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Writing for Family Tree Magazine
About the magazine
Family Tree Magazine is a general-interest consumer magazine that helps readers discover, preserve and celebrate their family's history. We cover genealogy, ethnic heritage, personal history, genealogy Web sites and software, scrapbooking, photography and photo preservation, and other ways that families connect with their past.
Articles are geared to beginners—our readers don't necessarily think of themselves as "genealogists"—but never talk down to the audience. Readers may be experts in one area of our coverage, yet novices in another. We emphasize sidebars, tips and other reader-friendly "packaging," and each article aims to provide the resources necessary to take the next step in the quest for one's personal past.
Writing for Family Tree Magazine
- Always query with an SASE. If we've never worked with you before, a paper query with samples of your writing is preferred over an e-mail query. (Though please do include your e-mail address for faster response.) Please don't call with queries or to check on the status of your query.
- The ideal Family Tree Magazine writer is both a writer—able to explain complex topics in clear, friendly, easy-to-read articles and sidebars—and an expert (or interested amateur) in one of our coverage areas. Your query should indicate both why you're right for this topic and why you're able to write it.
- Please query with a specific story idea. In general, we're looking for stories that are right for our magazine, not writers to assign articles to. Please do not submit finished articles (except for our Everything's Relative section; see #9) or articles previously published in other genealogical magazines.
- Issues are planned well in advance. Though our lead time is technically about six months, we'll have a plan for the December issue by January of that year. Better to look too far ahead than to miss the boat. And we do like to be timely—scheduling a story on wedding records in June, for example.
- Our style is bright, breezy, helpful and encouraging. We're NOT an academic journal or a genealogy-research journal.
- Articles need to be broad in scope to appeal to a general audience, yet narrow enough to support specific, useful information. "Getting Started with the National Archives" might be a good article for us; "1840 North Carolina Census Records" is not.
- We do NOT publish personal experience stories (except in Everything's Relative) or the histories of specific families. Nor do we publish generic family or parenting articles—keep in mind that our focus is family history.
- Query with specific suggestions on accompanying sidebars, tip boxes, resource lists and other elements, as well as ideas for content that might be appropriate for posting on our Web site, www.familytreemagazine.com.
- For writers new toFamily Tree Magazine, we are most open to short submissions for Branching Out (lively, newsy upfront section) and brief writeups of new resources for genealogists, scrapbookers and family history buffs for our Toolkit section. We also invite short, amusing stories of "the lighter side of family history" for our Everything's Relative page; accepted submissions here pay $25.
- Please read a copy of the magazine before querying.
- For more advice on writing and marketing your work, see writersdigest.com at www.writersdigest.com.
The Basics F&W Publications, publishers of Family Tree Magazine, is one of the nation's leading publishers of books on genealogy, including Unpuzzling Your Past, The Genealogist's Companion and Sourcebook and Long-Distance Genealogy. Many of these bestselling genealogy-book authors will be writing for Family Tree Magazine. F&W also has nearly 80 years of experience producing such award-winning how-to magazines as Writer's Digest, The Artist's Magazine, HOW, Popular Woodworking and Decorative Artist's Workbook.
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