Category: Secrets

This article is on how different magazines even within the same genre have different requirements for what and how stories should be told. Richard A. Martinsen was editor at Dell and Fiction House in addition to being an author who had published stories in many of the magazines mentioned here. Martinsen was the editor who… Continue reading Know their policy, insure against rejection

I CAN’T say truthfully that I received any immediate practical benefit from my visit to the editorial offices of Adventure Magazine, toward the end of my stay in New York City. I gathered, in fact, that Adventure’s policy rather discourages personal visits from authors, although it is entirely possible that I am mistaken in this… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Butterick & Hersey

BEFORE I went to New York on this editor-interviewing trip I had a very inadequate idea of the indescribable vastness of our metropolis, in spite of all I had read and heard about it. For instance, I thought that the job of visiting the editors would be a comparatively simple one, involving at most a… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Munsey & Fiction House

ANY writer who suffers from the hallucination that magazine publishing falls short of being a business, in any particular, should make a pilgrimage to New York and conduct a first-hand investigation. He will discover, among other things, that ‘ the editor who is not a business man as well as an editor has no permanent… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Doubleday

This is the first in a series of four articles published in 1926 by Albert William Stone in The Author and Journalist(A&J) on meeting various pulp editors in person. Stone was a Denver based author who mostly wrote western stories; A&J was also in Denver so Stone was writing mostly for a western audience in… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Street & Smith

An exchange in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, Tribune on the merits of pulps caught my attention recently. The instigator of this exchange was Donald Raub, then a schoolboy attending what used to be Central High School in Scranton, Pa who sent many letters to the editor. The first letter was this screed printed on 15 May,… Continue reading Point, Counterpoint: Contemporary opinions of the pulps from 1940

Here’s an article on editing by Ray Long, one of the top American magazine editors of the early 20th Century. The article originally appeared in the January 1927 issue of The Bookman. At the time that this article was written, Long was at the peak of his career, editing Cosmopolitan magazine, a very different magazine… Continue reading Article on editing by Ray Long – magazine editor