How to approach writing several similar articles?
Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 7:34 am
While writing, I often notice ways in which an article could be broken into shorter, more specific articles. My impulse is to strip out the sentence or paragraph which inspired the thought and use it as an intro to that offshoot article. But if I use the exact same wording in two or more articles, I can't sell any of them for full rights, yes?
Say I'm writing about medical practitioners in Haiti and then I realize I can take my "general" article and tweak it multiple times to become several articles about orthopedists, dermatologists, pediatricians in Haiti, etc...all with the basically same structure and some of the same wording.
Am I right in thinking that I would then only be able to sell the usage rights for those articles? And, I'm getting the impression that buyers tend to prefer full rights to usage, so would it hurt my sales to submit a lot of similar articles in that way? Or would it actually help, because buyers would have a greater chance of finding a niche article suited to their needs?
Say I'm writing about medical practitioners in Haiti and then I realize I can take my "general" article and tweak it multiple times to become several articles about orthopedists, dermatologists, pediatricians in Haiti, etc...all with the basically same structure and some of the same wording.
Am I right in thinking that I would then only be able to sell the usage rights for those articles? And, I'm getting the impression that buyers tend to prefer full rights to usage, so would it hurt my sales to submit a lot of similar articles in that way? Or would it actually help, because buyers would have a greater chance of finding a niche article suited to their needs?