How I went from zero experience to writing for my dream magazines

Including the email that landed me my first published article

This week on IF YOU GO AWAY I’m sharing the story of how I landed my first professional writing credit, after wasting a decade and having almost nothing to show for my English Literature degree and lifelong ambition.

I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement. I’ve collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, written for clients including Lionsgate and Heavy Metal Magazine, and my first serious comic was rejected by three printers on the grounds of obscenity before we found someone willing to risk on printing it.

Observant readers might have spotted that, in a cruel case of life imitating art, some idiot drank too many cocktails last night and accidentally send out a draft post about The Three Coffins, a comic about lonely drunks who are doomed to repeat past mistakes. Consider that one a bonus, this was today’s scheduled post!

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Aspiring writers – How to land your first writing credit

I’ve failed at a lot of things in my life, but one of the achievements that I’m most proud of is that I’ve had my work featured in three publications that were lifelong dreams to get into: Rue Morgue, Kerrang!, and Times Literary Supplement. That might seem like an eclectic mix, but it covers three of my greatest loves – horror, loud music, and Romantic poetry.

Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but for a good percentage of my life, that was it. I wanted to be a writer. Although I spent a lot of my twenties writing an unpublished novel and learning how to write DIY comix with friends, I found myself approaching my thirties with almost no writing credits to my name. It wasn’t until 2011 that I started reaching out to magazines and trying to persuade them to publish my work.

Here’s the thing that’s easiest to miss when you’re starting out as a writer: Getting started isn’t just about talent or passion. It’s about momentum. The difference between the writers who gain ground and the ones who tread water is learning how to keep moving forward, even when it feels like you’re getting nowhere. That’s more true for me today than it was when I started.

People regularly ask me how I started writing comics. The answer to that question is intertwined with my journey as a writer, because the more well-known I became, the easier it was to persuade people to make comics with me.

An incomplete gif that was supposed to show every comic I ever published, but I missed some…

Here’s the story of how I got my first writing credit and how I learned to create my own momentum.

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Laying the groundwork before anyone knew me or cared

Starting from ground zero is rough. Writers publish, so I needed to find someone to publish my work. Before reaching out to any magazines, I started blogging. I used Blogspot (this was a long time ago…) and committed to publishing monthly. Every night after work, the few hours when our toddler was sleeping, I’d write film reviews, but I’d also promote the work of other aspiring and emerging artists.

I learned early that the best way to drive traffic back to your own work is to give the reader something: introduce them to a new artist or writer they haven’t heard of, but only recommend things that you actively love. Think of me what you will, but my taste is consistent – if I recommended a cannibal novel that you enjoyed five years ago, you’ll probably enjoy whatever I recommend tomorrow.

At the start, your audience is minuscule. So the best way to bring people to your work is by publishing your own stories alongside people who are already better established. That gives more established artists, with audiences that might be similar to your own, a reason to share your work. I was posting to my blog monthly, sharing the links on any platforms available to me, and learning discipline: the ability to hit deadlines on good days and bad, whether or not I felt like it. That proved vital once I started writing for monthly magazines.

I also started reviewing everything I bought online, to get into the habit of articulating my opinions and publishing them in public forums. So before I landed my first magazine article in print, I had probably published around 12 monthly blog posts, including write-ups of work by 24 artists who I respected or admired, but were still emerging and likely to value the coverage. I’d probably also posted reviews of around 24 graphic novels to websites like Amazon, focusing on books that nobody else had reviewed. You’d probably do this on something like goodreads today.

The point is that by the time an opportunity presented itself, I felt ready to hit the ground running.

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Find a way to get your foot in the door

Growing in confidence, I researched what magazines were on the market so I could find likely places to publish my work. I concentrated on what was new. I visited shops and looked for newly established magazines that interested me, bought copies, and examined their weakest areas.

I was looking for gaps. What could I offer that they didn’t already do well?

