Bylined and trade articles

What a bylined article is

A bylined article is a piece written for somebody else’s publication to print, under your name. A trade magazine, an association newsletter, a supplier’s journal: their readers, their editor, their word count, their house rules. You supply the knowledge and the name. I supply the hours, the structure and the dealings with the editor.

It is not an advertorial, which is a page you pay for and which readers discount accordingly. It is not a post on your own site; that is a blog post, and you control everything about it. The value here is precisely that somebody else decided you were worth printing, and the price of that is that they can decide you were not. More pitches are turned down than taken up, accepted pieces get cut, and some publications never reply at all. Anybody promising otherwise is selling advertorial and calling it editorial.

When you need one

You need one when your buyers read a particular publication and you know which one. Specifiers, procurement officers, clinicians and trade associations all have a paper or a newsletter they genuinely open, and appearing in it carries a weight that nothing on your own site can.

You need one when you are selling to a sceptical trade rather than to the public. A contractor bidding institutional work, a manufacturer trying to be named in a specification: for those buyers, published in the trade press is a credential, not a marketing line.

You do not need one if the argument is really aimed at your own customers. Publish it yourself, where nobody can shorten it and nothing is declined, as a thought leadership article. That is cheaper, faster and entirely within your control.

What the work includes

• Choosing the publication. Three or four candidates your buyers actually read, ranked, with an honest note on which are realistic this year and which are not. Where nobody is sure who reads what, that question comes first and it is audience research.
• Reading the contributor guidelines. Every publication has them and most contributors ignore them. Word count, deadlines, what counts as promotional, whether they take pitches or finished pieces, and what they have already run on the subject this year.
• The pitch. A short note to a named editor: the angle, why now, why you, and the length. Sent one publication at a time, because pitching the same piece to four editors at once is how a contributor stops being read anywhere.
• The article, written to their specification. Their length rather than yours, their register, no product names where the guidelines forbid them, and no advertisement dressed up as a conclusion.
• The editor’s pass. Answering fact queries, agreeing cuts, and supplying the author line and the photograph they will ask for at the least convenient moment.

What you get

The pitch and the correspondence. Whatever the outcome, you get the pitch as sent, the editor’s reply, and a plain note on what it tells us about approaching that publication next time.

The article. Written to the stated length, in your voice, with every factual claim flagged for you to confirm before it leaves my hands. You approve every word before it carries your name. There is no exception to that.

A version you can use yourself. Most publications ask for a period of exclusivity and then release it. You get a second version, rewritten rather than repasted, for your own site once that period ends, with a note of the date it may go up.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A family firm in southern Ontario makes commercial kitchen ventilation and is specified by mechanical consultants who have never heard of it. The owner has argued for years that most kitchen fire suppression failures begin with a duct routed for the architect rather than for the person who has to clean it.

The shortlist is four publications: two national trade monthlies, a provincial association newsletter and a restaurant operators’ magazine. The association newsletter takes contributions from members and wants eight hundred words. The national monthly wants a pitch first and runs pieces at fifteen hundred. The pitch goes to the national monthly and is declined, politely, because they ran something adjacent in March. It goes next to the association newsletter, which accepts. The piece is written to eight hundred words. The editor cuts two paragraphs and the sentence naming the firm’s own product, and it runs under the owner’s name with a two-line credit. Four months later the restaurant magazine commissions a different piece off the back of it, which is how this work compounds.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you want to argue, who you want reading it, and which publications you already see. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The shortlist, the pitching and one written article, with a stated number of further pitches if the first is declined.
3. The shortlist and the guidelines. Three to five working days. You choose the publication and I read their rules before a word is written.
4. The recorded call. Forty minutes on what you have seen and why you believe it. That recording is the raw material, and it is yours.
5. The pitch, and the wait. Editors answer in anything from two days to a month, and some never answer. If it is declined, the next publication on the list gets a pitch written for them.
6. The article. Eight to ten working days from acceptance, then your approval, then the editor’s cuts, which I argue where it matters and concede where it does not.

What it costs

Bylined articles are quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call, in CAD, agreed in writing before anything starts. The price covers the shortlist, the pitching and the writing, because those are the parts I control. It does not buy a placement, and I will not quote a price that pretends to. If every publication on the list declines, you still own the article and the research, and it goes on your own site instead. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working here.

What happens next

Three things tend to follow a piece that runs. An editor who liked one contribution asks for another, and a standing run of them under one name is executive ghostwriting. The same argument aimed at websites rather than print is the guest article programme. And because a trade piece is read by people qualified to check it, some clients put later drafts through fact-checking before they are sent. None of that is assumed. One placed article is a complete piece of work, and nothing further is owed in either direction.