Get Your Work Out – to Alternative Markets

Doing new things always gives me new ideas. When I was writing my paper last week for my Theory and Writing class, one of my writer friends in a PhD program suggested I try to publish my papers. I knew people did that sort of thing, but I’d forgotten that now *I* could be one of those people. After all, I did a fair amount of research on my topic.

My friend gave me some ideas for finding journals and web sites that would be interested. Then I did more searching to find additional potential markets. While I was making a note of those, I remembered what I’ve done with other non-academic articles and made a third list – ways I could rework or rewrite the material so I could send it to writing-related magazines and web sites. I’ve now got a list with more than a dozen ideas for publishing some short pieces that are half written by virtue of having gobs (that’s a technical term) of information from my research.

So what could you do with all of your research? How many different ways could you repackage it, in large and small sizes?

If you want to see some examples, check out Jenny Crusie’s “For Writers” section of her web site. If you check the notes at the bottom of the articles, you can see where she previously published them. Several were part of compilation books, several were published in the Romance Writers of America’s national magazine, and some were published in more literary/academic types of markets.

Sit down and make a list of what you could do with your research. We always hear that writers tend to put too much of their research in the book because they spent so much time getting the information. Here is a way you can share what you know without succombing to research overkill in the book, get your name out there, and maybe make a little extra cash.

Sounds good to me!

Note: When we quote from other published material, we have to have written permission from the source, and we should have a source list to give to the editors who buy our articles. There are rules about all of this and I haven’t looked them all up lately, but when I do I’ll post something here.