Writing for Children's Magazines Workshop by Margaret Mincks

Yesterday I had the chance to drive to Celebration, Fl and attend this free writing workshop for children's magazines. This was hosted by Florida SCBWI. If you are interested in writing or illustrating for children, then this is a great group to belong to. Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld our Regional Advisor hopes to have more of these free workshops.


So back to the one I attended.  Margaret Mincks is a former editor of the children's magazine, Spider.
She gave us the low down of how an issue was planned and gave us some encouraging news.
Each issue she would try to have a number of poems, folk stories, fairy tales, nonfiction, etc.
One of the examples she gave was if you had written a beautiful poem on dragons and she had already purchased fifteen dragon poems, she would not purchase another one, no matter how wonderful it may be.


The other good thing though, is if it wasn't suited to the Spider magazine, but might fit one of the other magazines in the group, then she would forward it to that editor.


She  stressed following the submission guidelines. Check and double check.
Does your story follow the magazines tone?
Does your story follow the target age group?
Is it within the word count?


Just because you have been rejected don't give up!


Also some other things that were mentioned were the 12 x 12 picture book group
The First Line
Absolute Write


Next Sunday I will be announcing the winners of the books giveaways: Blogging for Writers by Robin Houghton and Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan.
Leave a comment for a chance to win.
Thank you for all the comments!