely that they pay their writers.

Unfortunately, there isn't really a standard pay rate these days, and many outlets don't pay at all or pay very little. That may not matter if what you are looking for is exposure, but if you only want to publish paid pieces, make sure you check the fine print on what the going rate is for that particular publication.

How to pitch if you have no publishing experience

Making the transition from writer to published writer can be challenging sometimes, but everyone who is a published writer started out as a writer with no publishing credentials.

When you pitch as an unpublished writer, focus more on the power of the story and your unique ability to tell it. If you've got special expertise in the subject, make sure to highlight that. Many writers have had their first piece accepted in a large publication because their story and writing style was interesting and engaging to the editors.

In addition, it may be beneficial to pitch smaller publications, local media outlets, and blogs where you can write guest posts . These can be a bit easier to get accepted into and are a great way to build out your writing credentials over time.

Realistic expectations

It can take a while to get a piece published, even if it's excellent, so don't give up. Pitch often and widely. A good rule of thumb is to pitch a story to 25 to 100 outlets before putting it aside.

If you are having trouble landing it, ask for feedback from other writers and readers you know who would be willing to give your piece a readthrough. You can even work with professional editors and writing coaches to refine your craft and make it more likely you'll get published.

Creating a writing portfolio for your published articles

Once you've been published, you'll want to create an online writing portfolio that showcases your articles. Journo Portfolio is a great option, with features like automatic article backups and auto importing. Learn more here .

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Thank you for your interest in Penguin Random House! The ins and outs of the book publishing process have long been opaque, and as part of our efforts to build a more diverse community of authors and create more pathways to publishing, we’ve written this handy guide to demystify the process and provide you with resources that help explain how the publishing process works.  

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all experience for authors, but this guide will point you toward the most common experiences of working with agencies and publishers. For a glossary of publishing terms that will help get you oriented in the industry, and better understand the information shared below, click here . 

Step One: Complete your manuscript or proposal 

If you have a great book idea, the first step is (in most cases) to complete that manuscript or proposal. Proposals are common with nonfiction projects, and full manuscripts are often needed with fiction. For help with nonfiction proposals , you can consult Jane Friedman’s How to Write a Book Proposal + Book Proposal Template blog post. For other help with writing and craft , check out this list of books that can help you on your way. There are endless resources out there to help you on your journey, so take some time to research and find what works for you.  

Also during this time, it can be helpful to connect with other writers, since they may have additional suggestions for resources to refer to, and some might even become critique partners or beta readers as you prepare your book for the query process, or pitch your manuscript to agents and publishers. Finding a community of writers who are in the same stage of the publishing quest as you are can also be an important source of moral support and you navigate the likely ups and downs of the process.  The easiest way to find other writers is via social media, and the hashtag #writercommunity on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok is a great place to start. Another path is to look for writers groups who meet either in person or virtually. The Poets & Writers website has a trove of suggestions for finding your community, including a directory of writing groups.

Joining SCBWI gives you access to all of the ins and outs of children’s book publishing if that’s your focus. SCBWI conferences offer an opportunity to build community as well as access publishing professionals to guide your path to publication.

Penguin Random House is working to remove systemic barriers for underrepresented voices by increasing access to and information about the publishing industry. If you’re looking for additional support and opportunities, check out the Black Creatives Fund with We Need Diverse Books, the Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowships, and offerings from our partners and friends at Kundiman.  

Step Two: Find a literary agent 

Historically, most major publishers, including Penguin Random House, have not accepted unagented submissions, in large part because an agent plays a critical role in serving your interests in the business relationship you will have with a publisher. While we are working to create and expand open submission opportunities through programs like the Berkley Open Submission Program , in most cases an agent is still required and advisable.  

When it comes to finding a literary agent, the first step is to do your research and find agents who represent the kind of work that you write. You can start by researching the agents who represent authors whose work you believe is comparable to your own–often, the agents will be named in those books’ acknowledgments pages. From there, you can find out more about those agents or similar ones through resources such as Query Tracker , Poets & Writers Literary Agents Database , Writer’s Digest Books , or the Deals page on Publishers Marketplace .   

The next step is to create a query letter and synopsis for your book. When you query agents, note that each agent has their own specific submission requirements—to start, some will want to see your first five or ten pages, others will only want to see a query. Whatever the agent requests on their website, be sure to follow those instructions. You don’t want to miss out on an opportunity with an agent because you sent the wrong materials. If an agent has interest in your project, they will respond requesting more material.  

One great resource for this stage of the writing process is Jane Friedman’s How to Find a Literary Agent blog post. 

Beware of scammers! It’s important to note that agents only get paid when they sell your work . The common relationship for an author and agent is that an agent will take a set percentage of the deal sales in exchange for their work earning the book deal and negotiating on your behalf. Be wary of agent or publisher scams out there that require money up-front to be traditionally published. The common saying is “money flows toward the author” and it’s always been a critical aspect of the publishing experience—getting a book deal should never be a “pay to play” scenario. One popular resource for investigating agent scams is  Writer Beware . Learn more on our PRH Fraud page.

Step Three: Collaborate with your literary agent to prepare your work for submission to editors 

Some agents use their expertise to suggest edits to your manuscript or proposal to prepare for submissions , which is when an agent submits your work to editors, who are independently responsible for selecting the manuscripts they want to publish, in hopes of attracting an offer. The process with your own agent may vary, but the goal will ultimately be the same. 

This process takes time, and there is no guarantee that your manuscript will find an editor who wants to publish it. Submissions very rarely lead to an offer in days. Many manuscripts take multiple rounds of submissions spanning weeks or even years to find the right home. In some cases, authors won’t be successful in selling their book to a publisher until their second or third manuscript, or beyond that. Though this can be a challenging time for authors, know that all parties involved want your project to find the right home, one that will provide the best chance to succeed.  

Step Four: (Hopefully!) Land a book deal 

If an editor shows interest in your project, they may ask other editorial colleagues for second reads. The process varies by imprint and publishing house, but most groups have regular acquisitions meetings in which the prospective editor presents your project to others on the publishing team. At this stage, they decide whether or not to make an offer. 

The editor will present a deal memo to your agent, who will compare that offer with any others. This process may take hours, days, or weeks. 

Ultimately, you have the final say over whether you will accept an offer, though you will likely discuss your options with your agent. After an offer is accepted, a contract will be drafted as well as the deal terms laid out in the memo. Minor negotiations will continue after this point, so if at any point you have questions about a contract draft, you should discuss them with your agent.  

Good luck on your writing journey. We sincerely hope to see you on our shelves someday!  

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A How-to Guide for Academic Writing and Publishing

By joy wada, corporate communications intern.

This post originally appeared on the SAGE blog

In honor of Academic Writing Month, SAGE Publishing has compiled a page of freely accessible resources and tools to help academics with their writing and publishing. With tips drawn from authors, editors, and the social and behavioral sciences, this guide also provides individuals with recommendations for collaborating, learning, and further engaging with the academic writing community.

General Writing Tips & Tools

How to master the basics of academic writing

“Mastering Academic Writing”

Covering the basics, including grammar, punctuation, and citations, this page from SAGE offers practical recommendations and tools for academic writing. It includes videos, blog posts, and writing guidelines for structuring and starting your academic works.

How to build your academic voice

“Intro to Writing for Scholars”

“What is Quality Writing?”

“How to Get Started”

“Finding Your Voice”

“Writing for Your Audience”

In this series of YouTube videos, Lyn Nygaard, SAGE editor and author of Writing Your Master’s Thesis and Writing for Scholars , shares her tips for getting started and finding your voice in the academic writing community.

How to keep organized

“Tools for Academic Writers,” by Janet Salmons for MethodSpace, November 2017

This article provides strategies and digital tools for authors to keep resources organized for improved time efficiency and increased writing productivity.

How to understand and integrate feedback

“A Review of Educational Dialogue Strategies to Improve Academic Writing Skills,” by Marlies Schillings, Herma Roebertsen, Hans Savelberg, and Diana Dolmans in Active Learning in Higher Education , November 2018

This journal article provides an overview of written feedback, sharing research on its effectiveness in improving academic writing. It discusses the danger of feedback misinterpretation and provides recommendations on implementing feedback in writing, highlighting the value of face-to-face dialogue.

How to maintain writing productivity under pressure

“Six Academic Writing Habits That Boost Productivity,” by Chris Smith for MethodSpace, November 2017

This article provides research from 23 interviews with academics in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., highlighting six common habits of successful academic writers and how they cope with pressure. Recommendations include accountability structures and time-blocking to increase productivity and reduce added stress.

How to jumpstart the writing process

“Ten Ways to Unstick Your Writing,” by Janet Salmons for MethodSpace, November 2019

Providing 10 strategies to boost creativity and encourage writing, these recommendations highlight practical activities for authors to undertake when feeling overwhelmed or stuck in their work.

How to plan when writing collaboratively

“Co-authoring and Writing Collaboration Planning Strategies for Success,” by Janet Salmons for the Textbook & Academic Authors Association, April 2018

Working with co-authors requires additional organization and planning. This article explains how reflection and effective communication can reduce frustrations and improve work design processes for a successful collaborative project.

Publishing in an Academic Journal

How to publish in an academic journal

"How to Get Published Webinar Series”

Featuring a panel of SAGE editors from diverse disciplines, this webinar series walks authors at any research or career stage through the journal publishing process and answers audience questions.

“How to Get Published”

This page from SAGE covers the academic journal publishing process from beginning to end with video tutorials, guides, and blog posts. It includes tips and resources for productive writing practices, choosing a journal, and submitting work.

How to publish open access

“How to Get Your Article Published Open Access with SAGE”

This brief video provides background on open access and shares tools and resources for authors to consider when publishing articles in academic journals.

How to submit a manuscript

“Manuscript Submission Guidelines”

Providing detailed instructions from pre-submission, formatting, and article acceptance, this SAGE Publishing guide will help ensure that your manuscript is ready for every step of the publication process.

How to promote your article

“Promote Your Article”

This page from SAGE offer tools and guidance for effective engagement in the academic writing community with recommendations for sharing your research on different platforms like social media and personal blogs.

How to find publication support

“SAGE Author Services”

This page provides resource and support for authors to utilize when choosing formatting, meeting language style requirements, and ultimately preparing for publication and promotion.

Publishing a Book

How to start writing a book

“Write a Book Webinar Recording & Slides,” by Janet Salmons for MethodSpace, November 2019

This webinar with Leah Fargotstein, a SAGE acquisitions editor, and Eric Garner, a managing editor of U.S. books production, shares tips on how to begin writing and publishing a book. They cover every step of the process, from conceptualizing your ideas to producing the book itself.

How to publish an academic book

“SAGE: A Guide for Authors”

Providing an overview of the academic book publishing process, this guide covers everything authors should consider when writing and publishing a book including editing, delivery, production, marketing, and finance.

How to submit a book publication proposal

“SAGE Proposal Guidelines”

These guidelines describe the book proposal process, explaining the timeline and what editors are looking for in a book proposal.

How to adapt PhD research into a book

“Interested in Adapting PhD Research Into a Book?” by Terry Clague for MethodSpace, November 2019

With reflective questions and practical tips, this post provides guidelines for authors when converting PhD research into a book. Offering different options of how to present and structure research in a book format, these recommendations provide a few rules of thumb for approaching the process.

How to promote your book

“Make Sure Your Book is Findable! Advice on Discoverability,” by Terry Clague for MethodSpace, November 2019

In the evolving print and digital publishing landscape, this article gives guidance on how to make your books accessible and discoverable in stores and online. Recommendations include the dos and don’ts of formatting for chapters and titles.

To find more tips and resources to support academic writing, visit SAGE’s MethodSpace , which is providing various writing and publishing resources, activities, guides, and tools throughout the month. Also, make sure to register for their 2020 AcWriMo Webinar on November 16th and join Rebecca Bayeck, Eric Schmieder, and Sharon Zumbrunn in conversation on the evolving publishing landscape.

Have more questions about writing or publishing? Take a look at our FAQ page .

