22 APRIL 2020 http://www.writers-online.co.ukATTENTION TO DETAIL
Pacing for a magazine needs to
be fast and intense. As a writer
for PFK, you will only have up
to 2,000 words to play with,
and only the most revered
authors are granted wordcounts
above this. This limit includes
any fact boxes, roundels, lists
and other accessories.
Hunt out all and any redundant
sentences and paragraphs and
kill them so the editor doesn’t
have to. The less editing of your
work that needs doing, the more
valuable you are.FONT MATTERS
Keep font simple on anything
you submit. Calibri is fine. Don’t
bother with quirky line spacing,
bold passages, italics, underlines
any other traits, as the first thing
we editors often do is copy your
entire document, pop it into
TextEdit and convert the whole
thing to plain text before passing
it on to our production editors.
Save yourself time and keep it
basic, because we won’t even see
those idiosyncratic flourishes.FISH OR FISHES?
There’s often a blunderbuss
approach to working with singular
and plural with fish writers.
Decide early on whether you’re
going to write about a fish as an
individual, or fish as a plurality,
and then stick to that. Sentences
like ‘The Otocinclus catfish is
a great species for aquaria, but
in the wild they are surprisingly
migratory...’ are all extra time for
the editor to fix.
As an aside, ‘fish’ can be the
plural of one species of fish (the
shoal of herring numbered a
million fish), while ‘fishes’ refers
to a plurality of species together
(the community tank was made
up of dozens of different fishes).the wild...’ or ‘It is essential that the
blue wires connect to, and only to,
the thermostat...’
If you’re writing vicariously
through an authority, then the
safest approach is a mixture of
technical writing and quotes.
Remove yourself from the feature
and use the authority as the voice,
by quoting them in the first-person
sense. ‘On Thursday of last week,
the Chinese paddlefish was declared
extinct in the wild. “I was disgusted
to see it go,” says Quentin Scientist,
the man who first discovered and
named the species.’
Don’t add long passages that add
nothing of substance – especially
those pertaining to personal feelings.
You can go ahead and pen down
something like, ‘When I was seven
years old I first gasped at the seraphic
vision of Centropyge angelfish in
their tanks, the electric shiver of their
majesty carrying me on a transcendent
journey far beyond a mere aquarium,’
but I’m cutting it and adding you to a
contributor blacklist soon after. I don’t
care, the reader doesn’t care. To use
the old phrase, ‘Kill your darlings’.How much will I get?
Some work is more valuable in niche
subject areas when you can also provide
imagery, especially of rare and unusual
subjects. Others may pay per word.
Note that specialist magazines
rarely have deep pockets, and so
£200 for a 2,000 word feature may
be especially generous.
Don’t expect ‘red top’ rates,
and expect considerably less (if
anything) when submitting to a
website or blog.If you have the
expertise and a suitable
idea you would like
to suggest, Nathan
welcomes proposals
by email
pfkeditorial@
warnersgroup.co.ukWHAT IS THE APA SYSTEM?
The APA referencing system works in two parts. The
first is the citation within the copy body, directly after the
sentence you’re quoting, and this is as straightforward as
writing the author(s) surname(s), year of publication, and
page or chapter in brackets, directly after the reference.
For example: (Hill & Telfer, 2020, pp. 28-31)
The second part consists of the full details given in an
alphabetical list of references at the end of the feature.
These details should include author surnames and
initials, year of publication, title, subtitle (where one
exists), edition, place of publication and publisher. For
example: Hill, N., & Telfer, J. (2020), Writing Magazine,
April 2020, (1st ed.) Bourne, Lincs: Warners.If fish aren’t your
thing, see p85 for
more niche pet
magazines looking
for writers.