Updated with fresh facts, examples and illustrations, along with two new chapters on digital media and blogs this third edition continues to be the authoritative and essential guide to writing engaging and marketable feature stories. Covers everything from finding original ideas and angles to locating expert sources Expanded edition with new chapters on storytelling for digital media and building a story blog Captivating style exemplifies the authors’ expert guidance, combining academic authority with professional know-how Comprehensive coverage of all the angles, including marketing written work and finding jobs in the publishing industry Essential reading for anyone wishing to become a strong feature writer Accompanied by a website with a wealth of resources including PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and Q&As that will be available upon publication: www.wiley.com/go/sumnerandmiller

A practical guide to all aspects of feature writing for journalists and freelance writers.

Prime Your Freelance Writing Career for Success! So you want to be a freelance writer. Great! But now you're faced with a laundry list of questions: Should I freelance full time or part time? Should I write for magazines, newspapers, or online markets? How do I dream up the perfect article idea, and how do I pitch it successfully? How do I negotiate contracts, foster relationships with editors, and start getting steady work while avoiding financial panic attacks and unpleasant ulcers? The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing answers all of these questions--and much more. From breaking in to navigating the basics of the business, this book is your road map to a fruitful and rewarding freelance life. You'll learn how to: • Dig into various markets, including consumer magazines, trade journals, newspapers, and online venues. • Make your digital mark and build your writing platform. • Pitch like a pro and craft solid query letters that get responses. • Conduct professional interviews in person, by phone, or by e-mail. • Write and structure various types of articles, from front-of-the-book pieces to profiles and features. • Quit your lackluster day job, and live the life you've always wanted. Filled with insider secrets, candid advice, and Zachary Petit's trademark humor and blunt honesty, The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing won't just show you how to survive your freelancing writing career--it will teach you how to truly thrive.

Always Get the Name of the Dog is a guide to journalistic interviewing, written by a journalist, for journalists. It features advice from some of the best writers and reporters in the business, and takes a comprehensive view of media interviewing across multiple platforms, while emphasizing active learning to give readers actionable steps to become great media interviewers. Through real scenarios and examples, this text takes future journalists through the steps of the interview, from research to source identification to question development and beyond. Whether you are a journalism student or an experienced reporter looking to sharpen your skills, this text can help make sure you get all you need from every interview you conduct.

Do you want to write magazine articles, but don’t know where to start? Or perhaps you want to break into new markets, but are not sure how. The Complete Article Writer will show you how to do all that… and more! Writing for the magazine market is the easiest publishing market to break into. But only if you can come up with the right idea for the right market at the right time. The Complete Article Writer shows you how to do that, time and time again. It also reveals how to maximise your article ideas: don’t write one article - write six or more! The Complete Article Writer shows you how to analyse a publication to identify its readership and the freelancing opportunities within it. Then it guides you into twisting your idea so it appeals to the core readership and the most important reader of all - the editor. With detailed advice about beginnings, middles and endings (the variety of different middle structures you can use to exploit your ideas further), along with other pieces of page furniture, including boxouts, sidebars and photos, The Complete Article Writer tells you how to offer an editor the complete package. Discover how to pitch your ideas and sell your article first before writing a single word. Learn how to negotiate the minefield of publishing rights and keep control of more of your work. Master all this and you will become The Complete Article Writer. Simon Whaley’s articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including: BBC Countryfile, Country Walking, Lakeland Walker, The Simple Things, Cumbria, Discover Britain, British Heritage, Writing Magazine, The People’s Friend, Coast and Outdoor Photography. Enjoy creative writing? Looking to get into freelance writing? Check out The Practical Writer Series for easy-to-implement advice.

Master the art of article writing! The world of journalism is changing rapidly, and the modern journalist needs more than a basic knowledge of article writing to navigate it. The Complete Guide to Article Writing provides a compass for freelancers and students of journalism looking to write successfully on a wide variety of topics and for many different markets--both in print and online. From researching and interviewing to writing features, reviews, news articles, opinion pieces, and even blog posts, this one-stop guide will illuminate the intricacies of article writing so you can produce entertaining, informative, and salable articles. • Learn how to write coherently, cohesively, and concisely. • Choose the proper structure for the article you want to write. • Weave narrative and fact seamlessly into your pieces. • Develop your freelance platform with the latest in social media outlets. • Pitch your ideas like a pro. • Develop a professional relationship with editors. • And much more! Modern journalism can be a treacherous terrain, but with The Complete Guide to Article Writing as your companion, you'll not only survive the journey--you'll be able to write pieces that inform, entertain, inspire, delight--and sell!

"Updated with fresh facts, examples and illustrations, along with two new chapters on digital media and blogs this third edition continues to be the authoritative and essential guide to writing engaging and marketable feature stories. Covers everything from finding original ideas and angles to locating expert sources Expanded edition with new chapters on storytelling for digital media and building a story blog Captivating style exemplifies the authors' expert guidance Authors combines academic authority with professional know-how Comprehensive coverage of all the angles, including marketing written work and finding jobs in the publishing industry Essential reading for anyone wishing to become a strong feature writer "--

What does it take to launch a career writing for magazines? In this comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to magazine writing, students will learn everything from the initial story pitch all the way through to the final production, taking with them the essential tools and skills they will need for today’s rapidly changing media landscape. Written by a team of experienced writers and editors, Magazine Writing teaches the time-tested rules for good writing alongside the modern tools for digital storytelling. From service pieces to profiles, entertainment stories and travel articles, it provides expert guidance on topics such as: developing saleable ideas; appealing to specific segments of the market; navigating a successful pitch; writing and editing content for a variety of areas, including service, profiles, entertainment, travel, human interest and enterprise Chock full of examples of published works, conversations with successful magazine contributors and bloggers, and interviews with working editors, Magazine Writing gives students all the practical and necessary insights they need to jumpstart a successful magazine writing career.

Writers have been writing about war since the siege of Troy, but few, if any, have captured the first-person experience of war as deeply as My Vietnam War. Set in 1967 (the deadliest year of the Vietnam War), this memoir-style novel depicts the psychological journey of a young man whose carefree days of studying philosophy at the university are ended by the draft. The story follows him from his initial rear-echelon assignment in Saigon, where he falls for a mysterious storytelling bar girl, to his eventual posting at an isolated front-line firebase in one of the deepest parts of the Vietnam jungle. While recovering from a leg wound (he is hit by a piece of bone from a fellow soldier who stepped on a booby trap mine), he becomes the assistant medic and sees the horrors of war close up. The experience begins his steady spiral down into PTSD. After he is seriously wounded, he ends up back in Saigon where, after an old friend from Arizona gets him involved in the underground drug trade, the mysterious bar girl may be his only hope for salvation. It is a powerful story, well-written, with vivid detail that you will never forget.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times