Tony James has had 40 years of experience of freelance writing and he says the key to his success is versatility. He has written about everything from sailing to the supernatural, showbiz to Buddhism.
His career started on a local evening newspaper where he was a reporter. He has since written 28 books, ghosted columns for footballers including George Best, and now works as a feature writer and syndicates much of his work around the world.
Syndication involves selling the same article to several publications, getting the most amount of revenue from one piece of work. It is effectively wholesale journalism. Tony writes up to 400 stories a year and is published in magazines and newspapers around the world.
Most magazines are aware they are getting syndicated stories but you shouldn’t sell to competing publications. It is difficult, but not impossible, to get into syndication.
Tony offers his tips for successful syndication:
- Have realistic expectations.
- Don’t pre-judge the sort of writing you’ll do. It takes time to find out what sort of writer you are so try everything until you find what you can do best.
- Be prepared to really work hard to become a good features writer.
- Study the markets. It is difficult to find new markets and it does involve networking and cold calling. Find out the philosophy of the magazine you are targeting and write in their house style.
- You can’t afford to make mistakes. Subs don’t want to have to re-write your work or check all your facts so make your work as perfect as possible.
- Prove your reliability – get a reputation for writing well and getting submissions in on time.
- There are stories everywhere if you look for them. Stories written for the syndication market are usually only semi-topical.
- You should ideally send a potential publisher 4 to 6 paragraphs of your feature with an introduction and a selection of other ideas.
- Be pushy. If you have sent your work to a magazine and not heard back from them within a couple of weeks, ring them up. Ask them to take a look at your work if they haven’t already.
- Syndicated stories are sold cheaper than normal stories but this doesn’t mean you can’t make a living out of syndication. You can make more money by having lots of small payments coming in rather than just a couple of larger ones.
- Tony does admit to having problems with receiving payment at times; it can sometimes take a few months to receive a cheque but they always arrive eventually. Because syndicated writers use many pen names (Tony has at least 50), it is necessary to use a trading name to receive payments.
- Although syndication is a difficult market to crack, it is worth persevering.
