How to Get Published from Your Journal

Well, I’ve hit the home stretch on my first eBook: How to Journal and How to publish from your journal.

Aside from my corporate writing, I’ve been publishing my personal writing since around 1990 in newspapers and magazines: Book reviews, Essays, Personal Remembrances, Poetry.

Last year at a writers group I joined for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org), I was asked how I got published.

I explained that most of what I’ve published comes straight from the pages of my Journal. I proceeded to explain how I journal everything and one day noticed that one of those journal entries had the makings of a personal essay/memoir.

I transcribed it into Word, edited it, polished it, rewrote it and submitted it to the Birmingham Arts Journal. It was accepted and published. Yay, found a goldmine of publishable ideas. I went back to my journals to look for more buried treasure, and I started journaling with an eye to what I was putting on the page.

After explaining this, I thought maybe others would like to know how to make then mine their journal for publishable material.

So here it is again, November looms and I find myself again at this year’s NaNoWriMo group. The same question came up about how to get published. This time I could not only tell them how, but that my eBook on the subject would be coming out on Amazon October 11, 2013.