magazine article submision

[Nick Forrer]

Hey gene (or anyone else who might know)

Bit of a delicate matter but.......do you pay for magazine articles submitted by freelance writers that you end up printing. And if so how much? I ask because I have recently written an article (on wing chun) and am wondering about sending it in.

PM/email me if you dont want to discuss this on a public forum

many thanks

[@PLUGO]

Until he gets here, You can find some answers here. Compensation comes in a variety of forms here at KFM... you're first step might be to submit your articles . . .


. . . Good Luck . . .

[GeneChing]

... but DS answered well, first you need to submit something. I'll add that if your into writing about MA for the money, keep your day job. Our policies and pay is listed in Writer's market, which I believe is still up-to-date. Our submission to publication is averaging around 6 months now, not that you asked this, but it would have been a good question.

[brothernumber9]

so Gene what do you do for a living then? (to generate income)

[GeneChing]

... I write, but less than 50% of that is articles, the rest is technical. As assoc. publisher, I do all the dirty work that people never think about when running a magazine - buying paper, dealing with printing, managing freelancers, etc. Plus I manage this forum. As an employee of TC Media, I also work on our videos, websites and products, deal with new vendors, qcuire and develop products. The actual writing about martial arts part of my job, the romanticized 'fun' part, only makes up about two or three hours of my 40+ hour work week.

[@PLUGO]

occasionally he gets to kick people in the head or "_________!!!"
not that he considers it fun mind you

[GeneChing]

...well, the job doesn't pay enough for me to afford a new jaguar, but it does have it's perks.....

[Nick Forrer]

Hi gene

Thanks for the response- ill send it in when its finished (bit more to do) along with photos.

take care

Nick

[GeneChing]

You can just email it all to me at gene@kungfumagazine.com. Pictures too - just compress them so they don't choke out my email server.

[GeneChing]

The Surprising History of 'Freelance'
Freelancing has always been a battle. Literally.

Talk to anyone who's looking for work these days, and you'll hear one word repeated more and more: freelance. We're most familiar with the verb, which refers to pursuing a career without making a long-term commitment to one employer. Usually, people who freelance are self-employed; they decide who they'll work for and for how long. You could call them corporate mercenaries, working for the highest bidder—and if you did so, you wouldn't be too far from the word's original meaning.


Our earliest written evidence for 'freelance' comes from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, in which a lord refers to his paid army of 'free lances'.

When freelance first came into English in the early 1800s, it was used to refer to a medieval mercenary who would fight for whichever nation or person paid them the most. Our earliest written evidence for this use (so far, that is) is in Sir Walter Scott's novel, Ivanhoe, where a feudal lord refers to the paid army he's assembled:

I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them—I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.

The evocative word took root quickly, and also swiftly gained broader meanings: one referring to a politician without political affiliation (who we'd call an independent these days), and one referring to a person who does any type of work on one's own terms and without any permanent or long-term commitment to an employer. Though freelancer is the noun we now usually use to refer to this last set of people, it's a newer term than freelance. So while "He's a freelance" may sound like modern jargon, it is the original term.

Interestingly enough, the phenomenon of freelances was well-documented throughout medieval warfare (and earlier), even if the word freelance was a 19th-century creation. Hired soldiers were common after about 1000 A.D. and were important pieces of major military campaigns between the 12th and 14th centuries. But most of the fancy words English has for these hired soldiers in the Middle Ages came about well after the Middle Ages: condottiere, which refers to a leader of a band of mercenary soldiers, and lansquenet, which refers specifically to German hired soldier during the 15th through 17th centuries, showed up only a hundred or so years before freelance did. So what were freelances called before we had freelance? Latin records from the Middle Ages show that most often, hired soldiers were called stipendiarii (or stipendiaries, meaning they were given a stipend for fighting), soliderii ("soldiers"), or simply mercennarius ("mercenaries").

We all knew this of course. And we continue to accept freelance submissions. In fact, we rely on freelancers for the bulk of our content.

Here are our submission guidelines again.