Monday 22 August 2011

It must be hard being an editor

Members of even the smallest specialist society invariably receive a magazine as part of the membership offer. Somehow the editor, almost always an unpaid volunteer, needs to extract articles from unwilling authors and this can be a thankless task.

About 20 years ago I had a brief spell as editor of the Niger News, the journal of the Nigerian Study Circle. One issue was 100% written by me - from the editorial, through a couple of articles on the Oil Rivers Protectorate and on to the auction realisations it was 100% mine.

In one of my hobbies, amateur astronomy, the number of authors is surprisingly high but as the hobby continues to fragment into ever smaller groups studying ever narrower parts of the science the shortage of "publishable" material remains acute.

I would have thought that specialists magazines would be well worth considering by any budding writer trying to "get published".

1 comment:

  1. A very good idea. I've often thought of writing stuff for beginning writers, having taught for a great deal of my life. All I want is a 48 hr. day. :0)

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