About the author

Joy Wada is the Corporate Communications Intern at SAGE Publishing where she creates content for social media channels and blog sites. She currently studies Communication and Business at the University of Southern California. When she isn’t working, she may be spotted skateboarding around campus, Yelping a new restaurant, or baking on her quest to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe (if you ask nicely, she will share).

Writer’s Toolbox

Faculty articles.

You will find oodles of great writing advice in these articles by members of the Gotham faculty.

• Choose a genre...
• Application Assistance
• Blog Basics
• Business Writing
• Children’s Book Writing
• Creative Nonfiction 101
• Feature Article Writing
• Fiction Writing

Hit Send: Publishing Short Nonfiction

• How To Get Published
• Humor Writing
• Memoir Writing
• Mystery Writing
• Query Letter
• Romance Writing
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing
• Screenwriting
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Four Steps to Publishing Articles and Essays

by Melissa Petro

Having worked as a full-time freelance writer for just shy of a decade, I often find friends reach out to ask me how I do it, hoping that they, too, can get published.

A part of me wants to take umbrage—after all, you wouldn’t presume that just anyone could become a plumber or reach out to a dentist friend and expect them to direct message you everything they know about root canals. At the same time, I know my editors are just as interested in your personal journeys, passions, and opinions as they are in mine. And maybe they’re more interested in your story, because you’ve never told it before (whereas, like most writers with a beat, I’m a whiz at spinning the same narrative or making similar arguments every opportunity that I can).

To publish short nonfiction essays and articles online or in print, you need only follow a few basic steps—and they’re the same steps whether you’re a seasoned professional or a total newbie. Those of us who publish often take these same steps again and again.

1. Do your research

The first step is to acquaint yourself with the market. There are literally hundreds of places that want your writing. Familiarize yourself with what’s out there. Publications open and close quite frequently, so stay up to date. Read, read, read. Follow other writers and editors on social media. On Twitter, search the phrase “pitch me” to find editors seeking stories. There’s also a site called pitchwhiz.com that curates editors’ calls for pitches.

Learn the difference between a service piece and a feature, a personal essay and a reported piece framed by your personal experience. You don’t have to know all the lingo, but you do need to know what kind of writing various publications generally publish…although knowing the lingo will help when it comes to pitching your idea (more on that in a sec).

2. Make a love connection

Sometimes you have a completed essay or an idea for a piece that you’re eager to write. Find the right publication for that idea. Other times, we start with the publication in mind. Peruse the site. As you read, ask yourself: What do I have to contribute to the conversation? What hasn’t already been said?

You wouldn’t try to sell a steamy personal essay about the time you inadvertently attended a sex party to Real Simple . But that idea may be just right for Cosmopolitan or Vice . Similarly, you’d skip Playboy if you were looking to place a breezy service piece on caring for antique dinnerware or a fiery op-ed on the importance of physical education classes in school. Few ideas are inherently good or bad—it’s all about finding a good fit.

3. Make Contact

Once you’ve matched the perfect idea with the perfect publication, it’s time to pitch. A pitch or query letter is composed of three basic sections: a lede or introduction, “the what,” and your credentials as a writer and/or on the subject you’re pitching.

Let’s break that down further:

A lede is the start of your pitch. Maybe you start the pitch the same way you start the essay. If it’s a personal essay, that may be an anecdote. Lure us in with the inciting incident or an otherwise dramatic moment lifted from the story. Or maybe you’ll lede with a newspeg, something currently being talked about in the news. Explain clearly and concisely what’s going on (hyperlink it to a timely article). Answer a question: Why now?

The next section is “the what”—a paragraph or two that succinctly describes to the editor exactly what you’re offering, i.e. “I’d love to write a 1,200-word reported essay about the housing crisis in New York, and how poor and working class people like myself are being pushed out of the city we call home. Framed by my personal experience, the essay will explore how services in place to help people with rent fail to…” and so on.

If there’s a story with a beginning, middle, and end, spell that out. Explain the ending—avoid sentiments like “find out what happens when…” Instead, tell the editor what happens when. No cliffhangers. End this section with a sentence like, “Ultimately, readers need to know [what].” Tell us what your argument is. Tell us why the story matters. (If you didn’t lede with a newspeg and there is one, you might mention it here.)

The last section is a paragraph on your credentials as a writer and/or on the subject that you’re writing about. Why are you the perfect person to write this story? Answer this question here. If you’ve published similar writing before, send the editor links, often called clips. If you don’t have clips, that’s OK. Hopefully the story idea is unique enough—and you’ve proven yourself to be the right person to write it—that they’ll take a chance.

4. Hit send and follow up

Publications don’t make it hard to find editors’ contact information—so long as you’ve done your homework, they really do want your pitches. Go to the publication’s website and look for a section entitled “contact us,” “write for us,” “submission guidelines,” or something similar. If the submission guidelines ask you to do something other than what I’m telling you to do here, follow that editor’s instructions instead of mine (duh). Sometimes, for example, an editor will ask you to send a piece “on spec.” This means they only consider completed drafts rather than pitches. It’s up to you if you want to write an essay for them without the promise that they’ll publish it.

Few ideas are inherently good or bad—it’s all about finding a good fit.

After you’ve sent off your pitch, a couple things might happen. You might get an email back along the lines of, “I love this idea! It’s perfect.” Awesome, that means you’ve just scored an assignment. Other times, an editor might get back to you with a “maybe” response. Maybe they need to clear it with the editor above them. Or they might have questions. They may suggest a different angle or in some other way change your idea. The editor might take a while to respond, they might not respond at all, or you might get a rejection.

If you get a yes, excellent! From here, make sure you clarify the deadline (that’s when the editor expects you to turn in the story), and confirm your rate (that’s how much money the publication is paying you for your services). A rate for any given assignment can be anything from 0 dollars to thousands of dollars. Check out the site whopayswriters.com for an idea of how rates vary.

If the editor doesn’t respond to your pitch, follow up in a week or so. And if the answer is no, do not despair! Seasoned writers like myself get lots and lots of rejections.

The truth is that publishing short nonfiction is a lot less about talent than it is tenacity: If there’s any secret to becoming a published writer, it is learning to weather the rejections and silences.

Repeat the steps until you get your yes.

This article originally appeared in The Writer magazine

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How to get published.

You believe your research will make a contribution to your field, and you’re ready to share it with your peers far and wide, but how do you go about getting it published, and what exactly does that involve?  

If this is you, this page is a great place to start. Here you’ll find guidance to taking those first steps towards publication with confidence. From what to consider when choosing a journal, to how to submit an article and what happens next. 

Getting started

Choosing the right journal for you.

Submitting your article to a Sage journal

Promoting your article

Related resources you may find useful.

How to Get Your Journal Article Published guide

Our handy guide is a quick overview covering the publishing process from preparing your article and choosing a journal, to publication (5 minute read).

View the How to Get Your Journal Article Published guide

How to Get Published webinars

Free 1 hour monthly How to Get Published webinars cover topics including writing an article, navigating the peer review process, and what exactly it means when you hear “open access.” Join fellow researchers and expert speakers live, or watch our library of recordings on a variety of topics.

Browse our webinars  

Sage Perspectives blog

Looking for tips on how to make sure your article goes smoothly through the peer review process, or how to write the right title for your article?

Read our blog

Sage Campus courses

Want something a bit more in-depth? Sage Campus courses are short and interactive (around 2 hours each) and cover a range of skills, including how to get published. Your library may already subscribe to the modules, or you may want to recommend that they do. Meanwhile, you can utilize the free modules.

Explore Sage Campus

Each journal has its own Aims & Scope, so the acceptance of articles is not just about quality, but also about being a good fit. Does your work reflect the scope of the Journal? Is Open Access important to you, and does the Journal have an Open Access model available? What is the readership of the Journal, and is that readership the right audience for your work? Researching the best match for your manuscript will significantly improve your chances of being accepted.

Watch our 2 minute video

If you already know in which Sage journal you’d like to publish your work, search for it and check the manuscript submission guidelines to make sure it is a good match. Or use the Sage Journal Recommender to tell us your article title and subjects and see which journals are a potential home for your manuscript. Be prepared to adjust your manuscript to match the scope and style of the desired journal.

Find journals with the Sage Journal Recommender  or  browse all Sage journals

Professional presentation of your work includes a precise and clear writing style, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and formatting your article to meet the criteria of your chosen journal. All of these take time and may not be skills inherent to your field of research. Sage Author Services can help you to prepare your manuscript to comply with these and other related standards, which could significantly improve your chance of acceptance. 

Visit  Sage Author Services

Submitting your article to a Sage journal

You’ve identified the right journal; now you need to make sure your manuscript is the perfect fit. Following the author guidelines can be the difference between possible acceptance and rejection, so it’s definitely worth following the required guidelines. We’ve a selection of resources and guides to help:

Watch How to Get Published: Submitting Your Paper (2 minute video)

Read our Article Submission infographic , a quick reminder of essentials

Here you’ll find chapter and verse on all aspects of our Manuscript Submission Guidelines

Ready to submit? Our online Submission Checklist will help you do a final check before sending your article to us.

Each journal retains editorial independence, which means their Guidelines will vary, so do go to the home page of your chosen journal to check anything you should be aware of. You can submit your article there too.

The academic world is crowded, how can you make your article stand out? If you are active on social media platforms, telling your followers about your article is one of the simplest and most effective things you can do.

Between us, we can improve the chances of your article being found, read, downloaded and cited – of your article and you making an impact. Our tips and guidance will show you how to promote your article alongside building your academic profile.

Read our  tips on how to maximize your impact

• Open access at Sage
• Top reasons to publish with Sage
• How to do research and get published webinar series
• How to get published for librarians
• Sage Author Services
• Manuscript submission guidelines
• During peer review
• During and post publication
• Help and support
• Journal Editor Gateway
• Journal Reviewer Gateway
• Ethics & Responsibility
• Sage Editorial Policies
• Publication Ethics Policies
• Sage Chinese Author Gateway 中国作者资源

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How to Get Your First Piece of Writing Published

Think more about building relationships.

The Writing Cooperative

You’ve been writing for months, maybe even years. You’ve developed a fool-proof writing routine, and you bang out your word count every day. You’ve edited your works, polished them to a beautiful sheen. Now you’re ready to try and get some of your work published. Except where do you begin? As of this writing, there are over 5,000 journals for fiction, poetry, and non-fiction submissions (according to Duotrope). Almost all of these journals ask you to “sample” their work before submitting (a reasonable request), but you cannot reasonably sample the entire range of publications that exists today.

You need to develop a plan, and you need to allow yourself plenty of time to execute that plan. You will not land a success on your first try at publication. You may not even land a success on your hundredth. Keep going. Rejection is the name of the game, and it’s true for every writer, no matter how successful they have been in the past. Any writer who has “made it” carries a long list of rejections in their wake.

These seven steps will help you develop a publishing plan that works for you. Take your time in this process and move through the stages at your own pace. Publishing your work can be infuriating. Long wait times, reading costs, form rejections…

Written by Tom Beck

I want you to write better, conquer your fears, and pursue your creative dreams. Get my writing-routine checklist: https://tombeckwrites.ck.page/

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How to Submit Articles to Publications

Last Updated: March 2, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Janet Peischel . Janet Peischel is a Writer and Digital Media Expert and the Owner of Top of Mind Marketing. With more than 15 years of consulting experience, she develops content strategies and builds online brands for her clients. Prior to consulting, Janet spent over 15 years in the marketing industry, in positions such as the Vice President of Marketing Communications for the Bank of America. Janet holds a BA and MA from the University of Washington. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 100% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 173,314 times.

You've finally wrapped up the article you've been working so hard on and now it's ready for publication. But first, you have to submit it. Submitting your first article is an exciting process. There are different procedures depending on whether you are writing an academic article or a personal essay. Regardless of what type of work you produce, there are several steps you can take to make the process a little easier.

Choosing the Right Publication

• Start by doing your research. Use the internet to search for literary journals.
• Look at the website for each journal. Browse some of the past issues. This will give you a good idea of what types of articles that particular journal publishes.
• Head to the library. Ask the reference librarian to help you find a complete list of literary journals. Make sure that the journal you are interested in accepts unsolicited submissions.

