Photo by Lady Orlando.

It was one of the most brilliant article ideas you’ve ever had. You sat down and wrote up a beautiful query letter, tailored it perfectly to the publication you were targeting and sent it off. Now to sit and wait to receive the assignment from the editor.

The reply comes faster than usual but instead of containing a word count and a deadline it’s…the form rejection letter.

It wouldn’t normally be a big deal except the article was about a niche topic and this was the perfect magazine to publish it.

Time to toss the idea and move on, right? Wrong. It’s merely time to re-examine it and consider other ways it could be written.

Changing the focus

As an example, say this was a profile of a local jockey who’s overcome adversity and has become a fast-rising star. The story has been rejected from a horse racing magazine.

Take a look at other publications. Could a different part of the story be focused on to make it relevant to that magazine’s readers?

The politics of horse racing for a current affairs magazine? There are few topics that aren’t political in some way so that’s always one way to go.

But being a local jockey, perhaps he’s still doing most of his racing at a lesser-known racetrack–it could be something for the travel section of another city’s newspaper wrapped around this gentleman’s tale.

Or maybe you can find other athletes who’ve overcome the same issues and pitch it to a national sports magazine?

The possibilities go on and on if you think about it. This is where again I became a fan of mind-mapping: write the crux of the story in the middle of a piece of paper and draw lines coming out leading to the different aspects of that crux and branch out further from them. It’s amazing how diverse even a simple story can be.

Reselling the re-slant

Of course, re-examining a story idea doesn’t need to be a reaction to rejection. The coolest part about finding a completely new way to tell the story is being able to re-sell it.

Even if you have, as many of us have foolishly done, given up all rights to the publication that bought the original article, you can’t copyright a topic–just don’t write the exact same article. The nice part is most of the research has already been done.

Which brings me to another reselling strategy. When doing research for an article, it’s amazing how few of my notes make it into the assignment. On the other hand, sometimes all that left-over research can make a saleable piece for another publication.

For example, a few months ago I read everything I could on the coworking trend for an article I was writing about a coworking location that was opening up locally. The resulted article barely used any of those notes but instead they were turned into a post for Freelance Switch.

Robert Janelle

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