The Renegade Writer Blog

Since August, I’ve been working two days per week and still earning full-time income writing for magazines. My goal, when I started this two-day workweek, was to spend more time with my now one-year-old son, have more fun, and do more volunteering. On my days off I do check e-mail just to make sure nothing [...]

Desiree asks: I have written several pieces that were well received by editors, but seem to be on perpetual hold to be printed. These have not been officially killed, and I was paid in full for each piece. In one case, I was told that the magazine will not be printing a 500 word [...]

This query resulted in a feature assignment from Fortune Small Business magazine. A friend told me that the magazine was looking for entrepreneurs with interesting hobbies, so I put out a request on Help a Reporter Out looking for entrepreneurs who were also martial artists. Laura Smith was the first person I heard from, and [...]

Since I teach an e-course that tells writers how to write queries that will hopefully land magazine assignments, one question I get a lot at the end of the course is, “What happens if I do get an assignment? What can I expect?”
Well, first, you do the happy dance. Then you e-mail me and let [...]

This is a query that sold as a feature for Woman’s Day a couple of years ago. Once I started working on the article, I suggested to the editor that we call it “The Om Of Organizing,” but she thought it was too new-agey for her readers. It ended up being called “From Chaos to [...]

A query letter is the tool that opens doors at your dream magazines, both online and off. It shows an editor not only that you have a great idea, but also that you know how to organize your thoughts, that you can write in a clear and engaging way, that you have research and interviewing [...]

I was doing a New Year’s cleaning of my computer files when I ran across my very first clip: a review of a text on dialectology for the journal Language, which I wrote while a grad student in Slavic Linguistics at UC Berkeley. In my first query letter sometime later, I mentioned that I had [...]

Sarah asks: “If I only have one clip — and it’s print — how do I handle this when sending email queries to editors?”
You can scan the article and create a PDF file, ask the editor to send you a PDF if they have one (sometimes they do!), or simply send the text from your [...]

Ready to put your writing career into high gear? The next session of Renegade Writer e-courses starts on January 11…that’s this coming Monday! Classes are filling up fast, so read on for how you can snag a space:
Monica Bhide’s Premium and Gold food writing courses are FULL However, she has unlimited space in the Basic [...]

I want to give a big thanks to everyone who submitted entries in the ‘Strangest Trade Magazine’ title contest. It was a tough, tough decision to pick a winner. Some of the titles were playful, such as Spudman for people working in the potato industry, and Sheep! for sheep farmers. Miniature Donkey Talk was right [...]