• Make sure that your research fits the scope of the journal. For example, if you are a scholar of European history, do not submit your article to a journal that focuses solely on East Asian history.
• Verify that the publication is peer-reviewed. This means that other scholars will review your work.
• Be aware that it may take a while to receive an answer from the editor. The review process for academic journals can often take several months.

• There are several different types of publications that publish personal essays. Make sure to choose one who's readers might be interested in your story.
• Many newspapers publish personal essays in the magazine section of the paper. Major papers such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times publish these types of pieces.
• You might also consider submitting your essay to an online magazine. Popular publications such as Slate and Salon offer their readers essays on a wide variety of topics.

• Op-ed pieces are typically fairly brief. A common op-ed is usually between 400-1200 words.
• Most newspapers accept op-ed pieces on a variety of topics. You can find specific guidelines on the newspaper's website.
• Make your piece topical. If your op-ed is timely, it will have a better chance of being published. For example, a piece about veterans services might be appropriate to submit around Memorial Day.

• Try to avoid predatory publications. These are journals who charge exorbitant author fees and will publish almost anything.
• Academics often feel pressure to publish regularly. It's important not to be lured by promises of publication in exchange for high fees. These publications typically do not have rigorous standards.
• Fiction writers can also find magazines that will publish in exchange for money. These publications are typically not highly regarded. If you are asked for money before your article appears, consider whether this is the right venue for your work.
• Some publications that charge author fees are reputable. If you feel a fee is appropriate, make sure that you pay it using the specified method.

Preparing Your Article

• Make it clear why your article is original. For example, if you are writing an academic article, you can emphasize the new sources you've utilized.
• In your introduction, highlight the unique aspects of your research. For example, you might say, "Based on newly declassified sources,..."
• If you are submitting a personal essay, explain your point of view. Make it clear to the editor and the readers why your take on the topic is interesting. You could say, "My experience as a first time mother was different than most because..."

• After you produce a first draft, go back and edit for content. Make sure that the points you are trying to make are clear.
• Pay attention to organization. Do you make it clear at the beginning what the point of your article is? Is your conclusion thorough? Would reorganization help?
• Edit for grammatical/stylistic errors. Make sure that your spell check is set to check style as well as just grammar. Spend time carefully reading each sentence to make sure your piece is error free.

• Ask a friend to read your work. Try saying, "Do you have some time this week to read an article that I'm working on?"
• Accept constructive criticism. Don't take it personally if your friend offers you some tips for improvement.
• Choose a friend whose opinion you respect. This will make it easier to accept and utilize their feedback.

• Pay close attention to the guidelines. They are not merely suggestions. Many publications will not read your work if it does not fit the parameters of the guidelines.
• Adhere to the length requirements. Most journals will give you a word count for minimum and maximum length.
• Format your citations as specified. Some publications prefer endnotes, some require footnotes. Make sure you use whichever system the journal uses.

Submitting Your Article

• If your pitch is accepted, the editor will often request the article within a specific time frame. Make sure that you submit your article on time.
• If you are an academic, your first submission may receive what is called a "revise and resubmit". This means that your article shows promise, but needs some revisions.
• Submit your revised article in a timely manner. Ask the editor for a clear timeline, and then deliver the article by that deadline.

• Write down where you send which article. If you are working on multiple pieces at once, it is helpful to keep track of where you have sent various pieces.
• Make note of the date you send each submission. That way, you can have an idea of when you can expect to receive a response.
• Maintain records of any communication with the publication. For example, if the editor e-mails you with suggestions for future pieces, you will want to retain that organization.

• Do not take it personally. Understand that editors receive more submissions than can be published. Just because your article was not the best fit for that journal does not mean that your work is not good.
• Move on. Be ready to send the article on to the next publication on your list. And you should definitely have a list of publications that you would like to submit your work to.
• Do not respond. There is no need to follow up on a rejection note. While it might be tempting to express your frustrations, it is better to accept it gracefully and move on.

• Provide the editor with any information that is requested. You may be asked for contact info., for example.
• If your article is being considered at another publication, you should immediately withdraw it from consideration. Send a notification explaining that your article will be published elsewhere.
• Celebrate. Having a piece of writing accepted for publication is a great accomplishment. Congratulate yourself and share your good news with friends and family.

Expert Q&A

• Sharpen your expertise. You're not selling yourself as a writer--everyone who writes for a publication is theoretically a good writer. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• You're trying to convince an editor that your article is about something interesting and timely that will interest the reader, and that you're someone who knows how to communicate that topic. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Keep trying. It takes most people quite a lot of time to get their first article published. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/
• ↑ http://thewritelife.com/19-websites-magazines-want-publish-personal-essays/
• ↑ Janet Peischel. Digital Media Expert. Expert Interview. 30 March 2021.
• ↑ https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-New-York-Times-Opinion-Guest-Essays
• ↑ http://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/practical-guide/target-journal-right-research-communicate-publish.html
• ↑ http://www.studentpulse.com/blog/posts/51/5-tips-for-publishing-your-first-academic-article/
• ↑ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/reading-aloud/
• ↑ http://www.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/AuthorInformation
• ↑ http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun03/eight-tips-for-getting-published-in-magazines-6036

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PROFESSIONAL WRITING TIPS

Step by step guide to getting your essay published and paid, now you know exactly what you need to do.

Christine Schoenwald

The Penny Pub

Many people say they’re experts but are lacking in real-world experience or knowledge. When I say I’m a personal essay expert I can back that up. As a freelance writer, I’ve had essays published in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Business Insider, Next Avenue, Your Tango, Bustle, and Women’s Day to name a few.

I’ve taught writing at Disney, Writing Pad, and Bang Improv Studio and I’ve read some of my essays in spoken word shows all over Southern Calif. and in New York.

If that’s not enough, I was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart prize.

When it comes to publishing, performing, and getting paid for personal essays, I know what I’m talking about. Soon, I hope to be sharing my expertise online with two essay courses.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the process of getting your work out into the world. I’ve made this simple guide that I promise you if you follow it, you’ll be seeing your byline all over.

How to be a published and paid writer.

1. Write down 5 topics you love to talk about. It can be travel, tech, animals, relationships, psychology, dogs…

Written by Christine Schoenwald

Writer for The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Next Avenue, Business Insider, and Your Tango Christineschoenwaldwriter.com

Text to speech

Write Nonfiction NOW!

5 Tips To Help You Publish A Personal Essay

November 4, 2010 By nawnfinimport 4 Comments

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If writing a memoir feels like too big a project for the WNFIN challenge or you have no interest in writing a book, you might try composing a personal essay. This allows you to take a vignette, anecdote or scene from your life and write a piece based upon that experience that is closer to the length of a magazine or newspaper article. I’ve written several posts in the past on the  topic  of how to write an essay, such as this one , this one , and this one , too.

My guest blogger today comes from Writer’s Relief , an author’s submission service that assists writers with preparing their submissions and researching the best markets for those submissions. The five tips they offer cover ways to write and to submit your essay for greater likelihood of success, by which I mean acceptance by a publication. I encourage anyone who decides to write a personal essay during WNFIN (or anytime) to polish it up, find a few great markets, and submit! There’s nothing like getting an acceptance letter and a check for a personal essay. And if at first you don’ t succeed–you receive one or more rejection letters, just tell yourself you’ve sent your essay to the wrong editor and find the right one.

5 Tips To Help You Publish A Personal Essay By Writer’s Relief

Writing a personal essay is a personal experience—and as such, what matters most is your experience of your writing and your satisfaction with the work you’ve done. But if you’d like to see your personal essay published in a literary journal or magazine, here are a few specific things you can do to help ensure your work will get a strong read:

1. Keep it short. Thanks to the Internet, the days of long, rambling personal essays and memoirs are gone. Most modern readers are rushed, distracted, and looking for some level of instant payoff when they begin to read an essay. At Writer’s Relief, we advise our clients not to write essays that are longer than 3,500 words. And if you’re thinking of targeting online literary magazines (which are a great resource), you may want to aim for an even lower word count. With short prose, less is more!

2. Get engaged. No, we’re not talking about weddings. We’re talking about current events and the modern world. Essays that are reflections on the way we live today—especially those that tackle “big” issues in a personal way—are often favorably received at literary magazines. So if you can put a personal spin on a big issue—like foreclosure, obesity, racism, or any other social issue—you may be able to get a foot in the door at a literary magazine.

3. “Tell me something I don’t know.” You’ve heard there are no new ideas. But the fact is, no one can replicate your particular view of the world. For that reason, editors at literary magazines continue to accept prose that offers new viewpoints of modern work and play. But in order for your prose to be compelling, you’ve got to push for deeper, more surprising, and more insightful explorations. You’re competing for space when you submit to a literary magazine, and if your insights are stronger than the competition’s, then you’re in!

4. Check your ego at the door. Just because you’re writing a personal essay, doesn’t mean you can indulge in your every last whim of hedonism. Essays that are about “me, me, me” and “I, I, I” are not likely to be published. Strive to paint a bigger picture—to show how your experiences are relevant to all people—and you’ll turn editors into fans.

5. Submit your essays to the best-suited editors. If you’re going to submit your personal essay, you’ve got to know the right people to send your work to. At Writer’s Relief, we’ve got a database of thousands of editors who are accepting essays—and we track which editors like what specific type of work.

But you can also do this kind of research on your own. Spend time at the library or on the Web to determine which magazines are right for you, then send out your work regularly. Expect rejections and strive for acceptances. Although the odds may seem staggering, we see writers’ work being accepted all the time!

While personal essays are personal, it’s helpful to know what readers and editors are looking for when they read your work. We hope these tips will help you get published. Happy writing!

About the Author

Writer’s Relief ( www.WritersRelief.com ) is an author’s submission service. We assist writers with preparing their submissions and researching the best markets. We have a service for every budget, as well as a free e-publication for writers, Submit Write Now! Visit our site today to learn more.

Sign in as a WNFIN participant here . Log into the WNFIN Forum here .

April 24, 2013 at 4:13 pm

With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright infringement?

My blog has a lot of completely unique content I’ve either authored myself or outsourced but it appears a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my authorization. Do you know any methods to help prevent content from being ripped off? I’d certainly appreciate it.

April 25, 2013 at 10:11 am

There are some plugins that time stamp your material to prove you published it first. You can put a copyright symbol on your home page and also a notice somewhere saying the material may not be used without permission, but there are some that will still take it and use it without attribution. It actually is quite rare. I have one site now doing it with some of my material…and no way to even contact them. Usually if you can find a way to contact them, they will take it down or add attribution. Most legit bloggers will attribute. The good news is you are being found. If your site had no traffic, your material wouldn’t get “scraped.” As they say, you have more to fear of obscurity than plagorism. Sorry I can’t be of more help. Do try to contact the site owner, though.

[…] essay to the wrong editor and find the right one. You can read Writer’s Relief’s “5 Tips To Help You Publish A Personal Essay” here. Share and […]

[…] just tell yourself you’ve sent your essay to the wrong editor and find the right one. Click here to read “5 Tips To Help You Publish A Personal Essay.” Share and […]

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How To Get Published on The Huffington Post

I’ve always wanted to be featured on the Huffington Post but never got around to doing it due to a lack of time.

Well, I finally got around to doing it, and my article on my lessons learned as a young online entrepreneur is now live on HuffPost Business.

If you haven’t heard of The Huffington Post, it’s one of the biggest publishing websites of the world.

Here’s how you can get published on HuffPost too.

Update from Raelyn:

As of 19 Jan 2018, The Huffington Post announced that it will be shutting down its contributor blogging platform “to improve the editorial quality of the news site and cut down on unvetted reporting.”

Well, it’s not the end of the world. There are still other places to guest post and be featured at. For now, I have a free masterclass that you may be interested in:

Need more traffic and subscribers? Sign up for my FREE traffic & list building workshop, where I go through 3 of the most effective strategies that have allowed me to grow my email list exponentially:

1. Before You Begin…

You need to have…

• Your author bio ready (a short one will do)
• Your headshot ready

Why would anyone even want to submit to The Huffington Post?

