Setting up an Article Data Bank

An article databank is simply a reservoir of material built up as you go about your business of writing articles. It consists of interviews conducted for previously published articles, all of your research material, and the articles themselves.  If you handle this databank right, you should be able to use the information it contains to create many more articles and even books.

Years ago when I interviewed Earl Stanley Gardner for an article about his house boating on the California Delta, he spent more than an hour talking to me about writing.  One piece of advice he gave me at the time was to always "use the interest of your writing, never the principle."  I puzzled over this for a long time.  But then I realized that what he actually meant was that the material you generate, the interview you conduct, the facts you gather, and the pictures you take, are your "principle."

If you use this information once and stop, you're using up that "principle."  But if you spin off a number of articles from the material, then you're collecting the "interest" for your efforts.

Gardner himself did this well when he used the same characters over and over again in the Perry Mason series.  He repeated this same process when he invented the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam characters for another series.  But Gardner went further than this.  Every time he did anything, it turned up later in his writing.  I discovered this firsthand when after I interviewed him, the details of our meeting appeared in one of his books.  Time and time again, some of the material he collected writing one book would show up again and again in his other books.

If you intend to sell as much of your writing as you possibly can, you must learn to do this.  Here are couple methods that work well. 

Build From Projects You've Already Completed

Once you sell an article, don't quit looking for ways to use the material contained in that article in other, sometimes unrelated ways.  I wrote several general house boating articles in which I surveyed the house boating manufacturers and described the various models.  Part of the material I collected concerned small trailerable houseboats, boats that could be lived in at a campground and also could be easily moved from one body of water to another.

I managed to sell one of these articles to a camping magazine.  I then turned the article around and sold a round up on the same subject to Better Homes & Gardens.  After that, I proposed a book on house boating using the same information and some additional material from the files.  Prentice-Hall brought it with the title, The Wonderful World of Houseboating.

I also knew a retired game warden, who wrote one article on his experiences as a game warden.  In building on this experience, he wrote a piece on abalone poaching.  He kept some of the funnier things that happened when he was a warden and sold "Silly Excuses Game Violators Use" to Field and Stream.

Mine the Full Potential.

Here, are two questions I ask myself when I’m looking over my articles.  What parts of this manuscript might be use as a basis for an additional articles?  When writing gardening articles I included some material on drip watering.  I decided this could be used somewhere.  As a result, I sold this material to several gardening magazines.

 In answering this question, go over your manuscript carefully and look for insignificant items.  Sometimes you might simply touch on something in your manuscript that can be expanded into another article with just a little more digging.  A mention of an expert in local baseball might be developed into a regional personality piece.  A paragraph or two in an article on automobile care could be expanded into an informative article on automotive care for the woman driver.

Finally ask, how many additional markets you can find for this material?  Simply run this through the table of contents in Writers Market and see if you can come up with five or more possible markets.  After that start to work immediately.

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