How I Used My Twitter Feed To Publish An Article In A Magazine

Every now and then making good money as a writer is easy.

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Let me tell you about one beautiful moment when something usually complex and frustrating became simple and successful. A moment where implementing one piece of advice quickly led to getting published in a large digital magazine. This was my experience recently, and while there is no “works-every-time” formula to making money as a writer, I’m hopeful this strategy will continue to work in the future.

So how did I do it? How did I get a pitch accepted and negotiate a decent fee for an article I had fun writing? All it took was a Twitter account and some unique story ideas. No kidding, it was that simple. Here is some insight into my process for getting published (and making money) and how I leveraged my Twitter feed to get an article published.

Like many of you, I’m continually jotting down ideas for stories with a unique slant. These ideas annoyingly tend to come while I’m in the shower or out on a walk. Maybe it’s because my brain isn’t focused on something else and thus frees up space for creativity? Who knows! As these ideas roll, I try to jot them down in the notes section of my phone because I don’t trust myself to remember them later.

I try to carve out time to work on these ideas each week. I have several writing projects going on simultaneously, so it’s essential for me to structure time each week to work on new stories. I have a folder on my desktop dedicated to future articles. I attempt to keep my word count at about 1200 for these, and I don’t spend a lot of time polishing. I write the story and then edit it once so that it’s available to be tweaked and polished when I’m ready to run with it.

Once you have a bevy of pieces, you can start looking for places where the stories could fit. Develop a list of publications that you believe your work would mesh with, and then do some research to see what articles they are currently publishing and the tone of the articles they feature. Do they feature how-to pieces or narratives on relevant topics? Do they like publishing short story, relationship, or memoir pieces?

Doing recon will give you more of a sense of whether your work will fit. It also allows you to mention any meaningful…