Customer Reviews

The American Directory of Writer's Guidelines: More Than 1,600 Magazine Editors and Book Publishers Explain What They Are Looking for from Freelancers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The American Directory of Writer's Guidelines is an excellent companion to Writer's Market and an essential reference book for freelance writers. Some of the included publications do cross-over, but for the most part, their different. And, it's great that a new edition has been released (2006).

The nice thing about The American Directory of Writer's Guidelines is that it provides both contact information and writer's guidelines for the listed publications.

Another thing I like about this reference book is the organization. It has publications organized alphabetically and then has the lists of categories in the back. It's much easier to find publications.

The downside of The American Directory of Writer's Guidelines is that it isn't updated annually. This makes using it a little more difficult because you have to do a cross reference to see if publications still exist, if the contacts still work there, and to make sure the pub hasn't moved. Of course, every query sent should be verified in this way before you send it, so you should be doing these things anyway.

One of the first things I learned as a salesman was that you couldn't sell something to people if that wasn't what they wanted to buy. If you're trying to sell beef to vegetarians you had best not be to dependent on commissions for income. Yet in the publishing business fledgling authors think nothing of sending a mystery book to a magazine publisher that only publishes articles on car repair and who isn't interested in new authors at this time.

In the sales business it's called qualifying your prospects. Does this guy buy what I'm selling? Does he need more than he's able to get at the moment? For the freelance writer here is just about all the qualification you need. For some 1,600 publishers here's what they are looking for, what they pay, and often the opening sentence will tell you what you really want to know. For instance, one publisher opens his entry with: 'Please note we do not publish novels, poems, children's books, or short stories. We publish ____.' This alone can save you a lot of time, a lot of postage.

The information in the entries is directly from the publisher. It usually includes his web address so you can see what he is publishing now - and it's likely that this is what he's going to publish in the future.

Here is a tremendous amount of useful information at a very low price.

Thank you for another plesant Amazon experience!

The book I ordered arrived quickly, and was in great shape for a

used book! I highly recomend this seller, and will check back

to see if there is anything I need in the future!

Thanks again!!