style will not blast its
chances of acceptance if the "story" is all there and is typed into a
presentable appearance and illustrated with interesting photographs. A
good style will enhance the manuscript's value, but want of verbal skill
rarely will prove a fatal blemish. Not so long as there are "re-write
men" around the shop!

It is not a lack of artistry that administers the most numerous defeats
to the novice free lance. It is a lack of market judgment. When he has
completed his manuscript he sits down and hopefully mails it out to the
first market that strikes his fancy. He shoots into the dark, trusting
to luck.

A huge army of disappointed scribblers have followed that haphazard plan
of battle. They would know better than to try to market crates of eggs
to a shoe store, but they see nothing equally absurd in shipping a
popular science article to the _Atlantic Monthly_ or an "uplift" essay
to the _Smart Set_. They paper their walls with rejection slips, fill up
a trunk with returned manuscripts and pose before their sympathetic
friends as martyrs.

Many of these defeated writers have nose-sense for what is of national
interest. They write well, and they take the necessary pains to make
their manuscripts presentable in appearance. If they only knew enough to
offer their contributions to suitable markets, they soon would be
scoring successes. What they can't get into their heads is that the
names in an index of periodicals represent needs as widely varied as the
names in a city directory.

Take, for example, five of our leading weeklies: _The Saturday Evening
Post_, _Collier's_, _Leslie's_, _The Outlook_ and _The Independent_.
They all use articles of more or less timeliness, but beyond this one
similarity they are no more alike in character than an American, an
Irishman, an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scot. Your burning hot news
"story" which _The Saturday Evening Post_ turned down may have been
rejected because the huge circulation of the _Post_ necessitates that
its "copy" go to press six or seven weeks before it appears upon the
newsstands. You should have tried _The Independent_, which makes a
specialty of getting hot stuff into circulation before it has time to
cool. Your interview with a big man of Wall Street which was returned by
_The Outlook_ might find a warm welcome at _Leslie's_. A character
sketch of the Democratic candidate for President might not please
_Leslie's_ in the least, but would fetch