Reslant your Articles for Unlimited Earnings

  

Some regional publications
pay 20 to 30 cents per word.

Last time, I shared some tips on how to write local when you live far away.

Is it worth the extra time and research, though?

It definitely can be when a region-specific publication pays well or allows you to demonstrate expertise in a particular topic. Another potential benefit, which I will delve into today, involves your ability to sell reprints or reslant your articles for different markets. The beauty of writing for regional publications is that you can often sell the same or similar material to non-competing markets, thus increasing your bottom line.

Let’s focus a bit on parenting publications to see how this might work. Imagine three made-up publications: San Francisco Parent, Dallas Parent, and New York City Parent.

It is obvious from the title of each publication that each one caters to a specific readership. Parents in San Francisco, for example, don’t generally concern themselves with the parenting scene in Dallas, New York, and other cities.

So, let’s say you lived in San Francisco and wanted to write an article for San Francisco Parent on the benefits of raising children to be bilingual. You would probably first do some research on bilingualism and outline the basic direction you wanted the article to take, explaining to the editor in your query how the article would be relevant the readers of San Francisco Parent.

Unless you were writing a personal essay (which could later sell as a reprint), you would probably want to find people living and working in San Francisco to interview for your article. Most likely, you would look for a couple of parents as well as an expert, such as a pediatrician, university professor, or language teacher, to quote. You would then fit the anecdotes and expert quotes into your outline so that your article became more lively and informative. For a side-bar, you might also list a few local-area resources for San Francisco parents wanting to raise their children as bilinguals.

When negotiating rights with the editor, you would make sure not to sell more rights than needed by the publication. You might, for example, sell “first” print rights for California, or even just the San Francisco Bay Area, thus giving you the flexibility to reuse the material as you see fit. You could then pretty much target similar publications, such as Dallas Parent, New York City Parent, and even Los Angeles Parent.

The basic article would stay the same, especially your introduction, conclusion, and whatever background information you had included on bilingualism and how wonderful it is for children.

The key, though, would be to acquire new quotes from local parents and language or child development experts, which would inject the article with the local flavor desired by each publication. Add a new side-bar with relevant local-area resources, and your article would be as good as new.

This is just one method of reslanting an article. There is lots to say about this topic, so look out for future posts that talk about reslants from different angles. As you can see, planning how you will reslant an article can make your hard work and research stretch a bit further than usual.