Right-o. I've abandoned the blog over the past few weeks, but I haven't stopped writing. See?
My Trazzler entries on the U.S. Botantic Garden, the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park (yeah, long name, huh?), and the (ex-USS, now-Display Ship) Barry have been submitted for consideration.
I also won Honorable Mention for my National Steinbeck Center entry, even if they did replace my photo. So, this week, while I've been rereading my travel writing books, the photo replacement thing has been at the top of my mind. Both Louisa Peat O'Neil and the Butler/Zobel team harp on the importance of being able to accompany your own writing with moderately useful photos - enough to tempt the editors, who are as visual as anyone else. They also recommend sending in a variety of photos - vertical, close-up, landscape, people, places, from a distance - so the graphics and layout people can play with the set-up. Nothing in a magazine is more boring than a layout that looks like it came from the plastic sleeves of your photo album. Besides, the author has no idea what the whole publication will look like, or if the story will be next to something with very similar photos.
Translating that to my current efforts, I figure I should consider submitting a few pictures along with my writing, so editors can decide themselves what picture they want. They don't exactly have access to my computer full of (awesome, usually) images, so they resort to someone else's tumblr of relevant photos to grab what they've envisioned. I'd rather they use me for both, though, so I posted my two favorites for each location on the Botanic Garden and Lincoln pieces.
I still don't understand why people post six stories in a single week's contest, though. There's only one prize per week, and they're destroying their ability to submit these pieces over the next six weeks...
Books referenced in this post:
Travel Writing: See the World, Sell the Story, by L. Peat O'Neil
The Travel Writer's Handbook, by Jacqueline Harmon Butler and Louise Purwin Zobel