• A backlink to your website from one of the largest website of the world
• Bragging rights
• Credibility to you as an author and blogger
• More visitors & traffic to your website via your author bio, which will also help you get more subscribers (after all, The Huffington Post is huge)

2. Here’s How to Write an Article That Gets Accepted

The best way to ensure you get accepted is to write something that you’re proud of. Don’t write a half-past-six article and expect it to get through.  If you write a great article, The Huffington Post will definitely publish it!

Some super helpful pointers that will help your article get accepted by HuffPost:

• The Huffington Post loves articles that are emotional, so write about personal experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
• Stick to a tried-and-tested format, such as how-to and list posts.
• Use an eye-catching title.
• Keep it around 800 words.
• Check out the most popular articles in your vertical of interest and see what does well.

It does not matter which vertical your first article is about, once you get accepted as a contributor, you’ll be able to publish articles to other verticals in The Huffington Post. [Tweet “Here’s how to write an article that gets accepted on The Huffington Post! “]

3. Send This Email to Arianna Huffington

Her email is arianna[at]huffingtonpost.com.

Alternatively, you can send it to the editors of the vertical of your interest. But if you can reach the boss herself and she doesn’t mind, why not?

I’m not too sure if it’s actually Arianna herself that answers all her emails, but it gets the job done anyway. 😛

Make sure you copy the article into the email (not in an attachment). This makes it easier for her to read your article and decide if it’s a yes or no. 

This is the email I used, feel free to copy it. 🙂

Email Subject:  Article Submission: (your article title) Dear Arianna, I hope that you’re doing well. Firstly thank you so much for creating The Huffington Post, I absolutely love it and read it almost everyday to ________! I’m (your name) , a (what you do)  over at (your website) . It would be an absolute honour if I could submit my article titled (your article title)  to The Huffington Post. I sincerely believe that it will benefit ____. I’ve attached the full article and a short bio/ headshot/social media links in the PDF attached in case it’s needed! I have also copied the full article below as well for easier persual. Thank you so much for your time! Sincerely, (Your full name) — <Paste your full article here.>

Attach a PDF to your email too. The PDF should contain the article, your author bio, headshot and social media links.

4. What Happens After?

If accepted, Arianna will respond in the affirmative. I sent my email to Arianna 8th November, and she responded on 20th November.

On the same day, you’ll receive an invite to sign up to the Huffpost Blogger Community.

After you’ve signed up, you’ll have your very own account where you will publish your article on the site.

5. Just Do It.

Here’s proof that just FOLLOWING this article will get your article published:

It’s honestly much easier than you think, once you’ve someone like me to teach you how. 😛

Give the editor at least 4-6 weeks before checking in again if you don’t get a response.

The best way to avoid a dead response is to have an excellent article (see point 2). Just do it!

I hope this helps.  Yes, you’re welcome. 😉

xx Raelyn 🙂

P.S. If you need help to get more traffic and grow your email list, sign up for my FREE traffic & list building workshop, where I go through 3 of the most effective strategies that have allowed me to grow my email list exponentially:

A tiny request: If you liked this post, please share this?

I know most people don’t share because they feel that us bloggers don’t need their “tiny” social share. But here’s the truth…

I built this blog piece by piece, one small share at a time, and will continue to do so. So thank you so much for your support, my reader.

A share from you would seriously help a lot with the growth of this blog.

Some great suggestions: –  Pin it!  (I even made a pretty pin for ya!) –  Share it to your favorite blog + biz Facebook group –  Tweet it!

It won’t take more than 10 seconds of your time. The share buttons are right here. 🙂

Thank you so much!

If you enjoyed this post, get updates from me. (it’s FREE)

You’re awesome for staying till the end.  Signup for my newsletter below.

I send email updates about new posts, and tips and tricks to build & monetize your online business.

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How to Get Published

The world of publishing: a guide for writers

It can be hard as a new writer to understand how the document saved on your laptop could ever make it onto the shelves of your local bookshop. Here’s our guide to navigating the publishing process as an aspiring author.

Tips on fitting writing around...

Family commitments by sara collins.

When my children were younger I worked full time as a lawyer, convinced that I’d always be too busy to attempt to write a novel. It’s no good having a room of your own if it’s forever being invaded by the demands of school drop-offs, or homework, or four out of five children ill with chicken pox at the same time as you have a major deal to negotiate at work. But after a milestone birthday, and my youngest child starting secondary school, my attitude changed.

The first step is accepting that it might be slow, but that it will be possible. A book is built word by word. Guided by that idea, you can schedule writing into whatever time you have to spare, without worrying about whether it’s enough. Mark it on your calendar; think of it as making an appointment with your own ambition.

The second step is to accept your limitations. I read once that Alice Munro wrote short stories instead of novels because as a mother of small children her time was measured in fragments. If she had to write what she could fit in, you can too. But you won’t write anything if you don’t start. The only regret I have is that I left it so long.

I suppose the best advice for busy parents who want to write is: do what you can, when you can. Approach whatever that is in a spirit of acceptance, and you will build your novel, word by word.

Sara Collins 's debut novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton was published in April 2019.

Work by Mohsin Zaidi

First thing first: there is no magic formula. Whichever way you cut it, trying to write a book and maintain a job at the same time can feel like trying to ride a bicycle and write a book at the same time.

For this reason, my first tip is make sure you enjoy it. There were certain evenings when I really felt like I should write but I didn’t want to. So I didn’t. Listen to yourself. Get off the bike. Sometimes. Your work product will thank you for it.

That’s all well and good, I hear you say, but what if I listen to myself too much and never sit down to write? Good question (if I do say so myself), and the answer is in my second tip...

This is where having an achievable plan comes in. Don’t set an unrealistic target. I once told myself I wasn’t allowed to leave the library until I'd finished the chapter I was working on. After seven precious weekend hours, I succeeded. But I was exhausted, so didn’t write anything else for weeks and, the real kick to the gut, the chapter was edited out entirely, probably because I was more concerned with typing words to meet targets than to inspire readers.

So, third and final tip: balance. Now, I’m cheating because this is really a combination of tip one and tip two, but balance is key. Let yourself enjoy it but know that if you didn’t get any time off, you might end up resenting it and resenting something you love would be awful. Set realistic goals and make sacrifices; evenings or weekends but not both. Otherwise you might get too tired. And you don’t want your writing to be tiring, you want it to be inspiring.

Mohsin Zaidi is a barrister and author. He was selected for the WriteNow 2017 programme and is writing a memoir.

Financial concerns by Jane Corry

As a writer, I’ve gone through periods of earning quite a lot of money and times when I‘ve rooted through my old handbags, hoping to find some spare change. If you don’t have a book contract that provides you with peace of mind, the best piece of advice I can offer is to have a part-time job that can just about pay the bills while giving you enough hours in the day to write.

Ideally, this job should be creative, otherwise you might find your soul being sucked out of you. For example, before I was published as an author, I used to write regular features for a women’s magazine in the morning and then spend my afternoons writing novels in the hope of getting published. Later, after my divorce, I took a job as a writer in a prison, which, again, helped pay the bills but gave me two days a week to write novels. I also ran writing classes round my kitchen table and worked into the small hours as a tutor for online writing courses.

You might well find that a paid part-time job actually feeds your writing. For example, the prison work inspired me to write psychological suspense, which led to a contract with Penguin.

Another tip is to explore your ‘best’ writing time. I used to think I could only write in the morning because that was when I was freshest. But when I worked at the prison I had to write in the evening instead. At first this was hard but then I discovered that I had a ‘second wind’ between 7pm and 9pm. This was a useful find!

The fear of not having enough money can affect your creativity, so I’d like to flag up certain organisations that can help writers in financial difficulties. The Royal Literary Fund provides grants and pensions besides running a fellowship scheme in which authors are paid to foster good writing practice in universities. The Society of Authors also offers financial assistance. Good luck!

Jane Corry is the author of a number of novels published by Viking , including I Looked Away .

How to know when your book is ready

Five questions on life as a writer with Claire Malcolm

Claire Malcolm is the founding Chief Executive of the writer development charity New Writing North . Here, she answers some questions commonly asked by new writers.

• Do writers have to go on paid writing courses to be a published author? No. However, in my experience many writers find that undertaking training of some kind can help them to finesse their craft and make improvements to their work. They can also benefit from meeting and working with others who have similar creative ambitions. Signing up to some kind of study can also help to set timescales to drive the completion of work, keep your energy and motivation going, and perhaps offer ways to get critical feedback on your work as it progresses, which are all important when you're aiming to work professionally as an author.
• Is there any financial support available for authors? Yes. When you are applying for funds it’s worth remembering that you will be in competition with many other writers and you will need to prepare yourself to experience knock-backs as well as success. Arts Council England offers funding and support for writers, though it helps if you have a track record that demonstrates that publishers, competition judges and other producers are supportive of your work. With bids to Arts Council England you can also build in costs for access, mentoring, childcare, etc. There are lots of regional and national awards and competitions for writers, such as the Northern Writers' Awards and the competitions run by Mslexia.
• Should I consider going on a writing retreat? I know writers who plan to take focused time out to work or to rework and edit material. Sometimes a change of scene or removal from day-to-day responsibilities can help you pick up the pace or solve problems. I know writers who have house-swapped or booked an Airbnb room for a week to get on with work. Of course, that’s not possible for everyone. More important, in the long run, is working out how you can write day to day.
• What should and shouldn’t I be paying for as a writer? Don't ever pay a publisher to publish your work, and be very careful about some of the packages that are offered if you are considering self-publishing. To support your creative work you might pay for mentoring, professional manuscript appraisal, editing support or training opportunities, although this is not required to get published. If you have one, you pay your literary agent a percentage of your contracted income, as their business advice will no doubt be earning you more than you would be otherwise. A subscription to the Society of Authors is also worthwhile for advice on contracts and other aspects of a writer’s professional life.
• What support do regional writing charities like New Writing North provide for writers? We act as brokers for writers with publishers and producers and are a central point for networking, professional development activities and advice, and for hearing about opportunities for new writers. At New Writing North we run a year-round programme of awards, broadcast opportunities, open commissioning calls, residency projects, and training and conference events. We also offer paid work for writers and support writers working with young people and within the community.

Most major publishers don’t accept manuscripts directly from writers, which means that to get your book published you will often need to get a literary agent as a key early step. Literary agents take a cut of what you earn from your book in return for finding the right publisher for you, negotiating the best possible price and supporting your career development as a writer.

A day in the life of an agent

Niki Chang is a literary agent at The Good Literary Agency , a social enterprise which aims to discover, develop and launch the careers of writers of colour, or living with a disability, from a working-class background, who are LGBTQ+, or anyone who feels their story is not being told in the mainstream. Here, she reveals what a typical working day looks like.

9am Emails, emails, emails! Inevitably, so much of our business happens over email, so the first thing I do when I get in is check my emails. Urgent emails will be replied to at home before I leave for the office. We try to keep office hours for responding to emails unless it’s an emergency. Some days I will then switch off my email alerts and phone calls for the morning so that I can do an edit on a client's manuscript prior to submission, or read through submissions from writers looking for representation.

10am Meet with a prospective author. I will have read their work and would like to discuss it with them. This is also a chance for them to ask me about what I do and how we work as an agency. It’s also an opportunity to get to know each other as the agent-author relationship is a personal as well as a professional one. All being well, I will offer them representation and hopefully they will accept. We always encourage prospective authors to talk to other agents too before they make a decision.

11am We might have a quick agency meeting where we update each other with the latest news, what stage our authors are at with their manuscripts and what response we are getting to a book that is on submission. In the absence of an agency meeting, we are a very small, very collaborative and supportive team, so we are constantly chatting to each other throughout the day anyway, either in person or on Slack, a messaging app. We are greater than the sum of our parts and Slack functions as a sounding board where we can swap advice and ideas.

12pm Prepare a manuscript before submitting to editors for their consideration. This involves selecting which editors I want to send the manuscript to, writing a submission letter to the editor which will accompany the manuscript, and telling them a bit about the book and why it’s so brilliant. I usually call these editors to discuss the author and their work before sending over the manuscript via email.

