Trevor's Tales

Firstly may I wish everyone at Writelink a very happy and prosperous new year.

Yesterday I received an email from ‘Best of British’ magazine informing me that my submission, 'My First Date.' was not quite what they were looking to publish in the next few issues. I knew It wasn’t too far off the mark though as I’d bought a couple of editions of the magazine to see what sort of thing they accepted.
I suppose I was lucky to get any kind of reply because I sent it in via email, which they don't usually accept. (In their writers guidelines they say that manuscripts should be sent via the postal service on A4 paper, double-spaced in a non fancy font etc. ) In the email, I mentioned one or two other articles I have written that I could source pictures for. I sent one, 'The Early Shift' about my time in the coal mines, with the original email.

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They have now asked me to send in the article by post, complete with photographs, so they must think my work is worth looking at, even if they dont' want to print it.
I'm very pleased with the very encouraging response, even if the work never gets published; it looks like I’m on the right track at least.

All the refusals I've had from other editors, just said that the article isn't right for them at this time.
It just goes to show how a bit of research into the sort of material your target magazine prints is well worth the effort.

I’m sending the manuscripts in this week complete with sets of free low res pictures. Best of British will pay the copyright on the high res images if they choose to publish the work. Should they choose not to I won’t be too discouraged, as at least they’ve asked to look at more of my articles.
So, all in all it’s been a very encouraging end to the year. I only started writing at Easter, so I'm thrilled at the prospect of having something of mine printed in a main stream magazine inside my first year. (I had a poem printed in an anthology paperback in December.)

I hope this will give some encouragement and hope to all the new writers on this site who are thinking of sending in articles for publication. This time round my work may not be used, but I know now that there are people out there who think my stuff is worth having a look at. They may well want to look at yours too. If you don’t send it in, you’ll never know.

Happy New Year.

Trevor