Many successful magazine writers get around the problem of competing titles by organizing their own, personal stable of complementary titles. This allows them to research a topic once or become an expert in a few different subjects, but write about their ideas several different times from several different angles, thus boosting their bottom line by selling multiple stories.

You can see how this philosophy works by looking at the example of boating magazines in the previous section. Let's say you become an expert at covering the design of new yachts. You may become a regular writer who covers new-yacht launches for Power & Motoryacht, but who at the same time is able to rewrite and sell different angles of your stories — say, profiles of the yachts' owners — to a luxury lifestyle magazine such as Robb Report. And if you travel to boating destinations to do your reporting on these new yachts, you also might be able to come up with a good story pitch for a magazine like Travel & Leisure.

Those three magazines, then, would become part of your personal stable of titles, or the titles where you can put different spins on your work to sell it in different ways. Having a personal stable of titles makes you much more likely to earn a higher income, since you can report once and sell three or four times, instead of starting from scratch with new ideas and reporting work for every story idea you sell.

In many cases, you won't even have to look too far to find titles that complement your chosen titles nicely. With more and more corporations gobbling up more and more magazines these days, your editor at one magazine can often put you directly in touch with an editor at a complementary magazine — simply because they all sometimes work for the same parent company.