Win No. 14–Getting that Job Writing a Column for a Martial Arts Magazine

I get emails like the one you’re about to read on a regular basis. It’s been a decade since I wrote for the Martial Arts magazines, but having done so has provided me with friends, customers, and a certain degree of almost notoriety. Read the email, then I’ll tell you how to get a job writing a column for the mags.

Greetings Al, I don’t know if you’ll remember me but I was a customer several years ago and I have most of your videos. But at that time I was unable to purchase your work and would like to know if you still have them available. I will be purchasing your latest courses as well as I always believed you had the best martial arts available and I would like those videos. Please let me know if your work is still available. After 30 years of training your work is still innovative.
Thank You
CC

Now, it goes without saying that you’re going to have to be good at and enjoy writing, and it also goes without saying that you should know a bit about the fighting arts The fact that you’re  reading this article already supports that, so let me get into the guts of the matter.

I had written a dozen articles for CFW, which company put out Inside Karate, Masters and Styles, Inside Kung Fu, and other magazines. On a whim, I decided I wanted to be a columnist.

Luckily, I had all the issues of Inside Karate for the last few years. So I went back and read every column written by John Soet, who was editing the thing. I then wrote a column, and tried to sound exactly like John. It was pretty easy, so I wrote eleven more columns, and mailed them to him.

That was it. I ended up writing Case Histories for four years for Inside Karate. I was read by millions of people across the martial arts world, and to this day I get wins like the one above.

Now, before I let you go, I want to share a bit of information that inspired me to this particular method, and abuse some wrong information concerning job seeking of any sort.

I was taking a psych class back in college when I came across an interesting datum: employers hire people who are stupider than them.

Man, that is pretty in your face, eh? That’s a grim loss of compassion if there ever was one, and, if it was true, the human race would have died out centuries ago.

The corrected information is: people hire people who are like them.

Well, of course! To sell something you have to make a friend, and that leads to the corrected piece of information. And that was the type of thought I pursued when I was copycatting an editor to get a job.

Now, I don’t know if any of John’s articles are still around, but you can find a healthy sampling of my own martial arts magazine articles, inspect them to see how closely I followed the advice I have given you here, at MonsterMartialArts.com.

Good luck in your writing, and I hope to see you in the mags.