Your administrative and marketing materials have two purposes: They help you to run your business in an orderly manner, and they give the outside world the impression that you are a serious professional. A lot of entry-level magazine writers try to make do without administrative and marketing materials because they are an additional — if nominal — startup expense. This is a bad idea, because successful writers establish themselves from the start, setting themselves apart from people who dream of writing but don't take the job half as seriously. Take the time and effort to create a basic set of administrative and marketing materials when you start your writing business. Your investment will pay off for years to come.

Administrative Materials

Administrative materials are the tools that you will use for communicating with editors and sources. They include business cards, fax cover sheets, and letterhead. Every professional in every kind of business has these basics in hand, and you, as a professional magazine writer, should have them too.

There are lots of ways to create administrative materials, some more expensive than others. Office-supply stores such as Staples now stock row after row of shelves with do-it-yourself business stationery products that you can design on your home computer and print out in color or black-and-white. You also can order raised-letter business cards at a reasonable rate from the same kinds of stores, along with preprinted stationery that includes a logo you create by selecting from templates.

While you can spend a ton of money having a graphic artist create a logo for you, and then incorporating it into all of your administrative materials, most magazine writers find this to be an unnecessary expense. The do-it-yourself route is the most common, and most editors respect the effort as a sign of professionalism.

Marketing Materials

Your marketing materials are an extension of your administrative materials. (After all, when you hand out a business card, you are in essence marketing yourself.) Marketing materials include things such as your resume and the folders in which you mail previous writing clips as samples to editors.

If at all possible, your marketing materials should share the same look and logo as your administrative materials. Your goal, remember, is to present yourself as a professional doing business, and the more you can reinforce your name in the editor's memory, the better chance you will have of succeeding. The best way to reinforce your name or idea is to have a logo or look that is professional and classy and that stands out.

A professional set of administrative and marketing materials has additional benefits, as well. One of the most important is that it helps you to establish to outsiders that you are, indeed, running a business — which can be extremely important should you run into legal problems regarding an article you've written.