Bret Devereaux

Have an idea? Write a draft, polish it carefully, pitch it at the publication of your dreams. When they pass on it, drop down to the next choice until someone takes it. Now you have a byline. Amend your next pitch to note that your words have appeared in print at X.

Placing articles in mainstream media places is one of those things where the more bylines you have, the easier it is to get new bylines; another reason to start this stuff early (but don't do it for free because bylines by places that didn't pay you don't matter as much).

While you are doing this, be nice, prompt, and courteous, because the gold ticket is building a good working relationship with an editor at a solid publication. If you are a known, reliable quantity, it becomes much easier to land pieces.

If you are building your own platform (like ACOUP)...uh...get really lucky? This advice is harder for me because I think there's a lot more alchemy than science here, so I can only speak to what I did.

My strategy for ACOUP (where I hoped to perhaps have a few hundred regular readers, so...uh...mission accomplished, I guess?) had a few basic elements: 1) Write with posts appearing on a regular schedule so readers knew when to come back looking for new stuff.

2) Conversational writing more akin to a written 100-level lecture than an 'essay.' Teaching experience can also help you get a sense of where the average person is in terms of subject knowledge, so you know where you need to start.

3) Honey on the cup of wormwood (Lucretius, DRN 1.939-41) - always lead with the hook, where the hook is going to be some modern connection, either a modern work of pop culture or a modern assumption about the past.

In retrospect, I didn't plan this, but if you can tap into an existing subculture, that can really help build an audience, because chances are those folks have their own forums and reddits where they share neat stuff.

My initial audience came pretty heavily out of the fantasy literature community (esp. on Reddit) because I had used GoT and LOTR has some of my hooks. Then those folks evangelized my work to other people.

My final bit of advice is to be on Twitter and to curate a professional persona on Twitter. The public you want to reach isn't on twitter, but the journalists, editors, podcasters, etc. that you want to use to reach that public are.

Twitter is almost never a major driver of traffic on ACOUP (it's there, but in 26 months, twitter has been my top referrer in just 3 of them), but doing my public engagement history bit on twitter has gotten me opportunities to write elsewhere that were very good.