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One of the unique opportunities available to writers is feature article writing. Potential topics for feature articles are nearly endless. Mediums of publication are also varied for feature articles. They can be “featured” in magazines, online, journals, newspapers, blogs, etc. But how do you successfully publish a feature article? According to the ‘2012 Writer’s Market’, the key to successful feature article publication is in the query letter.

Before my History of Publishing class, I had never heard of a query letter. (Thank goodness I have at last, since I am graduating this year, hopeful of entering some kind of professional writing career!). According to the book, there are three central parts to a query letter.

Part 1: The Hook

The goal of the first part of the query is to catch the editor’s attention. (With a likely overwhelming amount of queries on their desktop, and thesis sentences bombarding their minds, editor’s will take any excuse to forgo reading another piece of paper.) Some ways you could do this would be to start your letter with an eye-catching fact. You could also begin your letter in what would be the middle of your piece. (Dangle the carrot! Don’t give the editor the introduction, the conlcusion, or all the juicy statistics).

Part 2: The Specs

The goal for the second part of your query is to keep the editor reading. You want to clearly define your article’s scope and size, and also give the editor a taste of your writing voice, in just 1-2 paragraphs. A few things to include in your specs are your article’s estimated length, the targeted section of the magazine (Kairos! Do you hear me rhetoricians?), any potential interviews, and sources you have already lined up.

Part 3: The Bio

Basically, if the editor is still reading, then you have already done your job. This part of the query is highly subjective. The only essential part is that you share your credentials and why you think you are the best person to write the article, and say so as humbly as possible. Specifically, you may want to address points such as: your personal qualifications, whether or not you have written about this subject before, and any past publications.

Any undergrads reading this might have realized a glitch: what if you don’t have any qualifications because you are fresh out of the classroom and a major greeny? This is what makes Part 3 so subjective. According to the Writer’s Market, if you don’t have experience to boast about, then don’t mention it. It is better to skip these embellishments and close your letter with a polite word of thanks. And if anyone asks you specifically about your credentials, humbly admit to not having any.

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More and more I am seeing the traditional distribution line being broken, in larger and larger degrees of success. The internet has provided a direct line from artist/developer/manufacturer to consumer, and more and more people are learning that they can take advantage of this in a multitude of ways.

Recently, many artists have been creating their own products (or pitches for potential products), looking at how much money it will actually take them to produce, and selling products accordingly or asking for start-up money for said projects. Of particular note would be Double Fine’s recent success with Kickstarter, and Louis CK’s sales on his personal website (instead of via iTunes or similar), in which both parties made incredibly large amounts of money in extremely small amounts of time.

Double Fine’s project can be viewed here (Start from the bottom if you want the full story, though the first video from the bottom sums up a lot of the initial information quite well):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure

Louis CK’s project can be found here:

https://buy.louisck.net/news

As a side note, I would like to mention that Louis CK’s product was released completely free of DRM (data rights management, designed to prevent copying of data), making it potentially possible for just a handful of people to buy it, and then distribute it for free to the rest of his fanbase. The interesting thing here is that they didn’t.

The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that we are killing a lot of the current middleman business, be it huge publishing houses and their associated distributors, large video game publishers and their usually greedy and fairly horrendous business models designed to gouge the bejeezus out of the consumer, or even just local stores trying to sell similar products. This doesn’t, however, mean that these companies are going to disappear, just that they need to learn to adapt to this reality where the artists and other people that actually act on ideas they’ve come up with are going to have a much larger say in what happens with their product, a change that I believe will change the market for the better.

The second is that this direct-sale model will create prices on products that will be much lower than they are now. Particularly with digital products, if a producer of media can create a product and sell it directly to the user for little to no processing cost to either party (i.e. no distributors need to be paid, no shipping needs to be paid, etc), the price of a products sinks to reflect what the product is worth and the producer actually needs, and then the producer gets almost all of that money directly, without having to cut it up into little pieces to pay people that didn’t have anything directly to do with the project.

I like that these kinds of things are happening more and more, as I’d rather have a market run on the personal integrity of the consumers than one based on the lack thereof within the companies that supply the products.

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“If you can write and have something to say, you will do well in life. Most people can’t write to save their lives and have nothing interesting or valuable to say”. – John Yunker

John Yunker and Midge Raymond, both authors and publishers at Ashland Creek Press, came in to speak to our class about small presses, the e-reader marketplace, and how to really sell your book. I really like the above quote from John, because I find it to be so true. Good authors are hard to find, even among published works. Sometimes I find myself reading a book that is poorly written and has so many errors, I want to grab a red pen correct it all, and send it back to the author with a big sticky note saying “try again”. It’s the authors that can really write who do well in this world. Stephen King didn’t get to be at the top of booklists by creating mediocre stories. I’m quite sure also that he worked his butt off promoting his first few novels.

Promoting your work is another thing that John and Midge really impressed on me. I never really thought much about it before. For some reason, I figured you got an agent to find a publisher, and once you got your work published, it just either went big time or it didn’t. Like magic. Only, I learned that the publisher isn’t necessarily responsible for promoting your book. Today’s authors have to be quite aggressive in getting their work out there. And with all of the social networking sites available, as well as blogs and YouTube, it’s never been easier.

I had never really thought of these things as a means to promote a book, but after listening to John and Midge, the sites seem like the perfect place to hawk your work. The added bonus of many of the social networking and other media sites is that it opens the possibility for immediate feedback and comments from people visiting your site. When it comes to books, reviews are extremely important. The more good reviews a book gets, the more likely it is that it will be read by more people. I know from personal experience that I am more likely to buy and read a book if it has been recommended to me by someone. In our fast-paced world, word-of-mouth has never spread quicker, the internet acting as a bulletin board. When you post a promotion about your new book, it’s suddenly accessible to everyone. And getting everyone to hear about your book is at least half the battle.