WRITE LESS, SELL MORE – HOW TO REWRITE, RESLANT AND RESELL by Pamela White
I want more money from my writing. You want more money from your writing. Who doesn't want more checks arriving in the mail?
Sometimes writers feel stuck because they only have so many hours in a day to write so…how can they turn their limited writing time into more money (with little work).
Rewrite, reslant, and resell.
For each article that you write for newspapers, websites or magazines, you do research, find interview subjects, outline the articles, find the perfect market or two and then sit down to do the work of creating your soon-to-be published masterpiece.
Take that research and all those interview notes and sit down and write a different article to sell to another magazine.
In this case, if you were writing about wineries in the Finger Lakes, you could then rewrite three or more profiles of some of the family-run vineyards and sell them to national publications. You could also write up reviews of the restaurants that many of the wineries have, or beg the chefs for recipes to use in a series of articles you wish to sell to the national food magazines.
Sure, you have to write entirely new articles, but the bonus is that you have done the travel, the photographs, the research and the recipe testing already, cutting the time it takes to produce a piece for publication dramatically.
You can also reslant an article. You travel to Greece on vacation (lucky you!)but before you left you were given an assignment by a travel magazine on the best restaurants in tourist cities. You take your photos, write the article, then you reslant it. You can turn your 3000 word article into a tip article listing your choice of the best restaurants, or you could approach a syndicate or a newspaper like the New York Times to write an essay on your trip. Each time you use the same information, you just reslant it for your audience. You could also reslant for trade publications for travel agencies.
The least amount of work to earn more from a published article is to sell reprints of it. You must know what your original contract says – and that's one reason I recommend that you take nothing less than one-time or FNASR (First North American Serial Rights) with a time limit for the original publisher of your piece to be able to hold it exclusively – anywhere between 90 days and one year.
Reprints usually garner smaller fees, but since you've had to do no extra work besides finding the additional markets, it's all gravy.
Other ways to make more with little extra work would be to self-syndicate your columns, if you have one in a local periodical, or to send one-time submissions to syndicates that accept them.
And if you have a series of articles or columns that have an overriding theme, you can self-publish them in book form and sell through Amazon.com and BN.com, as well as local bookstores.
Don't assume that the $500 you get for that great article is the last income you'll see from all that work. Remember: rewrite, reslant, and resell.
© Pamela White, 2008
Want to use this article in your ezine or on your website? Feel free as long as you include the following:
About the author: Pamela White publishes Food Writing, the free ezine for food writers from her website: www.food-writing.com and The Writing Parent from www.thewritingparent.net . She develops writing and food writing courses, and her book, Make Money as a Food Writer in Six Lessons, is available at Amazon.com . |