1pm Meet an editor for lunch to catch up. We might discuss what’s going on in the industry, what books they’ve bought or published recently, what books I’ve sold recently. We might also discuss books they have tried to buy but which they lost to another publisher, as well as what books they would kill to publish. I will also ‘pitch’ them books I am going to send out soon so that they are on standby to receive them. We all work hard to maintain relationships across the industry. Editors receive dozens of submissions from agents every day, so if they are expecting yours, they will hopefully prioritize it.

2pm Phone call with an author, for a general catch-up, to talk about their work or to talk through something they are worried about. It’s my job either to reassure them what they are concerned about is normal, or to take action if it’s not. Likewise, I might call an editor to discuss a cover design that is not quite right, ask for sales figures for a book that’s been published, or look at publicity and marketing plans for a book that will be published soon.

3pm Sending out an author’s book to a select list of editors is like matchmaking – we are trying to find the best home for an author and their book. If it’s a good week, I’ll have at least one offer from a publisher to acquire an author’s book. If more than one publisher wants to acquire the book, the fairest way to decide is to hold an auction. I set the rules of the auction to make sure it’s a level playing field for the publishers. We might go in to meet the editor and their team to talk through their ideas and vision for how they will publish the book. As agent, it’s my duty to look after my author’s best interests and advise them accordingly, bringing my experience of the industry to the conversation as well as listening to what they want and what is important to them. Auction or not, I will negotiate the best deal possible with the editor.

4pm Coffee with a literary scout or our foreign rights team to discuss what the foreign markets are doing as well as plan submissions of our authors’ books to foreign publishers for translation.

4.30pm Discuss submissions with our assistant. At The Good Literary Agency we have an in-house development editor as well as freelance editors who may work on our authors’ manuscripts. And while our assistant is often the first person to read our submissions, we all look at the ones that are most promising so we can decide whether to offer representation, discuss what work we think might need to be done before we do or give the most constructive feedback we can.

5pm Review, negotiate and finalise contracts for the deals that have been agreed with publishers. This involves negotiating the best terms for our clients, answering any queries they might have on the contract and then getting them to sign on the dotted line! We keep an eye on the money to make sure our clients get paid as quickly as possible.

The thing about agenting is that every day is different. But a lot of our job takes place outside office hours and might include the following on any given evening ...

• Give a talk to aspiring writers, students who are studying creative writing, literary festivals etc.
• Judge a literary prize
• Attend a party held by a publisher. Authors, agents and all manner of people from the industry will be invited to attend. This is an opportunity to catch up with familiar faces, meet new people or even fangirl over a dream author, but they can also be tiring and take up your precious free time – they are also not obligatory.
• An author’s book launch. Budgets are smaller these days so most books are not celebrated with a launch per se – the editor, agent and author might go out for lunch or dinner – but they do still happen, usually in a bookshop.
• Try to read for pleasure when possible!

Dos and don'ts of approaching literary agents

The publisher

Our role as publisher is to work on your manuscript alongside you and your literary agent to make your book the best it can possibly be. we then bring together experts from across our business, including design, sales, publicity and marketing, to connect your book with as many readers as possible around the world..

What editors are looking for

What if you’re writing for children or young adults?

Children’s books vary hugely from cloth and board books for our youngest readers, up to young adult fiction for teenagers. Here, three of the team from Penguin Random House Children’s talk about what they’re looking for.

Joe Marriott, Picture Book Commissioning Editor

I work with a team of designers and editors making picture books for babies and readers between 2 and 6, both stories and illustrated non-fiction. I’m looking for original texts and ideas (and illustrations) that are funny, clever, surprising or heart-warming. Key elements to think about are a clever or thought-provoking scenario, memorable characters and a structure that allows every page, and word, to count.

I usually know quickly whether I like something, but ultimately it must have broad appeal beyond just me – and be right for the mix on our specific picture book list. This involves discussions with many different areas of the business.

As an adult looking for ideas that will entertain children I need to tap into the part of me that loved books, stories and ideas as a child. I also think about what works when I read books to children – and what appeals to me as a grown-up; it’s important not to lose sight of the adult reader, who needs to enjoy reading and re-reading the book to their child.

Most important is the child’s reaction – it’s key that they are engaged and entertained, but there should always be something that makes them think, and opens a conversation – however silly or serious.

Millie Lean, Assistant Editor

Editors are looking for so many different things in middle-grade submissions (books for 8 to 11 year-olds, although the term ‘middle-grade’ can be used to encompass anything for ages 6- 13), but a combination of being fresh, full of heart, unique, and unputdownable with brilliant writing is a great place to start. Each editor has different tastes in genre, writing style and voice, but literary agents are great at knowing who the right person is for your manuscript.

It is always great to bear in mind which books are already doing well in the children’s market and why. You can do this as easily as going to a bookshop or looking at the Amazon bestseller pages. Do you notice any similarities between what you want to write, the top-selling titles and the books that the shop is promoting the most? Which titles would you place your story between on the shelf?

It is also important to define why your book is similar to but different from market comparisons. Make your story stand out and fill a gap in the market. Think about what you represent as an author, and if there is anything about the way that you view the world and what you really want to say which you could utilise to make your manuscript unique.

The next step is to test your work on real-life children! Think about whether each child picking it up would feel represented in your story. Make sure that if you want your book to be funny the humour is actually laugh-out-loud hilarious for kids. The most successful middle-grade stories, like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series or Roald Dahl ’s books, are fabulously entertaining and accessible for kids (and parents love them because their child loves reading them)!

Children’s books have the power to shape a young person’s understanding of the world and help them develop a love of reading which can stay with them for the rest of their life. Publishers want kids to love our books, for reading to be fun, and for all children to be able to see themselves in the books we publish.

Carmen McCullough, Commissioning Editor

What I look for in a young adult book can vary quite a lot depending on what stories are resonating with the current young-adult audience. Most importantly though, I look for strong immersive writing – voice-led stories with distinctive characters that you feel invested in from the very first page. I also feel strongly that every child or young adult should be able to see themselves in a book, so I am particularly keen to publish diverse stories that reflect the world we live in.

Liking a book is instinctive, and if you feel a genuine passion for it, then it’s highly likely that it is publishable as there will be other readers who feel as strongly as you do. The question you then ask is how you would position the book in the market and whether it would be for a very broad audience or a more limited one because of the type of story that it is. A great story is a great story whether it’s aimed at children or at adults.

As a children’s book editor, I’m always interested in what is appealing to children or young adults at the moment (whether that’s books, films, games), but ultimately if you have a brilliant story then you feel confident that readers will enjoy it.

More than anything, I want readers to enjoy the books we publish – whether a story is funny or sad, dark or uplifting, I want them to feel that they were able to really engage with the story and characters and that the experience encourages them to keep reading.

The acquisition meeting

The key moment a publisher decides which books to ‘acquire’.

Publishers regularly have ‘acquisition meetings’, which is when new manuscripts for possible publication are discussed. This meeting involves people from a variety of departments who all give their input as to whether a book should be acquired, or bought for publication. Here, the team from our publishing house Cornerstone explain some of the factors which affect their decision making.

The Managing Director: Susan Sandon

As chair of our weekly acquisitions meeting I try to ensure that an editor is given the time and space to pitch their project and that the ensuing discussion gives all the meeting’s participants a chance to express their view. I’m always interested in how passionate the acquiring editor is: it’s hard to make a success of a book you don’t wholeheartedly believe in – inspiring and rallying the team are such key parts of the publisher’s role. Much of what I am looking for crosses over with other attendees at the meeting: is there a market for the book, how big is it, do we have a clear view of how we might target the audience, should we be trying to acquire world rights in it, what format ought it to be, what price could it take and when might we publish?

Because our publishing house, Cornerstone, is made up of individual imprints with different editors acquiring for each imprint, it’s also my job to join the dots and think about how the book fits into our overall Cornerstone list. This is so that we don’t, for example, have a glut of first novels all publishing at the same time.

I will also be thinking about workloads: have we enough room to take the book on or does it need to be published at a point when sales, marketing and publicity already have their hands full? Is the editor being realistic about the work they will need to do with the author and have they the space to take it on among their other projects?   

Before the book is acquired I will also appraise the project financially together with our Head of Commercial Affairs, determining whether it meets our financial criteria and what level we might set the advance at.

The editor: Tom Avery, Editorial Director at William Heinemann

For editors, the acquisitions meeting is a chance to present the new titles we would like to publish to our colleagues. It is the biggest step in what can be a long process, starting with speaking to an agent or writer or receiving a submission, and ending (hopefully) with the acquisition of the project. In between there are many stages, from imprint editorial meetings to extensive research, to conversations with colleagues across the company. The acquisitions meeting is the key moment when we decide, collectively, if we are going to pursue a project.

My job at the acquisitions meeting is to communicate three connected things to my colleagues.

Firstly, my passion. There is no better feeling than reading a submission and falling in love with it, and knowing how you will be able to publish it successfully. I try to spend a bit of time in each presentation describing and explaining not only why I care so much about the project, but why I think everyone will.

Following this is the question of why I think the project I am raising is worth us pursuing, taking into consideration its subject and approach, the author’s profile and publishing history, and where it sits in the market and what gap it might fill (including a mention of any suitable comparable titles).

Lastly, I have to clearly set out my vision for how we would publish the project, including publication date, format (size and shape), price, and, more broadly, how we would get it into the hands of as many people as possible.

The sales rep: Claire Simmonds, Sales Manager

In the acquisition meeting, my role is to identify the sales potential of a proposal. This involves identifying what retailers I think the book will sell through, across all formats, and to what level. My team’s job is to flag the opportunities a book presents in regards to our retailers and the potential challenges that could arise. Initially, I decide this through analysing the current market and trends, and where I see the proposal sitting within this.

The acquisitions meeting is, then, a great forum to discuss the editorial, publicity and marketing vision for the proposal, which further helps us determine the overall sales potential. We discuss what publication date, format and RRP (recommended retail price) we think will give the book the best chance of getting into the hands of as many people as possible. Once we have determined if we want to pitch for a book, sales then provide our sales forecast, which needs to be a fine balance between being both realistic and ambitious.

No two books are ever the same and so the meeting is always full of fresh discussions and brilliant energy.

The publicist: Charlotte Bush, Director of Publicity and Media Relations

My role is to look for the publicity potential in a book and give feedback on what the media opportunities might be.

For a non-fiction book I’m looking for media hooks – is there a special date this book would launch on or is it a particularly timely idea? Has the author had exclusive access, or do they show special expertise and/or originality?

For fiction the approach is slightly different: perhaps the author has an interesting backstory that they would be willing to talk about, or there may be a connection between the novel or its’ characters and a real-life story. And if the author is already in the public eye I will look into previous interviews and their social media profile too.

I’ll also involve other members of my team: they may have more expertise in certain areas or be closer to a current trend. At this stage it is all about putting yourself into the shoes of a journalist and sometimes playing devil’s advocate!

The marketer: Rebecca Ikin, Marketing Director

The marketing team will read and review every title ahead of the weekly acquisitions meeting. Marketing are involved at this early stage to help identify the book’s potential target market – who the book is for and how will we go about reaching them. We also consider how efficiently we can promote the book and what marketing budget we will need for the project.

We help the meeting understand the audience (who the book is for), positioning (the hook of the book and what will capture imaginations or help set it apart) and platform (market trends and demand or the individual’s profile).

At Penguin Random House we use audience segmentation and also run desk research, using tools like social media listening software or YouGov consumer data – particularly for non-fiction where we might be considering a new idea or a personality with a public profile.

We hope to blend that data and research with our collective and varied experience and instincts (built up over many years) with, of course, a more immediate response to the book and the writing. After all, you still want to be blown away by what’s on the page, and when that happens it’s incredible; the whole meeting is energized. It’s still the most exciting thing for us all, a real privilege in fact.

