Editors Buy Ideas Not Writing

This is one of the basic principles I discovered during my early article writing years. I had written about 40 articles for trailer life magazine. During this time I had struck up a friendship with the then editor and publisher Art Rouse.

One day at lunch I said, “I know you get about 90 articles a week from writers, how do you pick the articles you are going to buy?”

“As you know, Art said, “we try to run articles that our readers can use. This can encompass almost anything that has to do with RVs. The subject matter might include technical articles, travel, cooking, in your RVing with your baby, RV travel personalities. Full time RVing, and a lot more

“every morning I look through the stack of manuscripts and read the first page. If it is an idea I can use from reading that one page, I buy it. If it isn’t, no matter how well written it is, I reject it.”

I Asked, “what happens if you buy and article that after the first page it isn’t very well written?”

“that’s okay Art said, “one our editors can fix it or we will send  it back to the author for revision.”

That was the first inkling I had that editors placed such a premium on the idea itself. Up to that time I believed the writing was of first importance. My next eye-opener came within a few months.

I had written a query to a national home magazine about an article titled, “Do You Really Own Your Own Home?” it concerned a group of homeowners in the Napa Valley who had purchased their home on a contract of sale. These homeowners had kept their mortgage payments current. But the firm they made the payments to hadn’t passed the money on to the bank that held their mortgages. The bank was about to foreclose and the homeowners stood to lose everything. I didn’t hear anything about this query for six weeks. Then about 3A.M.one morning, California time, I received a phone call from the editor of the magazine. He wanted to know if I could finish the article in forty-eight hours.

You bet I could.

It turned out that they needed the piece desperately for their new magazine. At that point they had only seen the query and had no idea how I could write. But they intended to buy the article no matter what.