1. Reach: Magazines have the potential to reach more people with your message. 
For instance, if you’re published in The Upper Room, with more than four million subscribers, you reach a readership that very few book writers can match.
2. Turnaround Time: Even today with some publishers using print-on-demand, a book can take eighteen months until its release. The average lead time for magazines is one to six months. Think about the many months required to write a book versus only a few hours for an article.
3. Faster Payment: Periodicals often pay upon acceptance. Even if they pay on publication, your wait is much shorter than with a book. And the per-word compensation for an article is astronomically higher than for the average book.
4. Writing Credits: Experience in writing for periodicals looks good to publishers of that future book. It tells book publishers that other editors liked your stuff and shows your versatility in writing on a variety of topics and in a variety of formats. And some magazines allow you to include your book credits in a bio, adding to your book’s platform.
5. Instant Feedback: Even if your feedback is mostly flat rejections, it will do what all feedback should: help you learn, grow, improve, and be willing to adapt your writing to the requirements of a variety of outlets.
6. Variety: Writing magazine articles for different kinds of magazines and on different topics will help you avoid the feeling of slogging along through the same topic month after month as you write your book.
7. Improvement of Craft: Hal Hostetler (former editor of Guideposts and Saturday Evening Post) claimed that writing devotionals was the best discipline a writer could have. In general, the shorter the piece, the harder it is to write. While most magazine articles are longer than the average devotional, they are all much shorter than a book. Thus, a final benefit to writing for periodicals is that it helps sharpen your writing skills in general.
That, in a very large nutshell, is why even a novelist or poet might consider writing magazine articles. Most likely, you will use your experience in writing for magazines to produce a much better book.
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Susan King mentors writers and edits non-fiction books, novels, devotionals, articles, Bible studies, etc. While serving 24+ years as an editor for The Upper Room magazine, she began teaching at over one hundred Christian writers’ conferences in the US and Canada. Her experience also includes 27 years of teaching English and feature-writing classes at Lipscomb, Biola, and Abilene Christian universities and serving as compiler and editor for the Short and Sweet book series.