Keep in mind that by this stage, I had an English Literature degree that I’d let languish for nearly a decade because I was a working-class idiot who didn’t understand what a graduate job looked like or what sort of social mobility might open up to someone with a degree. I had almost no portfolio to demonstrate my skills, just a few DIY comix, a handful of short films in the making, and a head full of knowledge. That was all I had to offer.

My first publication, in the pages SCREAM: The Horror Magazine

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The reality of breaking in: what nobody tells you

People ask how I got started as a writer, and I regularly give talks to undergraduate students about how to do your own PR in the creative industries. These are one and the same thing. I researched places I wanted to write for, I begged, pleaded, and cajoled editors to give me a chance, I stayed up late every night to impress them once I got a foot in the door, and I tried not to tread water, using every opportunity to lead to the next one.

To be transparent, a LOT of the magazines I’ve written for haven’t paid me. When you’re building a portfolio and making a name for yourself, you sometimes have to take that on the chin. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t value yourself and your effort. Whenever I wrote for free, I asked myself: What am I getting out of this?

Am I adding a new name to my portfolio? If so, you can do that just as easily after writing for a magazine once as you can three times.

Is this editor helping my work reach a wider audience? If so, great, but am I linking back to my website? Am I linking to my newsletter so that readers can follow me back to the source?

Is an editor benefiting from my free reviews? Great. In that case, can they be persuaded to publish my creative work? Will they run a monthly magazine strip?

Is the editor going to pay for this strip? No? Then agree to work with a different artist every month so that everyone does a single page of art in exchange for reaching a new audience and adding the mag to their portfolio, but don’t take the piss by expecting anybody to regularly draw for free.

That’s how I got my first break.

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The email that got me my first print credit

As far as I can remember, my first credit in a national print magazine was for SCREAM: The Horror Magazine back in 2011. I bought a physical copy, read it cover to cover, identified what I could offer, then looked inside the inner cover for the editor’s contact details and sent the following email.

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My pitch to SCREAM

Hi Rich,

After reading the second issue of SCREAM magazine today, I’d like to find out about your submissions policy and how I can convince you to let me write something for the magazine. Specifically, I’d like to write coverage of comics in line with the respect that you show to other mediums, and in doing so, I think I could offer you something that no other horror magazine in the UK currently has.

I don’t have a published history to direct you to, so you’d have to judge me on the strength of my submission, but I studied English Literature at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, where I specialised in Vampire Literature, The English Ghost Story and Film Noir, then wrote a dissertation about the Western comic book as a representation of the historical period in which it was created.

I realise that it’s early for SCREAM and you probably have a surfeit of material that would be suitable for future issues, but I hope that you’ll consider contacting me if there’s a way that I can convince you to devote some space to the analysis of horror comics. It would be a mistake to offer to review new releases for you, because the internet is full of comic bloggers and for a bimonthly magazine, information like that would be dated pretty quickly.

I’d like to spotlight publishers like Avatar that have been applauded for their extreme horror comics in the last couple of years, or do retrospectives of emerging creators and more recent movements in comics. EC and the history of horror comics have already been covered extensively elsewhere – I’d like to cover new subjects and celebrate modern horror comics.

Thanks for your time, and congratulations on collating a compelling reason for me to part with my money. I want my magazines to respect their subject matter and give value for money, and that’s exactly what SCREAM has done.

P M Buchan

My first article for SCREAM - As promised in my pitch

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Have you ever tried pitching to a magazine? If not, what’s stopping you?

Anybody can go to their favourite website and find the editor@ email address to contact someone in charge, but going into a newsagent and paying money to pick up a copy of your favourite print magazine takes commitment.

Inside the cover of that magazine, you’ll normally find contributor and editor contact details that they’ll never give away online. Let me know what happens if you make your first pitch!

Because of that email back in 2011, the late, great Sid Haig once read my work ❤️

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– P M Buchan