When lots of other publishing houses also have that same reaction, then an auction can get very heated. In those situations, marketing will work really closely with editorial and also very quickly (sometimes over just 24 hours) to pitch for the book to the author and agent. In those cases we are outlining (writing and designing) our entire publishing vision and promotional strategy for the book and hoping that our ambition and passion for it helps us win the book. It’s intense but can be hugely rewarding if your highly concentrated efforts pay off!

Jargon buster

Returns, rights, royalties. Synopsis, slush pile, subsidiary rights.

At times, it can seem like the words used by the world of publishing are just nonsense sounds, there to deliberately confuse you or make it harder for you to get a foot in the door.

But, while publishing has its own language, it's not as impenetrable as you might think. To help, we've compiled a handy jargon buster which gives you clear definitions of all the terms you need to know as a writer. You'll soon know the difference between an ARC and a proof (hint: there is none) and publishing will be a puzzle no more.

Read our jargon buster here.

What does an editor do?

Ask the editors: dealing with feedback

Getting feedback from an editor for the first time can be a daunting process. Here, four editors answer some common queries from writers.

My editor’s just sent me the first letter about my book, and it’s so long. Does this mean my book is awful?

Simon Prosser, Publishing Director at Hamish Hamilton : Not at all. It may mean the book is terrific – but could be even better still. Perhaps the plot is complex and needs fine-tuning; perhaps there is a compelling character who could be given more space; perhaps there are unconscious repetitions of phrase or idea which need cutting or replacing; perhaps there is a tendency to say too much, when condensing would give the writing more strength.

An editor’s job at this stage is to be the writer’s ideal reader: which is to read with the utmost sympathy and understanding of what the writer is trying to achieve, while at the same time maintaining as objective an eye as possible, remaining alert to any ways in which the work can be improved. Even the simplest novel is a complex structure, with many moveable parts. And even a novel composed of individually perfect sentences may be imperfect – but, with luck, perfectible.

I thought the editor bought my book because they thought it was great. Why am I getting feedback?

Joel Richardson, crime and thriller Publisher at Penguin : Firstly, they did buy the book because they thought it was great! Editors are incredibly selective, so the fact that they’ve acquired your book means they think it’s something special.

That said, unless you’re the first person ever to write the perfect book (if so, congratulations!), the next stage is making sure it’s as good as it can be before it publishes. You’ve been working on the manuscript for an awfully long time, and so it’s nearly impossible for you to appraise it with fresh eyes. Do your characters come across the way you want them to? Will your twist ending successfully take readers by surprise? Those are questions only a new reader can answer.

In that sense, if an edit wasn’t focused on what could be improved, then it’s not really doing its job. Trust your editor to share your goal of making a great book even better, and look at everything they say with an open mind – and ask questions yourself if you don’t understand something, or don’t agree. There might still be hard work to go, but it will be worth it when you finally finish, and know that you left no stone unturned in making your book brilliant.

My editor’s asked me to change something I really love. Do I have to change it?

Andrea Henry, Editorial Director at Transworld : The work of a good editor can make all the difference, so listening carefully to what your editor has to say can be crucial to a book’s success. When you’ve perhaps spent years writing, investing time, energy and emotion, it becomes your baby and you feel protective of it. But it can become hard to see the wood for the trees. Your editor is reading with fresh eyes – seeing things more clearly than you might now be able to.

You might not always like what they’ve got to say and the edit can feel like a nit-picky process, in which your hard work is scrutinized and found lacking. If they’re trying to change something you love, be open to the conversation. You can push back and argue the toss, arrive at a compromise, or indeed reject suggestions that you feel really strongly about. But you’ll need to be able to justify your decision. The key thing is always to take your editor’s thoughts seriously. Keep in mind that, despite finding flaws, they loved your book enough to want to publish it. It’s their baby too now, and they’re there to help make your book the best it can be.

I’ve got so much to do and I’m not sure I’m going to get it done by the deadline. What should I do?

Ruth Knowles, Publisher at Puffin : Talk to us: we’re here to be your partner in this process, to help you make your book the very best it can be - and you absolutely don’t need to carry this worry alone. It’s always better to over-communicate rather than just stay silent, and it’s extremely likely that there’s some more time in any deadline to be found.  Talking to your editor can help you unpick what’s causing the writing to feel hard or not right to you as well, and we’re so proud to be publishing you and working with you we’ll be delighted to be involved in even the most tricky bit of the process, I promise.

It can be good to take a break from struggling over the same section of the book too. Maybe try writing a couple of pages from a different character’s perspective or jump to a scene later in the book. It can free you up creatively and energise you for coming back to a section you’d previously found tricky.

The moment you've been waiting for - holding your published book in your hands - is a special one for writer, agent and publisher. It's likely that your book will also be published as an ebook and audio book. While it varies hugely how quickly a book is published, for many debut authors it can take around a year from when your book is acquired to publication day - allowing us to build a buzz around you and your book ahead of the big day.

Designing a cover

Books shouldn’t, of course, be judged by their cover, but no one can deny that the way a book looks can influence our feelings about it.

Designing a jacket for a book is not a simple matter of moving around some images and typing the author’s name and book title across the top. Rather, it involves meticulous research of everything from typefaces to patterns for wallpaper or clothing from a certain era, and sometimes multiple iterations of a cover before it is finalized.

Suzanne Dean is an award-winning designer and the Creative Director at Vintage , and has directed and designed dozens of book covers.

She has worked with the author Julian Barnes on the covers for his books for more than 20 years, and the two sat down to discuss what makes a good cover, and designing the jacket for Barnes’s The Noise of Time .

The first jacket Dean designed for Barnes was for Letters from London , a collection of the author’s journalism. At that time, Dean and Barnes had never met. Dean said: 'I read the text and came up with this idea of objects that had been sent through the post that represented different articles. I trudged round London, finding various things like a bowler hat, put stamps on them to make it look like they’d been sent through the post, and photographed them.'

It clearly worked, two decades later Dean and Barnes have worked together many times. In fact, the relationship between the pair is so fruitful that Barnes said: 'I do say to her on regular intervals, 'You’re not allowed to retire until I’ve stopped writing', and I mean it!'

You can read the full discussion between the pair, hosted by literary journalist Alex Clarke, here or listen to it as a podcast here .

How to create a campaign around a book

Brilliant books can sell themselves, but it helps to have a marketing and publicity campaign in place as well! When we talk about marketing we mean paid-for content such as adverts on social media or billboards at train stations, whereas publicity is ‘earned’, for example through press coverage. Here, Olivia Meade, Campaigns Manager at Penguin General , explains more about how to create a buzz around a book.

A marketing and publicity campaign is essentially all about telling people about a brilliant book. So, a campaign begins with the book – but does not end there. The book is merely the jumping-off point for us to work out all the ways we can bring it to the right attention in the right way.

The first thing to do is look at who the book’s audience is and all the different ways we can reach them. This involves sales and editorial too, whom publicity and marketing will work with incredibly closely. A publicity and marketing campaign is a crucial part of the publication and sales strategy, and we need to make sure everyone is on board with how we have decided to position the book in the market.

We publicists will have read the book cover to cover, sniffing out feature and interview angles, and looking at how it fits in with the wider world - thinking about pop culture and current affairs. For example, does it tie in with any emerging literary trends?  Are there any upcoming anniversaries that work for the book? What is it saying about the current political moment? Is there a brand or charity we could look to partner with that links to the book? Alongside this we will be talking to the author, discussing how involved they would like to be in the campaign, what they are comfortable with, any ideas or contacts they may have, or personal angles they are willing to discuss.

Our collective marketing and publicity brains are whirring away strategising the campaign from the beginning. We look at all the possible avenues we have and, while a few remain the same for every book, not every campaign is the same. Working in publicity, you learn a lot on the job, including what media outlets impact sales, whether that be traditional (newspapers, magazines, radio) or digital (podcasts, the ‘influencer’ effect). This can vary hugely depending on the type of book! For instance, it is more unlikely for a debut novelist to be on BBC Breakfast than a famous face promoting a book. For the debut novelist, however, being picked for a prestigious slot like the Observer‘s New Faces in Fiction would be a fantastic coup. A book with a largely female readership will appeal to the literary editors of women’s glossy magazines (who are always such champions on social media too!), whereas harnessing the power of the brilliant online crime fiction community is key for a crime novel. They key thing is that a publicist tries all possible avenues open to them across national print and broadcast media.

For marketing, the same applies – so much is learnt on the job. As in publicity, there are many different avenues to go down to promote a book, so a marketer’s job is varied: from helping develop an author’s social media profile to designing proofs of books to send out to influencers and media to build a buzz around the book ahead of publication.

The difference between publicity and marketing is that the marketing strategy is dependent on how big budget marketers have to spend. They will look at who the audience is and how to reach them best, from the traditional, like train station billboards, to digital, e.g. social media advertising, all the while bringing out the messages of the book. I’m in awe of my marketing colleagues and the way they monitor, update and react to consumer behaviour, particularly online.

When marketing and publicity are working in harmonious tandem, campaigns zing with creativity, passion and excitement. Our ultimate aim is always to get brilliant books in front of, and hopefully in the hands of, readers who will love them as much as us.

We know that the process of writing and getting published isn’t always an easy one. We hope that this guide has given you both useful information and inspiration to keep writing and to navigate your next steps to getting published.

We wish you the very best of luck.

WriteNow is our programme to find, mentor and publish new writers from communities under-represented on the UK’s bookshelves.

It offers the chance to take part in free regional workshops, get personalised feedback on your work from an editor, and ultimately join our year-long mentoring programme.  

Click here to find out more.

#MerkyBooks , our collaboration with grime artist Stormzy, is the home for a new generation of readers and writers including an annual New Writers’ Prize for young people. Follow us on Instagram to keep updated.

Further resources

If you want to know more about the publishing process, from writing through to publication, here’s some further reading, listening and viewing.

On Writing by AL Kennedy (Vintage) The author’s collection of blog posts and essays about the craft of writing, touching on topics including voice, writers’ health and research.

Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook This bestselling guide is updated each year, and as the definitive place to find a literary agent it includes contact details for more than 4,000 people in publishing.

Get Started in Writing Young Adult Fiction by Juliet Mushens Literary agent Mushens covers everything from how YA fiction works to the big dos and don’ts of the genre.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King One of the most famous books on writing, Stephen King’s tome can be found, well-thumbed, on the shelves of many authors and editors.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss (HarperCollins) A humorous and useful guide to grammar and punctuation.

The Penguin Podcast Guests on this podcast discuss how they write and where their ideas come from, and talk listeners through five objects that have provided inspiration for their work. Acast | Apple Podcasts

The Vintage Podcast This weekly books podcast includes book news, discussions and interviews with authors discussing their work. Acast | Apple Podcasts

20 podcasts about writing that will have you penning a bestselling novel in no time - Bustle

14 podcasts every writer should listen to - Book Fox  

20 inspiring writing podcasts to subscribe to right now - The Write Life

Blogs and videos

#Merky Books: How To Get Published : Watch this in-depth panel discussion about the publishing process between an author, literary agent, editor and publicist at the first ever #Merky Books New Writers’ Camp.

Abir Mukherjee: 10 Things I Learnt About the Publishing Process - Penguin.co.uk

Kit de Waal on why we need more diverse writers - Penguin.co.uk

Author Jane Corry shares her original covering letter - Penguin.co.uk

More posts about publishing can be found on Penguin.co.uk’s Getting Published blog .

See behind the scenes of publishing in Penguin's videos on printing, design and more on YouTube . See more of life at Penguin with our Work in Publishing videos.

Networks and organisations

Arts Council England offers financial support to individual writers who need time and space out of their day to day lives to progress their writing project.

Arvon is the UK’s home for creative writing, offering residential courses and retreats as well as mentoring opportunities. Grants are available for writers unable to afford course fees.

The Association of Authors’ Agents represents the interests of agents and authors, and a full list of its members can be found on its website.

The Good Literary Agency is a social enterprise supported by Penguin, which aims to discover, develop and launch the careers of writers of colour, disability, working class, LGBTQ+ and anyone who feels their story is not being told in the mainstream.

