woodbloke66":3ji1xll5 said:
I used to be a regular contributor to F&C some years ago when the editors were Mike Huntley and then Derek Jones.
That's interesting, Rob. From about early 1998 to maybe 2004 or 2005, F&C published my articles intermittently. I suspect that's because I wrote them fairly intermittently, and only submitted them on spec - I was never commissioned by them to write. In terms of success, I think all but perhaps one item I submitted was published.
I wrote articles primarily because I enjoyed the process of putting something reasonably cogent together, and I just like to write, writing being an essential for studying English, probably my second favourite subject at school. I also found the money earned a small bonus, but it wasn't really enough additional income to fully compensate for all the time and effort necessary to create the article's content. The kudos of being a published author I think possibly helped open two or three doors leading to work, so there was that more tangible benefit.
But, in the end, I decided I didn't want to write articles anymore, it being more work than I was prepared to put in for the return, even though I frequently sold essentially the same article to more than one publisher in different parts of the world, thus frequently doubling the income generated. My writing interest moved on to a longer format, the result being my book on timber technology, Cut & Dried. This actually started as basically article format texts intended primarily for my furniture students at the time, with the possibility in the background of perhaps spinning off variations of the student learning material to woodworking magazines. That never did happen because I realised that the word count and images required to properly discuss each of the essential timber technology topics was always going to exceed by thousands of words what a magazine would publish even in a series of perhaps three issues, or more. So that was the end of that, and I just got on and wrote a book instead, which took about ten years, on and off, all without having a publisher to hand, which really is a cack-handed way to write a book, but there you go.
Interestingly, in about September of 2018, I was contacted by Derek Jones who was still then editor of F&C, who told me they were going to publish some sort of extract out of Cut & Dried near the end of that year. They'd made arrangement to do so directly with Lost Art Press as far as I know. I never did see the article nor, unsurprisingly, did I get any payment for it, but I assumed it happened. Slainte.
) in the past I have contributed to several mags, both "hobby" (aeromodelling) and "professional" (aviation).
