'Flying Adventure' article for flying magazin

[Katamarino]

Hi all,

I am busy writing an article for a magazine, and was wondering if any of you have written one of these, and if so if you have any tips. Its my first effort at something like this, and the main problem I am having is fitting everything in - it was something of an epic trip (more than 3 times the distance covered of anything I have seen written up in the couple of years that I hve been reading these magazines!) Can anyone offer any advice on what I should be trying to pare down to and concentrate on? I have some ideas of my own but would find all input valuable!

Also, how would the rights to the article and photos work - I assume copyright would remain with me? Its the photos I am interested in more than the text, as I may want to use them in future.

Thanks :ok:

[ChampChump]

The main UK magazines have hints & tips on writing for them on their websites. I would think that'd be a good place to look if you've not already done so.

[Pitts2112]

I wrote one a few years ago and can offer these tips:

Read a few others - and then make yours different. I don't normally read these things anymore because they all sound the same - "We got up and the weather was X, so we checked Notams, and did the preflight while Charlie filed the flightplan...yadda, yadda, yadda". Don't make it a chronological list of the actions you took. Those read like a court transcription.

What was it that made the flight truly memorable? Write it like you were telling the story to your mates at the pub. The details of flying would bore the hell out of them, but the interesting people you met along the way, the funny stuff that happened, the near-fatal mistakes you made; that's the interesting stuff. Most people get way too wordy and cover all the minutae in the interest of being complete. Readers aren't interested in complete. Hell, they're not even really that interesting in the truth - they just want a good story!

Keep it down to a couple of pages or the editor will either reject it or cut it up so badly you won't even recognise it (but each magazine should be able to give you tips on what they suggest for this). If the trip truly was epic (in interest level, not just distance), then do it in two parts. Then cut it in half, and you'll probably have something with only the really interesting stuff left, and then it'll be worth submitting.

Don't submit to Loop. Not only do they not pay for content like this, our mate wrote up a decent travellogue and, after much hounding by their editor, submitted it, for it to wind up as a small box that sounded like their writers had simply done a telephone interview with him. If he'd known that was how they were going to handle it, he wouldn't have bothered with them.

[BackPacker]

Don't submit to Loop.

Don't submit to P&V either. I wrote a two-page article and sent it in. They asked me for some photos and I provided them with captions. I then heard nothing, nothing at all, until I happened to be walking into a bookstore seeing my title on the cover, and my article inside.

No thank you. No payment (not that I was expecting or assuming any). Not even a heads-up to notify me that my article would be published in which edition. Nothing. I had to buy the magazine to read my own article.

Also, how would the rights to the article and photos work - I assume copyright would remain with me?

This is a very tricky minefield. I would assume that the copyright for the bare text and the photographs would remain with you, particularly if you don't get paid for writing the article, but the copyright with the complete article as laid out in the magazine would remain with the publisher - they added the intellectual property of the layout after all. But I'm not a lawyer so take this with a big pinch of salt. Oh - and as for the copyrights to the text remaining with you, this is a bit of a moot point since I think it's "not done" to submit the same text for publication elsewhere.

If you want to be sure about this, it's best to contact the magazine(s) you want to write for and get an agreement in writing/e-mail. Also, I know Ian Seager from Flyer posts on here occasionally. You might want to send him a PM, or contact him through the Flyer forums.

Another tip: contact the magazine before you write the article itself, about what you want to write. They will typically have a plan for their magazines for the first few months, and need to tell you where you might be able to fit in. So they will give you an idea about the angle of the story, how many pages/words it should contain, how many photographs they need and so forth.

[Whirlybird]

Don't submit to P&V either. I wrote a two-page article and sent it in. They asked me for some photos and I provided them with captions. I then heard nothing, nothing at all, until I happened to be walking into a bookstore seeing my title on the cover, and my article inside.

No thank you. No payment (not that I was expecting or assuming any). Not even a heads-up to notify me that my article would be published in which edition. Nothing. I had to buy the magazine to read my own article.

Send an invoice to their Accounts Dept, with a note stating that this is your usual fee per article or per word/1000 words, and you'd appreciate payment within 30 days. They pretty much have to respond in some way, and you might even get a cheque instead of an answer. :ok:

[IO540]

My suggestion, having been around this block a bit, is that if you want say £800 or whatever and don't care about anybody getting any wiser, send it to a printed magazine. They will do a nice pretty 4-page piece with nice pictures and not a lot of boring detail.

If you want to write up something that helps others in terms of education or is aspirational (let's face it, PPL training is pretty bare when it comes to operational info e.g. how to actually go somewhere....) then stick it up on a website of your own and post links to it on pilot forums. Many more people will benefit that way, and you will get feedback by email on what they thought of it and what extra info should go in there.

I think the well known prolific contributors to the printed aviation mags do make a fair bit out of writing (perhaps of the order of £20k p.a.) but they are "household" names in GA, are at it all the time and are writing for multiple mags.

I believe a large part of the UK pilot mag readership are non-flyers, and I also think that a large % of pilots who no longer hang around a school/club (which has back issues on the table, like at a dentist) don't subscribe to any of the mags - except probably Loop which is a free mailing.

This comment might get me into hot water (no stranger to that ;) ) but I also suggest that anybody who wants to write useful stuff forgets about retaining copyright on their writing. Copyright is a soooo old fashioned concept which de facto went out of the window with the internet and (speak to any professional photographer on this one) digital cameras. I can well understand that people who make a living out of this will fiercely disagree but one's choice today is to write something copyrighted and reach a narrow readership, or write something free and reach many more. It's a personal choice.

[172driver]

Copyright is a soooo old fashioned concept which de facto went out of the window with the internet

Would you then say that goes for electronic circuitry also ??

[Katamarino]

Thanks all for the excellent replies! I am not worried about the copywrite of the text, I wouldn't dream of submitting it elsewhere - just the photos themselves!

Off to continue writing and hacking text around...

[IO540]

Would you then say that goes for electronic circuitry also ??

Sure - there is almost nothing in electronics or computing that does not have massive prior art going back decades. Any uniqueness, nowadays, tends to be limited to the application of the technique, and that remains patentable (for all the good that such a patent does anybody...).

[Whirlybird]

Many of us who do a lot of aviation writing don't limit outselves to the mags - we also write for the internet, books, etc. It doesn't have to be 'either/or'.

If you write a magazine article you'll usually retain your copyright. This is important, as it means if a foreign edition of the mag wants the article, you'll get paid again. It also means if you decide to publish it elsewhere, or get asked to, you can. So don't ever give your copyright away! If you do, you have no rights whatever over what happens to the article.

Before you write for the mags, get a copy of their guidelines (as has been said elsewhere) and most importantly, find out what length they want and stick to it! No overworked editor is going to shorten, say, your 3000 words to 1500 words - I've done that and it takes longer than writing an article from scratch. You're not trying to put everything in; you're trying to write something that's interesting and entertaining to read - and many of the aviation articles people write are excellent cures for insomnia. :(

If writing for your own website it doesn't matter, but generally, writing for the internet is a whole different technique, in that people want information quickly and don't necessarily want to be entertained. Decide which you're doing, and while you can do both, I doubt that one article will work well in different mediums.

Good luck. If I've repeated stuff that's been said earlier, my apologies - had a long day and too tired to read it all in detail.