Crossover Market Strategies

Someone on a writers' forum asked about strategies from moving from one topic area to another in which you have no expertise or experience. Here are four approaches you can use to get into new markets. The first is one that I teach in my online marketing class. You create a series of steps that get you from one subject to another, creating a trail that you can follow. For example, pretend that you write about classical music in specialty magazines and that you want to write business stories about retail. Here is a set of steps that could plausibly get you from one to the other:

1. Write music pieces for magazines devoted to classical music lovers.


2. Pitch and then write an article that looks at the business life and realities of a free-lance classical performer.


3. Pitch a story to a small business magazine about a small album label that is trying to go against the conventional wisdom that classical music is dying out.


4. For another business magazine, write a story about the economics of niche music at retail establishments, and how that affects what you can hear.


5. Pitch some retail stories.

It generally shouldn't take more than about five or six steps to make the transition, and if you're clever, you can sometimes combine steps to shorten the amount of time. In the above example, the writer could have turned the third step into writing a story about a retail store that was trying something interesting to increase sales of classical music. Suddenly you're into writing about retail stores almost immediately.

Another crossover strategy is to create a strong enough relationship with an editor that he or she has a level of trust in you. The editor may know that you don't have specific expertise in the area, but understands that you won't get involved in something where you can't deliver. The first assignment or two may be shorts, because that reduces the exposure for the editor; if something goes wrong, it's easy to recover.

You could do so much research up front that you demonstrate some expertise, even though you haven't officially had any. Infuse the query with insight that builds confidence on the part of the editor. Then you complement the research with compelling clips. There are a three major tactics, in general, for choosing clips. You can focus on writing technique, expertise, publication prestige. You can use any combination of them. Because you don't have the expertise (otherwise this wouldn't be a market crossover situation), you take a mix of clips with great writing from the biggest publications to which you've contributed. (This is difficult to pull off when you don't have good national clips.) Mix the topics of the clips so you convey the impression of being able to cover a lot of different things.

Entering a new market is one circumstance under which pitching poorly paying publications can make strategic sense. If you have strong clips in other areas and want to build a track record for a new one, the editor with little budget might jump at taking a chance on you. Then you start to get your legs underneath you, without asking a mainstream pub to underwrite your learning curve at its usual rates. You get a clip or two on the topic, then quickly start moving up to the level of publications that you want.

It's vital for writers to understand ways of moving from one market to another. Not only can an infusion of new material keep you flexible so you can respond to changes in the economics of the industry, but it can shake up your usual beats, adding depth and insight that comes from making the intellectual and emotional connections among apparently disparate topics.