Pathways is a new two-year illustration programme, supported by Penguin, for talented and ambitious artists from diverse backgrounds who believe they can be the next generation of children’s illustrators.

The Society of Authors is the trade union for UK writers, and offers advice on contracts and more, as well as lobbies on the issues that affect authors.

Pen to Print  provides a safe, collaborative environment for emerging writers in a number of genres including free workshops, competitions, events and through its new  Write On!  magazine, which aims to showcase emerging writers in print.

Regional writing organisations

Regional writing organisations are home to advice and information for new and established writers, and are a great resource if you want to find out about prizes for unpublished writers and local writing groups.

New Writing North - based in Newcastle, and supports writers in the North of England.

National Centre for Writing - based in Norwich, the National Centre for Writing was formerly known as Writing Centre Norwich, and covers the Eastern region of England.

New Writing South - based in Brighton, covering the South East region of England.

Spread the Word - based in London, and runs schemes including the Young People's Laureate for London.

Writing West Midlands - based in Birmingham, supporting writers across the West Midlands.

Writing East Midlands - based in Derby, supporting writers across the East Midlands.

Literature Works SW - based in Exeter and covering the South West region of England.

Commonword - based in Manchester.

Literature Wales - Literature Wales is the national company for the development of literature in Wales.

Scottish Book Trust - this is a national charity which promotes books, reading and writing.

Images of Sara Collins and Jane Corry by Justine Stoddart. Image of Claire Malcolm by Richard Kenworthy. Image of Madeleine Milburn by Libi Pedder.

More From Forbes

How to earn side income as a published author: 5 key considerations.

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Turning your writing into a side income can be both exciting and challenging. Whether you’re looking to pursue traditional or self-publishing, the process requires more than just a passion for writing. This article covers the key considerations to help you succeed, from the right publication path and importance of marketing, to realistic financial expectations, brand development, and the non-income benefits of being an author.

1. Choosing Your Path To Publication

Getting your book published is one of the toughest challenges for any aspiring author. The path from manuscript to print can be intimidating, especially in traditional publishing, where competition is fierce and success rates are low. Literary agents receive thousands of submissions, but only a tiny fraction— around 1 to 2% —get accepted.

As author Lauren E. Todd explains, “Literary agents get tens of thousands of queries every year, so it’s like, here’s my book in a sea of 20,000 submissions. The odds are very low.” This reality can be a tough pill to swallow for new writers trying to break into the industry.

If the traditional route seems too complex or restrictive, self-publishing is a solid alternative. It lets you skip the gatekeepers and bring your book directly to readers. It offers more creative freedom, faster publication, and potentially higher profits. However, it also means you’re responsible for everything—from writing to editing to marketing—which can be time-consuming and expensive.

The choice between these paths depends on your goals and resources. Traditional publishing offers professional validation and wider distribution but is a long and uncertain process. You need a strong query letter, a polished manuscript, and thorough research on an agent.

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Self-publishing gives you full control and quicker access to the market but requires a significant investment of time, effort, and money in professional editing and design, knowing your audience, and planning your marketing strategy.

2. The Importance Of Marketing

This element is vital if you want to make money as an author. Gone are the days when publishers handled all the promotion; now, it’s up to you to get your book in front of readers. You must actively market your work, from creating social media content to running ad campaigns.

For example, even with a publishing contract, Lauren E. Todd spent $230 on a three-week Instagram ad campaign and sold 37 copies at her book launch event, which the bookstore called their most successful in years. This shows the power of self-promotion—you can’t just rely on others to do it for you.

Here are some strategies to boost your book’s visibility:

• Build an email list: Start gathering emails before your book launch to create anticipation and ensure you have a ready audience.
• Partner with influencers: Collaborate with bloggers or influencers in your niche to reach a wider audience.
• Host launch events: Whether virtual or in-person, these events can generate buzz and drive initial sales.
• Use ads: If you’re self-publishing, advertising tools like Amazon ads can help you reach more potential readers.
• Run promotions: Offer limited-time discounts or special deals to encourage early sales, especially around the launch.

3. Setting Realistic Financial Expectations

Many published authors don’t see significant income from their first book. Instead, you should consider it a foundation for building an audience and setting the stage for future success. Actual earnings often come after publishing multiple books and maintaining steady promotional efforts.

Understanding how the money works is crucial. According to Forbes Books , if you self-publish, you can earn anywhere from 20% to 100% of the sale price per book. In traditional publishing, you might get up to 15% in royalties .

Additionally, according to a survey by The Authors Guild, a professional organization of U.S. writers, median income for all authors range from $2,000 to $5,000, while full-time authors earn up to $20,000 from book sales and related work. Knowing these numbers helps you set realistic goals.

Remember, getting a book deal doesn’t guarantee instant money. You need to sell enough copies to earn back your advance before seeing any royalties. The road to financial success in writing is tough, but it’s rewarding for those who are committed and patient.

Stay realistic about your earnings. Publishing is more of a marathon than a sprint. Success builds over time with persistence, clever marketing, and a focus on the long game.

4. Developing Your Author Brand

While marketing is focused on driving sales for your book, your brand is the bigger picture—how readers perceive you across your entire body of work.

Your brand should reflect your unique voice and personality, making you recognizable and relatable. A strong brand makes readers trust you and continue supporting your work, making it a critical part of your success as an author.

Consistency is key. Your messaging, style, and tone should be aligned across various platforms, such as your website, social media, or public appearances. It’s also essential to actively engage with your audience, as building a connection with readers strengthens your brand and keeps them coming back for more.

5. Other Rewards Of Being A Published Author

Making money as an author is important, but the non-income rewards of publishing a book can even be more valuable. I would recommend it to anyone trying to build a personal brand.

When I published Raising an Executive , I was catapulted from being a nobody to somebody almost overnight. It established me as an expert in my field, which led to speaking gigs, consulting work, and media features.

I don’t think there was a more potent and better use of my time that built my personal brand faster than publishing my book. The time I invested paid off in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It opened doors to collaborations and opportunities that provide value way beyond book sales.

Final Thoughts

Publishing a book can be a viable side income and may also open up opportunities that lead to improved financial and professional health. However, you’ll need perseverance, a solid marketing plan, and realistic expectations. Remember, success doesn’t happen overnight but is consistently built over time. The journey may be challenging, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

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From bestselling novels to unpublished manuscripts, what is the secret to literary success?

Social media, celebrity book clubs and the conglomeration of publishing houses all make publishing tricky to navigate for writers old and new.

You might think releasing 20 books — including four American Girl books — carries some weight in the publishing world. Yet, Kathryn Reiss still has four books, including a thriller for adults, in her repertoire that remain unpublished.

Reiss, an associate teaching professor in creative writing at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus , has made her name writing suspense novels for kids and teens; she published her first novel, “Time Windows,” in 1991 after writing it while on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany. But she’s bumped up against a wall when trying to branch outside her niche.

“(Publishers) have to think they can market it,” Reiss said. “So if I want to do an adult book, or if I want to do some literary fiction that’s not a typical Kathryn Reiss suspense novel … they go ‘Well, how will we market that?’ You almost get stuck.”

Creative writing is an art, but writers face the same problem many artists do: how they can create something they like that people will also want to buy. Like any other business, book publishers want to sell a good product that they can easily market, Reiss said. But this makes it hard for writers to break out of their shell, if they can even break into the industry at all.

“For a new writer, you have to prove to them you have a very marketable book,” Reiss said. “What people don’t understand is once you’ve had a book published, it doesn’t mean you’re a shoo-in for your next book. It means your publisher will look at your next book. 

“You have a one-up on someone who hasn’t published anything, but it isn’t a given. They have to think they can market it. … Publishers are really about making money. They care about their readers, but they want to sell books at the end of the day. That’s what they’re in the business to do.”

Lesser-known authors have a hard time

Public figures like Prince Harry will automatically generate intrigue and sales when they write something. Popular authors like Colleen Hoover and Emily Henry are also guaranteed hitmakers. 

But debut or lesser-known authors find they have a harder time. In 2021, there were only 15 novels by debut authors on the New York Times’ list of best-selling hardcover fiction books . Of these, 10 were celebrity authors or were part of a celebrity book club and benefited from the endorsement.

The evolution of publishing has created this scenario. In his recent book, “Big Fiction,” Dan Sinykin explores how publishing has changed since the 1960s when book publishers began conglomerating and becoming more corporate. The publishers of mass market books were acquired and larger publishers took over, focusing on sales over everything else. This led to the creation of “best-selling” authors who could churn out hit after hit.

Book production increased in the 2000s when publishing shifted from manual to digital production, added Juliana Spahr , an English professor at Northeastern’s Oakland campus. Making a book became a faster and cheaper endeavor and publishing houses went from publishing a few thousand fiction titles a year to churning out tens of thousands.

Publishing more books increases the odds

Both small and large presses alike started publishing more books to increase their odds of producing a commercial hit that would offset the costs of their other works, Spahr said. At the same time, major New York publishing companies continued to gobble up smaller presses. “The Big Five” remaining companies now have a stranglehold on the publishing world.

“They’ve had control for many years over major media things like the New York Times Book Review,” Spahr said. “It’s a very different landscape. … Publishing has always been hit or miss. Nobody knows what’s going to hit. So for larger publishers, it often made sense for them to publish more titles hoping that one of them will subsidize the costs of the other titles and a bestseller. There’s no more first books. It’s really hard.”

It also makes it harder for new titles to stand out.

“The internet is a wonderful thing,” Reiss said. “But it means there’s just so much out there all the time. You can’t keep up with new books. It’s not just the 10 big publishers with their 20 new books. So much is just coming out all the time.” 

There’s also the pressure to follow publishing trends. Spahr said certain topics and genres like vampire novels or romantasy (romance-fantasy) or books dealing with race have become popular at certain times and it can be hard for writers who work outside those trends.

‘I was as edgy as Jello’

Tanita Davis , who earned a master of fine arts from Northeastern’s Oakland campus and studied under Reiss, had published several books when she had a breakout hit with “Mare’s War,” a young adult historical fiction novel about two girls who find out their eccentric grandmother was in the African American battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. “Mare’s War” won Davis the Coretta Scott King Award and a nomination for the NAACP Image Award. 

But Davis found her editor had a different vision for her work going forward, wanting her to write something along the lines of “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas’ best-selling young adult novel about a young Black girl who sees her friend killed by a police officer.

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“My editor at the time kept saying ‘We want you to be an edgy writer,’” said Davis, who is Black. “I was as edgy as Jello. I felt like a lot of what people were looking for was a certain type of Black character. Part of being a writer for me was wanting to express my own thoughts. Not everybody has the same experiences or can write believably about the things and there are myriad experiences of Blackness in America, (just like) there’s nearly a myriad of experiences being an American.”

Davis ended up leaving that editor and finding another who lets her write in a way that she says is more true to herself. Her recent work has been middle grade novels, with her latest, “The Science of Friendship,” coming out this month.

Davis said many agents and editors look for “comp titles.” These are other books (or other types of media) that are similar to the one being pitched; the idea is to give editors and agents an idea of how to market a new work and whether there’s a demand for it.

“The regrettable part of publishing is that it’s always looking for something that is echoing something else,” Davis said. “It’s always the next thing, and similarities are what sells and so people always say when you write your pitches, you want to say something that is like ‘Mean Girls’ meets ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ Publishing always reacts better if they look at it and say, ‘OK, that was a really high-grossing movie, so I will feel comfortable looking over this project.’” 

How to break outside existing molds

This makes it difficult, though not impossible, for writers to pitch works that break outside existing molds. Reiss’ daughter, Isabel Strychacz , followed in her mother’s footsteps and turned her thesis from her undergraduate from her time at Northeastern’s Oakland campus into her debut novel, “Starling,”   a young adult novel with fantasy, sci-fi and romance elements woven together. Her second novel, “House of Thorns ,” which is advertised as being “in the vein of The Haunting of Hill House” comes out this month.

But Strychacz’s experience selling her books is different from her mother’s first brushes with publishings. When Reiss published her first book in 1991, marketing was done by the publishing house and writers weren’t expected to get involved, she said. Instead, publishers would put out lists of their new titles each season. Authors would have events and signings. There’d be interviews and reviews in the local paper or on TV.

