I have had a lot of stuff published in the PPL/IR magazine, and did a couple of sections in the PPL/IR book, and normally they tell you how many words they want.
This is important because - assuming the author can actually write grammatically correct English, which is not always the case (**) - the person best placed to condense a perhaps longer article into a smaller version is the
author.
Over the years I have done massive amounts of technical writing (the stuff one used to do on Ventura or later Framemaker
) and it is also obviously true that the
author is best placed to flow the article on the finished page, by changing the words around, etc, but you aren't going to be doing that on a printed magazine because that is 2-3 people down the production road
I would hope that offering to deliver an article condensed to X words should help acceptance, but I don't really know because like I said none of the UK news-stand pilot mags have ever run anything from me.
(**) it may suprise some that some best-selling authors (Jeffrey Archer being one example, apparently) product copy which is almost unusable and needs heavy editing...