FREE Guide on how to get published in martial arts magazines

Welcome to the free guide on how to get published in martial arts magazines.

For three years, I wrote for Combat Magazine, Traditional Karate, Fighters and Taekwondo & Korean Martial Arts. Two of those years I was actually employed as Features Editor and Technical Consultant, writing over three hundred articles, interviews, profiles and news pieces. At one point, I actually worked out that some magazines had nearly 80% of their content written by me. So I know what I’m talking about.

So, on to how to get published in the martial arts magazines.

1) This first step is amazingly simple. Identify the magazines that you wish to write for. Get a list of emails for their editors.Don’t submit a Taekwondo article to a Karate magazine, or a Karate article to a Reality-based magazine unless there is a strong reason for doing so, i.e. How Taekwondo can help you improve your Karate kicks. If you do do that, don’t be a fucking arse about it.
2) Write the article, interview, news piece as far in advance as you can. Most magazines have a two-month deadline. By this, I mean that when you’re reading this month’s magazine, next month’s is already finished (bar any headlining articles) and the month after that is pretty much done too.
3) Make sure that you don’t confused their with there, or they’re. To with too, lose with loose and all of the other utterly ridiculous mistakes I’ve seen. Editors are paid to edit, but they won’t want to wade through article after article of knuckle-drugging mistakes.
4) Make sure that any photos you have taken are saved as a minimum of 600dpi and are also fairly large as well. This is because print uses images that are huge, in order to make them small (in layman’s terms).
5) Submit it with a covering email.
6) Expect no payment.

That’s right. Expect no payment. The majority of articles in the magazines are published without any payment. Those that are regular columnists usually get discounted advertising rates for their products/classes/systems.

After you’ve done all that, make sure you check the shelves of your favourite magazine store to see if you’ve been published, because you won’t be getting any free copies either. Oh, and if you think you’ll get new members for your club from a club-based article you won’t.

Why? Because martial artists read martial arts magazines. Beginners who – let’s be honest – are completely clueless, usually just rock up to the first martial arts club they can find and then start training. They never, ever, buy a magazine to see what they want to do.

So, good luck with getting published. It’s almost guaranteed that, if you can actually write half-decently, you’ll be published if you submit enough articles.

Actually this also applies to a lot of other magazines.Here’s an example. My wife used to own a horse. I had some rollerblades. She would go out riding and I would blade alongside her. I wrote a letter to a magazine about my exploits. Lo and behold, they published it as a two-page article, with a model that was far better looking and far better at roller blading than me.

Good luck, and enjoy seeing your article in a magazine. There’s no feeling like it. Unless they’ve got your name wrong, removed it entirely, or copied your article and republished it without telling you.