Strychacz said there’s now an understanding that writers will promote their work on social media, creating a “brand” through their posts.

“It’s almost not even mentioned because they’re just expecting that you will,” she said. “You can do as much as you want … but it’s definitely something I’ve had to think about. The reality of the industry is that like everyone wants their book to do well, so that they get another book deal and just the reality is that to do that, you almost have to be on social media to some degree and it always helps to be active in marketing your books.” 

Agent system isn’t as powerful

TikTok especially has been noted for its effects on book sales. Colleen Hoover’s novel “It Ends with Us” became a New York Times bestseller and made her a household name years after it came out, thanks to users promoting it on TikTok.

In addition to facing fewer publishing options, there’s also fewer direct paths to getting published, Spahr added. People who wanted to write literary fiction would get a master of fine arts degree and their program adviser would connect them with their literary agent who would place the student’s work at a publishing house. 

Now, Spahr said, the agent system isn’t as powerful and there are many writers competing for a few representatives working the market. Over the years, Reiss has taught noted writers like Nina Lacour and Aiden Thomas. But she’s struggled to place anyone she’s taught with her agent.

“Whenever I speak at conferences, people always have this question of ‘How did you break into publishing?’ That’s what everybody who wants to be a writer wants to know, as if that will be the magic key for them,” Reiss said. “Living in Germany, writing a book because I had nothing else to read, that’s not the way you’re going to break into writing. There isn’t one way.”

Erin Kayata is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email her at [email protected] . Follow her on X/Twitter @erin_kayata .

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Rachel Maddow mocks latest Trump rallies for "getting a little bit weird"

Trump and his campaign appeared impatient with speakers at his arizona rally, including kari lake, by gabriella ferrigine.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Monday called out former President Donald Trump's recent campaign rallies, invoking a heavily favorited adjective amongst Democrats describing the GOP: "weird."

Maddow kicked off her Monday monologue by underscoring some of the key differences between the former president's campaign and that of Vice President Kamala Harris, noting how MAGA events have been altogether strange. Harris had seen surging popularity ever since President Joe Biden chose to withdraw from the presidential race. The veep's campaign has  raised $540 million  since its launch in July; her campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo that the money raised is "the most for any presidential campaign ever.”

Yet, Maddow cautioned her viewers to remember that the race is still a narrow one despite Harris' strong polling. 

“When it is this close, little differences between the candidates and their campaigns can make a very interesting, not only for an interesting contrast but can make a big difference,” the host said. 

Still, Harris' ballooning funds and energized base of supporters are compounded by reports that Trump is "terrified" to face her on the debate stage on September 10. On Sunday night, the ex-president on his Truth Social platform teased that he would not appear for the debate, which ABC will host. Trump wrote that he had watched ABC's Sunday show, which featured a “so-called Panel of Trump Haters."

“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?" he asked. 

Maddow argued that Trump's team “may try to get all the way to the election without a single debate.”

“Also worth noting that Trump’s campaign events are getting a little bit weird,” she continued, before citing a recent rally in Glendale, Arizona, in which Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake — a fervent MAGA supporter — spoke for much longer than her allotted time onstage. The MSNBC host displayed images taken from behind where Lake was standing to illustrate how the GOP-er was repeatedly told to exit the stage to clear the way for Trump.

“As you see there, it says minus 5:35, meaning you are five minutes and 35 seconds over your allotted time," Maddow explained. "And then it says underneath, ‘please get off the stage.’ But then look almost a minute later, there’s this other shot. Now let’s see 6:23, so she’s now six minutes and 23 seconds over her allotted time. And now the instruction to her says, ‘Please get off stage Trump waiting.’”

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Maddow continued by noting how Trump at the same event got an endorsement from an Arizona police union.

"While the union president was making his pro-Trump remarks, basically giving the endorsement, it seems like Trump got bored or annoyed," Maddow observed. "He just kinda crept up on the guy and was looming over his shoulder and frowning at him while the guy was speaking."

Trump eventually told the speaker, Justin Harris, "gotta go," leading Harris to gather his speech papers and depart the stage awkwardly. 

“That’s a nice way to receive an endorsement," Maddow added. "And now today, that same police union announced that they’re endorsing the Democratic US Senate candidate in Arizona, the guy who’s running against Republican Kari Lake."

“I mean, they had already given [Trump] his endorsement, so presumably, that one couldn’t be reeled back in. But you know, if this situation here, if this was Trump trying to turn on the charm to also get this union’s endorsement for the Republican Senate candidate he was ostensibly there to support. Well, we all know how good he is at sharing the glory,” she concluded. 

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Gabriella Ferrigine is a staff writer at Salon. Originally from the Jersey Shore, she moved to New York City in 2016 to attend Columbia University, where she received her B.A. in English and M.A. in American Studies. Formerly a staff writer at NowThis News, she has an M.A. in Magazine Journalism from NYU and was previously a news fellow at Salon.

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Watch a star get destroyed by a supermassive black hole in the first simulation of its kind

Professor of Astrophysics, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Daniel Price is very grateful for funding from the Australian Research Council, otherwise his research would disappear into a black hole.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Giant black holes in the centres of galaxies like our own Milky Way are known to occasionally munch on nearby stars.

This leads to a dramatic and complex process as the star plunging towards the supermassive black hole is spaghettified and torn to shreds. The resulting fireworks are known as a tidal disruption event.

In a new study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters , we have produced the most detailed simulations to date of how this process evolves over the span of a year.

A black hole tearing apart a sun

American astronomer Jack G. Hills and British astronomer Martin Rees first theorised about tidal disruption events in the 1970s and 80s. Rees’s theory predicted that half of the debris from the star would remain bound to the black hole, colliding with itself to form a hot, luminous swirl of matter known as an accretion disc . The disc would be so hot, it should radiate a copious amount of X-rays.

But to everyone’s surprise, most of the more than 100 candidate tidal disruption events discovered to date have been found to glow mainly at visible wavelengths, not X-rays. The observed temperatures in the debris are a mere 10,000 degrees Celsius. That’s like the surface of a moderately warm star , not the millions of degrees expected from hot gas around a supermassive black hole.

Even weirder is the inferred size of the glowing material around the black hole: several times larger than our Solar System and expanding rapidly away from the black hole at a few percent of the speed of light.

Given that even a million-solar-mass black hole is just a bit bigger than our Sun, the huge size of the glowing ball of material inferred from observations was a total surprise.

While astrophysicists have speculated the black hole must be somehow smothered by material during the disruption to explain the lack of X-ray emissions, to date nobody had been able to show how this actually occurs. This is where our simulations come in.

A slurp and a burp

Black holes are messy eaters – not unlike a five-year-old with a bowl of spaghetti. A star starts out as a compact body but gets spaghettified: stretched to a long, thin strand by the extreme tides of the black hole.

As half of the matter from the now-shredded star gets slurped towards the black hole, only 1% of it is actually swallowed. The rest ends up being blown away from the black hole in a sort of cosmic “burp” .

Simulating tidal disruption events with a computer is hard. Newton’s laws of gravity don’t work near a supermassive black hole, so one has to include all the weird and wonderful effects from Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

But hard work is what PhD students are for. Our recent graduate, David Liptai, developed a new do-it-Einstein’s-way simulation method which enabled the team to experiment by throwing unsuspecting stars in the general direction of the nearest black hole. You can even do it yourself .

The resultant simulations, seen in the videos here, are the first to show tidal disruption events all the way from the slurp to the burp.

They follow the spaghettification of the star through to when the debris falls back on the black hole, then a close approach that turns the stream into something like a wriggling garden hose. The simulation lasts for more than a year after the initial plunge.

It took more than a year to run on one of the most powerful supercomputers in Australia . The zoomed-out version goes like this:

What did we discover?

To our great surprise, we found that the 1% of material that does drop to the black hole generates so much heat, it powers an extremely powerful and nearly spherical outflow. (A bit like that time you ate too much curry, and for much the same reason.)

The black hole simply can’t swallow all that much , so what it can’t swallow smothers the central engine and gets steadily flung away.

When observed like they would be by our telescopes, the simulations explain a lot. Turns out previous researchers were right about the smothering . It looks like this:

The new simulations reveal why tidal disruption events really do look like a solar-system-sized star expanding at a few percent of the speed of light, powered by a black hole inside. In fact, one could even call it a “ black hole sun ”.

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The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism

The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel

O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”

Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-­colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-­visible Palestine case …  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—­as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.

Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—­as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-­term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.

These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-­first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—­like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—­occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-­Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-­speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-­Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.

I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-­and-­soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”

For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti­-Semitic and anti­-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-­Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-­Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti­-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—­an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-­Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-­Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (­the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—­the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”

As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .

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CFPB Report Finds Large Retail Chains Charging Cash-back Fees to Customers Using Debit and Prepaid Cards

Closures of banks have created conditions for major dollar store chains to charge for cash back

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published a new report finding Americans are paying tens of millions of dollars in fees to access their own money when getting “cash back” at large retail stores when making a purchase with a debit or prepaid card. These cash-back fees are occurring against the backdrop of bank mergers, branch closures, and prevalence of out-of-network ATM fees that have reduced the supply of free cash access points for consumers.

“While retail chains had long provided cash back on debit card purchases for free, the CFPB has found that dollar store chains and other retailers are now charging fees for access to cash,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “Many people living in small towns no longer have access to a local bank where they can withdraw money from their account for free. This has created the competitive conditions for retailers to charge fees for cash back.”

Getting cash back at a store is a common way for people to get cash. While making a purchase at a retailer that offers the service, people can get access to their money by requesting cash back at the register. Retailers typically have pre-set withdrawal amounts, including maximum withdrawal limits. Consumers benefit from having the cash, and merchants benefit by having a way to attract consumers and reduce their cash-handling costs.

While this was often a convenient offering, getting cash at a store is sometimes the only option for people. Many retailers are filling a void in providing access to cash, as some communities lack access to a local bank. While some retailers have typically offered cash back for free, the CFPB’s recent market scan suggests that this is changing, particular at dollar store chains.

The CFPB sampled eight large retail companies (Dollar General, Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, Kroger, Albertsons, Walgreens, CVS, Walmart and Target) and assessed their practices for charging cash-back fees.

The report’s findings include:

• Cash-back fees cost consumers millions of dollars . The CFPB found that three companies in the sample charge cash-back fees and estimates that they collect over $90 million in fees annually. The CFPB also estimates that the marginal cost to merchants for processing each transaction may be a few pennies, compared to the much higher fees these retailers charge consumers.
• Cash-back fees are levied on low withdrawal amounts . Many merchants pre-determine the withdrawal amount options in a single transaction, commonly between $5 and $50. Levying a fee on small transactions may constitute a hefty percentage of the withdrawal amount, and it may also induce repeat withdrawals, with consumers incurring a new fee each time.
• Three major retail chains in the sample charged cash-back fees . Dollar General, Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, and Kroger charge fees for this service while the other companies did not. At Dollar General and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, cash-back fees for small withdrawal amounts are the highest in the sample ($1 fee or more for cash-back amounts under $50). Kroger, the country’s largest grocery chain, recently announced new charges at their Harris Teeter stores (75 cents for $100 cash back or less), and charges 50 cents for up to $100 cash back at their other brand stores such as Ralph’s, Fred Meyer, and others.
• Consumers with lower incomes or fewer banking choices encounter cash-back fees disproportionately . Dollar stores are frequently located in small rural towns, communities of color, and low-income communities. These areas are also more likely to have fewer bank branch locations and more residents reliant on cash for daily transactions than others.

Read today’s report .

Read the Director's Notebook statement .

Employees of companies who they believe their company has violated federal consumer financial laws are encouraged to send information about what they know to [email protected] .

Consumers can submit complaints about financial products or services by visiting the CFPB’s website or by calling (855) 411-CFPB (2372) .

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that implements and enforces Federal consumer financial law and ensures that markets for consumer financial products are fair, transparent, and competitive. For more information, visit www.consumerfinance.gov .