Want My Job? Here’s How to Get It
In September 2004 I got an email from Nate Green, a 19-year-old kid in Montana. He told me he wanted my job. I don’t think he meant to put me out of work. (If he did, it totally didn’t happen.) He just wanted to do what I did: write about fitness and nutrition for a living.
A few years earlier I would’ve thought he was crazy. I’d stumbled into fitness magazines when I was a grad student in creative writing. I thrived mainly because it was the perfect mix of something I was pretty good at — writing and editing — and something I was passionate about: exercise and healthy living. But I won’t lie: The lack of competition helped. Nobody I worked with wrote about fitness on purpose. Most of them couldn’t wait to move on to something else.
It was the first of many emails I exchanged with Nate; we eventually worked together on a book and at T-nation, and all in all he’s done pretty well for himself. By then I understood that Nate was just one of many fitness pros who wanted to do more than train clients.
Those who didn’t have blogs wanted to launch one. Those whose blog posts found an enthusiastic audience wanted to write for websites like T-nation. Those who wrote for T-nation wanted to get into magazines like Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health. And those who contributed to those magazines wanted to know how to get a book deal.
Lots of them came to me for advice about how to move up to whatever level they hadn’t yet reached. I did the best I could, and eventually compiled my best advice into a document that I gave away to anyone who asked. “It’s free advice,” I warned, “and worth every penny.”
About a year ago Nate convinced me that it’s time to start working on a guide that wouldn’t be free. He put me together with Sean Hyson, group training director at Men’s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness magazines, and a few months later we added John Romaniello to our team.
Our product is called How to Get Published: Writing Domination in the Fitness Industry.
I cover the basics of writing: how to get started, how to get better, how to know when your work is ready for the marketplace.
Roman explains how to create a website that reflects your personality and shows the unique knowledge and skill you bring to your industry, whatever your industry might be. (We focus on fitness writing, but really, the information applies to anyone who has a message to communicate and wants to learn how to deliver it.)
Sean, who assigns and edits hundreds of articles a year, tells you what magazines like his are looking for, how to pitch ideas that will get noticed, and how to write a good article once you get the assignment.
Then I return with a step-by-step guide to publishing a book, from shaping your idea to crafting a proposal, finding an agent, making a deal, and, oh yeah, actually writing something that will appeal to your readers.
Finally, I give aspiring writers some insight into how publishing works, who works in publishing, and why success is never exactly what you think it will be. There’s always some space between what you want to provide the market and what the market wants from you.
How to Get Published: Writing Domination in the Fitness Industry is now on sale. If you’re interested in writing about fitness — or really, any topic you know well and are passionate about — I hope you’ll give it a look. It’s not free, but I’m confident it’s worth every penny.
