Perhaps my experience will be of interest. 'scuse me while I ramble a bit;
Writing: I'm a writer and got into this completely by accident. My day job is reasonably well paid and not particularly taxing so I have lots of time to muck about on automotive adventures here and abroad. A magazine picked up on what I was doing and published something that I wrote for fun. Since then I've had work published in about a dozen magazines and I find that I enjoy the writing almost as much as the mucking about. Mags don't pay much and they often pay late, although if you can sell the same story to more than one publication you can earn quite a few quid. My record was £4000 for one little story (3 hours work)! I'm not going to name names but take great care here, look at the accounts of the publishers. Many are technically broke and rely on enthusiastic new writers doing stuff for free or peanuts to keep going. Many won't give you much feedback to learn from and will just devour your work, so I question how valuable an experience this is for any new writers. Local papers? Ask yourself what you can write that they would be interested in. I wouldn't bother. I don't write much for other mags now as I (and a couple of friends in similar positions) wanted to create own own thing. This takes me on to publishing.
Publishing: I now have my own little digital magazine and get to see the other side of publishing, which is a bit of an eye opener. Firstly, one of the reasons that the print mags pay peanuts is because many are nigh-on broke, as mentioned by others, the print medium is in freefall. The other reason is that they're bombarded by people offering to work for free. Mags deliberately print way more copies than they will sell in order to make their circulation stats look more appealing to advertisers. They're all in decline. Advertisers are the key, I would guess that roughly half a typical print mag's revenue is from ads, half from the cover price. Some one marque mags are subsidised by the car manufacturer (sometimes indirectly) although this is also seems to be in decline as things shift online. Roughly half of what many mags print gets pulped. Digital is the way to go. I don't write much for other mags now and put my energy into my own publication. I bloody love it. We get regular emails from various companies wanting to advertise and while this isn't exactly paying the mortgage it's a nice little earner and funds our fun and games. We took great pleasure in telling a payday loan company that we don't want their rubbish in our mag, at any price. As our (digital) overheads are very low we don't really need their money. It's important (IMO) not to dilute the quality of your work just for money. We also get regular emails from wannabe writers and photographers. Some are good. Some are quite funny. Some aspiring writers seem to think we hand them the keys to a Veyron and beg them to visit the 'ring in it for which we will pay them a squillion dollars. This isn't the case. The only way to make your dream come true is to get off your bum and get creative. A blog is a great place to start and costs you nothing. Who knows where it will take you.
Do you really want a staff writers job for a mainstream mag? I can't think of anything more likely to destroy my love of motoring than getting out of bed at 4am to drive some dreary diesel, knowing that the Editor only wants positive content for fear of upsetting the advertisers. And don't even get me started on watch adverts. Do your own thing and accept that you probably won't earn much in the short term and you'll be fine. I have huge fun doing this. I was in Ireland in a Morgan last week, next week I'm at Donington in an MX-5 and I still pinch myself that I'm getting paid for this. This all started from me writing twaddle online for fun. Try it yourself!
Apologies for the rambling nature of this post, I hope it's of some use to you. Writing isn't my day job but it has become a great paid hobby. Perhaps some of the full timers can share their own experiences of how they got started as I think perhaps I just got lucky.
Feel free to drop me a line if you want any pointers, I wish you the very best of luck
Writing: I'm a writer and got into this completely by accident. My day job is reasonably well paid and not particularly taxing so I have lots of time to muck about on automotive adventures here and abroad. A magazine picked up on what I was doing and published something that I wrote for fun. Since then I've had work published in about a dozen magazines and I find that I enjoy the writing almost as much as the mucking about. Mags don't pay much and they often pay late, although if you can sell the same story to more than one publication you can earn quite a few quid. My record was £4000 for one little story (3 hours work)! I'm not going to name names but take great care here, look at the accounts of the publishers. Many are technically broke and rely on enthusiastic new writers doing stuff for free or peanuts to keep going. Many won't give you much feedback to learn from and will just devour your work, so I question how valuable an experience this is for any new writers. Local papers? Ask yourself what you can write that they would be interested in. I wouldn't bother. I don't write much for other mags now as I (and a couple of friends in similar positions) wanted to create own own thing. This takes me on to publishing.
Publishing: I now have my own little digital magazine and get to see the other side of publishing, which is a bit of an eye opener. Firstly, one of the reasons that the print mags pay peanuts is because many are nigh-on broke, as mentioned by others, the print medium is in freefall. The other reason is that they're bombarded by people offering to work for free. Mags deliberately print way more copies than they will sell in order to make their circulation stats look more appealing to advertisers. They're all in decline. Advertisers are the key, I would guess that roughly half a typical print mag's revenue is from ads, half from the cover price. Some one marque mags are subsidised by the car manufacturer (sometimes indirectly) although this is also seems to be in decline as things shift online. Roughly half of what many mags print gets pulped. Digital is the way to go. I don't write much for other mags now and put my energy into my own publication. I bloody love it. We get regular emails from various companies wanting to advertise and while this isn't exactly paying the mortgage it's a nice little earner and funds our fun and games. We took great pleasure in telling a payday loan company that we don't want their rubbish in our mag, at any price. As our (digital) overheads are very low we don't really need their money. It's important (IMO) not to dilute the quality of your work just for money. We also get regular emails from wannabe writers and photographers. Some are good. Some are quite funny. Some aspiring writers seem to think we hand them the keys to a Veyron and beg them to visit the 'ring in it for which we will pay them a squillion dollars. This isn't the case. The only way to make your dream come true is to get off your bum and get creative. A blog is a great place to start and costs you nothing. Who knows where it will take you.
Do you really want a staff writers job for a mainstream mag? I can't think of anything more likely to destroy my love of motoring than getting out of bed at 4am to drive some dreary diesel, knowing that the Editor only wants positive content for fear of upsetting the advertisers. And don't even get me started on watch adverts. Do your own thing and accept that you probably won't earn much in the short term and you'll be fine. I have huge fun doing this. I was in Ireland in a Morgan last week, next week I'm at Donington in an MX-5 and I still pinch myself that I'm getting paid for this. This all started from me writing twaddle online for fun. Try it yourself!
Apologies for the rambling nature of this post, I hope it's of some use to you. Writing isn't my day job but it has become a great paid hobby. Perhaps some of the full timers can share their own experiences of how they got started as I think perhaps I just got lucky.
Feel free to drop me a line if you want any pointers, I wish you the very best of luck