Writing for Publication

[mmarotta]

Basically, it is pretty easy and anyone who posts regularly to boards like this is aleady fairly good at the basics.

 

Myself, numismatics or whatver, I find it easy to break into a publication via the Letters column. If you can distill an idea into 250 good words, you have the knack.

 

One problem that I have seen in others over the years is wanting to say everything all at once. Sometimes publications need to fill space and without naming names you get these 2000 word tomes on "Everything I Know About the Coins of Freedonia."

 

That aside, you should not allow your own uncertainty prevent you from submittting.

 

Believe me, I know about writer's block, but I read this quip, where this woman said. "My father was a truck driver and he went to work every day for 30 years and never had Trucker's Block."

[thedeadpoint]

Haha. Thanks for that. Which article(s) of yours are you most proud of?

[ikaros]

Believe me, I know about writer's block, but I read this quip, where this woman said. "My father was a truck driver and he went to work every day for 30 years and never had Trucker's Block."

Speaking as a fiction writer, that truck driver didn't have to travel a slightly different route every day.

[Art]

Many times in my life I felt that I wanted to be a writer. But alas, I have never really made a serious attempt.

[YeOldeCollector]

I've edited a coin book and written a few articles but I am seriously thinking putting together a book this summer. Time will tell...

[Art]

I wrote a book once about a strange little man who knifed people for a living. I had a great time writting it but filed it away. I reread it a few years later and said "What a piece of crap!". I tossed it.

[thedeadpoint]

Lol. Someone escape from the looney farm?

[mmarotta]

Seems to be a lot of talent around here. I assure you that if you can tell a story about a coin ... or coins... or some other numismatic thingee ... you can place it for pay.

 

MSNS and CSNS both pay about 10cents per word. That makes it an easy hundred bucks for 1000 words. As the former editor of The MichMatist and the present webmaster at www.michigancoinclub.org, we do get the complaint that we only publish the same people over and over. The reason why, of course, is that they are the ones who send in material for publication.

 

The Numismatist is a bit harder to please, but they work with people all the time, to get a new story from a new writer. I cannot speak for the other magazines and newspapers. I know that ten years ago when I worked for Coin World, their budget for freelancers was limited, but they did buy several a year. The Krause newspapers are more amenable to new entries. The newsstand magazines -- Coins, CoinAge -- tend to be set in their ways. They like the same old stuff in the mainstream, from Buffalo Nickels to Imperial Roman, nothing outlandish, but that said, with American numismatics, there are very many interesting niches, such as Lesher Dollars and Alaskan Bingles that can grab an editor's attention.

 

What I would do is write and ask for their editorial calendar. Then you can see what they plan and how you might fit in.

 

All of that is for pay. The Celator gives you an extension on your subscription, which is something and they are at once the leader and sole source for ancients. So, if you have an interest in that, they are there.

[ikaros]

Many times in my life I felt that I wanted to be a writer. But alas, I have never really made a serious attempt.

Doesn't have to be a serious attempt. Keep your word processor handy and write out anything that catches your fancy, even if it goes nowhere. Every sentence you write is educational. Heck, I just discarded fifty pages because I'd written myself into a corner -- but I'm keeping it around just because there's one or two ideas in there that aren't horrible and can be recycled into the restarted novel.

 

Best piece of advice I ever got on writing was attitudinal -- I had described myself to a pro (I forget who) as 'an unpublished writer' and he said "No. You are a writer. You just haven't been published yet."

 

'Course, we're talking about the fiction market and not the trade magazines, but even so, anyone who says they want to be a writer, my best advice is to do exactly that.

[mmarotta]

Haha. Thanks for that. Which article(s) of yours are you most proud of?

 

You will excuse my not answering right away, but it is a tough question.

 

In the late 1980s when viruses were new, I wrote a couple of articles for Data General user magazines and did that by tracing the idea from Conway's Game of Life and Fred Cohen's master's thesis. I then suggested that the technique could prove helpful and useful -- and here we are: you think nothing of site uploading aplets to your computer so that you can run a presentation. Microsoft updates my computer on Tuesday nights.

 

About that time, I wrote a four-part series on Quality for The Greater Lansing Business Monthly. I am about to refer to it again for a job application.

 

As for numismatics, Ann M. Zakelj worked with me on "Portraits and Representations of Alexander the Great" for The Celator. We took a lot of flak for that. (Online recreation on my website here.)

 

"Copper Owls: the Emergency Coinage of Athens" was another where I examined a popular misconception, that silver-plated Athenian Tetradrachms are "emergency coins." Given that there might be a few hundred genuine examples known (not offical issues, either, but actually created by hardcore democrats in rebellion against the Athenian oligarchy), they are only mere fakes from ancient times.

 

The ANA granted me a Heath Literary Award for an article on the origins of coinage. When I started collecting, I was reading all the standard works, of course, and writing, as I always do. I was placing an article in a little libertarian newsletter from the UK called Practical Anarchy. My point for that piece was that we do not need governments and banks to create money; we can create our own media. I cited the Encyclopedia Britannica which said that merchants invented coinage. As I was writing, I told myself a joke: "If any merchant ever stamped a lump of electrum, it was to avoid taking back a bad penny." In that moment, I realized that the merchant theory was inconsistent and incomplete. I wrote up my objections to the merchant theory and sent it to The Classical Numismatic Quarterly. The editor then was Kerry Wetterstrom, who now owns The Celator. He rejected the article, saying, "We know all of that. You are reading the wrong books." So, I asked him for a bibiliography. I followed up on that with a literature search of my own from the sources cited in those books and rewrote the essay. He published it. That version was cited by Nobel laureate Robert Mundell in a paper on Gresham's Law.

[thedeadpoint]

You will excuse my not answering right away, but it is a tough question.

 

And after reading all of that, I still can't derive what the answer is.