WHAT EDITORS WANT.  All the requirements for success in special feature writing may be reduced to the trite dictum that editors want what they believe their readers want.  Although a commonplace, it expresses a point of view that aspiring writers are apt to forget.  From a purely commercial standpoint, editors are middlemen who buy from producers what they believe they can sell to their customers.  Unless an editor satisfies his readers with his articles, they will cease to buy his publication.  If his literary wares are not what his readers want, he finds on the newsstands unsold piles of his publication, just as a grocer finds on his shelves faded packages of an unpopular breakfast food.  Both editor and grocer undertake to buy from the producers what will have a ready sale and will satisfy their customers.

The writer, then, as the producer, must furnish wares that will attract and satisfy the readers of the periodical to which he desires to sell his product.  It is the ultimate consumer, not merely the editor, that he must keep in mind in selecting his material and in writing his article.  “Will the reader like this?” is the question that he must ask himself at every stage of his work.  Unless he can convince himself that the average person who reads the periodical to which he proposes to submit his article will like what he is writing, he cannot hope to sell it to the editor.

UNDERSTANDING THE READER.  Instead of thinking of readers as a more or less indefinite mass, the writer will find it advantageous to picture to himself real persons who may be taken as typical readers.  It is very easy for an author to think that what interests him and his immediate circle will appeal equally to people in general.  To write successfully, however, for the Sunday magazine of a newspaper, it is necessary to keep in mind the butcher, the baker, and—­if not the candlestick-maker, at least the stenographer and the department store clerk—­as well as the doctor, lawyer, merchant, and chief.  What is true of the Sunday newspaper is true of the popular magazine.

The most successful publisher in this country attributes the success of his periodical to the fact that he kept before his mind’s eye, as a type, a family of his acquaintance in a Middle-Western town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, and shaped the policy of his publication to meet the needs and interests of all its members.  An editor who desired to reach such a family would be immeasurably helped in selecting his material by trying constantly to judge from their point of view whatever passed through his hands.  It is equally true that a writer desiring to gain admittance to that magazine, or to others making the same appeal, would greatly profit by visualizing as vividly as possible a similar family.  Every successful writer, consciously or unconsciously, thus pictures his readers to himself.

If, for example, an author is preparing an article for an agricultural journal, he must have in his mind’s eye an average farmer and this farmer’s family.  Not only must he see them in their surroundings; he must try to see life from their point of view.  The attitude of the typical city man toward the farm and country life is very different from that of the countryman.  Lack of sympathy and insight is a fatal defect in many an article intended by the writer for farm readers.