Writing fir nothing or next to nothing for a magazine whose editor et al are all being paid is not my idea of good business. As Marcus Berkmann says in his book How To Be A Writer (review coming soon), if you write for nothing and the people you’re writing for are being paid, you’re a mug.

Having said that, I do believe there is (or could be) mileage in writing for relatively low returns, in some circumstances. I’ve outlined those circumstances below, and updated the list a bit since I first wrote this in 2021.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s I wrote regularly for a weekly computing magazine. It didn’t pay very much by the standards of other (monthly) computer mags, and a friend of mine kept on trying to encourage me to stop writing for it on the grounds that (a) I could earn more from the other mags and (b) I was worth more than what they were paying me.

Nevertheless, I continued to write for the weekly mag despite the relatively low pay. Why?

• Writing for the weekly mag and writing for monthly mags were not mutually exclusive. It wasn’t as if writing for the weekly one used up the time I could have been spending writing for the monthly ones.

• The editors of the weekly mag liked to have series. Thus if I proposed, and had accepted, a 10 part series on, say, how to use Microsoft Access, it meant I had a more or less guaranteed income for the next couple of months. That is quite important for a freelance writer.

• Writing a series also meant that I could plan the “episodes” right at the outset, rather than having to start afresh each week with a new topic and a new proposal.

• Writing frequently for the same outlet means that you become very familiar with their house style, so the writing is easier and quicker. You don’t have to keep double-checking that you used an abbreviation correctly or adopted the preferred spelling.

• I’ve never tested this, but I suspect that if you are relying on a magazine article to raise your profile, it’s probably more effective to have readers seeing your name every week than every month or two.

• Writing book reviews is unlikely to make you rich beyond measure. But I find that writing reviews of books in my areas, which are education, literature, writing, culture, has benefits quite apart from the pecuniary ones:

  • I am able to keep up with developments in those areas.

  • It’s good for keeping my name in people’s minds.

• Even one-off or very sporadic commissions for a low-paying outlet can be worthwhile, as long as they have a good-sized readership and let you put your signature (a very short bio) in the article.

So the next time you’re offered the opportunity to write for a periodical that doesn’t pay as much as you’d like, don’t just dismiss it out of hand.