Hi
I'm the features editor for Two Wheels Only magazine. We have a great travel section in the magazine called 'Passport and Panniers'. In the past I've written about bike journeys through Libya, Bosnia and all over Europe. Each member of the editorial team has been on a bike based journey somewhere cool and we pride ourselves on the fantastic stories we bring home. We're looking for more adventures to use in the pages of TWO. If you have a tale to tell (and hi res images to back it up), we want to hear from you. We'll pay £150 if your story is published. If you're interested please email a brief (150 word) outline of your journey and attach some lo res images to Hogan@two.tv
Thanks very much
John

Hi, I just have to say that a short trip that I did lately cost more than that for fuel. I hope no-one takes this up as it is way too little. Infact this is a golden opportunity for HUBBers to negotiate a reasonable rate. How come I was offered £1,000 for an article 18 months ago? I was too slow to get on the road. Now I'm expected to contribute £500 to £800 for TWO to get an article. Linzi.

Depends how you look at it, if it's just a bit of exposure an first experience of writing why not? Or if you got some freebies out of people then again, why not it means they get a bit more exposure.

See if they'd commision me in advance, then I'd be up for doing it for that amount just cos I could tell potential sponsors and leverage more out of them.

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Rates vary widely from publication to publication. I might actually give this a go. £150 would pay half the cost of my MOT!

Roughly how many words are you looking at for the completed article John?

Matt

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http://adventure-writing.blogspot.com

http://scotlandnepal.blogspot.com/

*Disclaimer* - I am not saying my bike is better than your bike. I am not saying my way is better than your way. I am not mocking your religion/politics/other belief system. When reading my post imagine me sitting behind a frothing pint of ale, smiling and offering you a bag of peanuts. This is the sentiment in which my post is made. Please accept it as such!

This one may run and run.................

I briefly freelanced as a writer for various EMAP motorcycle publications in the early 1990s (15 years ago) and have here on my desk an invoice to EMAP (which has been paid !) for £1400 for a 1200 word story (and I didn't even do the photos !)

A professional writer and or photographer would piss themselves laughing at rates like this.

If I want to read amateurs stories of traveling round the world I would go on the Hubb/Advrider and enjoy the experience very much, and I do just that.

If I want awesome, inspiring photography, and mind bending words, I am happy to pay a premium, maybe for National Geographic or some of the European travel mags. Magazines should be investing in professionals and excellence, otherwise they become no different to the Internet. In fact, a great story with great pictures displayed here and on Advrider will get thousands and thousands of readers

In the UK, newspapers (and the BBC in particular) are going crazy for citizen journalism and photography. Tell us your story blah blah blah, send us your photos blah blah blah, we can't be bothered to commission professionals and pay proper rates

Publishers have for a long time made absolutely no investments in editorial work, regional newspapers have been the very worst example and their demise has been spectacular.

I can of course,see the attraction of having your story printed in a national magazine but selling it for £150 so that the publisher can make money from it is absolutely nuts, completely nuts.

And be very careful to check any issues with regard to syndication, copyright and so on. I have no experience of TWO and make absolutely no comment on them, but a great many publishers who seeks contributions from citizen journalists then go on to syndicate the work to other publishers and make substantial profits from it. Check the terms and conditions very carefully.

These are not the ramblings of an embittered freelance, I'm a staff photographer earning a decent living shooting international, top spec sports
Equally, I'm not saying that there aren't some very very talented writers and snappers out there who don't normally make their living from words and pics. But if your stuff is good enough to be published in a profitable, national magazine that takes big adverts and wants to position itself as a brand leader, please please please don't give it away for an utterly dismal 150 quid.

Don't devalue yourselves ; don't devalue the intelligence, creativity, effort, perspiration and the ambitious, open mind that got you into (and out of) the situation that makes your story an asset to a profit making company.

£750 should be the absolute minimum, especially for words AND pictures.

You put that very well. You are absolutely correct to separate magazine articles from online accounts. The trouble is the editors seem to want to dumb down their editions, saving money in the short term. I think Bike magazine will already be seeing sales drop after their change of direction and loss of their then excellent editor. (Who's now at MCN!) I shall endeavour to get top notch material and offer it to a few, selected editors at top rates or they can't have it. Thanks for showing me that the original amount I was offered was realistic. The offer was for "excellent words and pics". 'nuff said. Linzi.

Yep - just like the obsession with reality television eh? - get the gormons to entertain us, rather than proper actors (and script writers)...

To be fair to TWO - they haven't said how many words they want - is the feature a bit of fluff (like BIKE used to do over a page or two, a few hundred words and picture heavy), or are they looking for 2000+ish words over say 4-5 pages...?

If so, you are completely correct that 150GBP is insulting, even an amateur - after all, if it's good enough to put on their page, its good enough to pay a fair rate...

Perhaps 750GBP is a touch high? but for a full feature I would expect the minimum of 100GBP per A4 page...

xxx

TWO Magazine are the owners of Visordown - Motorbike Reviews | Motorbike News | Motorcycle Forums..

They dumbed down, over commercialised and ripped the soul out that once great forum so I can't even start to think what they will do to your treasured tales and pictures... You ever read TWO ?? Its written for retards.

Your story will probably be rewritten and dumbed down for the skin headed R6 riding weekend heros who buy the magazine so don't come back whining then they edit you out of your favourite shots and replace you with Ewan Mcgreggor lookalike and your bike has been turned into 1200GS with TWO stickers all over it..

Then of course there will be the editing where your great experiences of meeting indigenous locals will be replaced with the tale of you dodging genades and bullets by those scary people who arnt white skinned !

But hey, £150 is £150 quid... Its a chain and sprocket set in exchange for your soul

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Did some trips.
Rode some bikes.
Fix them for a living.
Can't say anymore.

Now you have gone too far.

"1200GS with a chain and sprocket"

A soul is worth the cost of a rear drive.

lol, yer I know its a shafty.....

But your right, BMW really would take your soul if you let them

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Did some trips.
Rode some bikes.
Fix them for a living.
Can't say anymore.

The thing is over at Bikechatforums.com I do writeups for free and so does everybody else at the BCF much like the HUBB where riders reports of the road out there is done for free , or as I like to think of it as sort of repayment for the help and advice that is given out by HUBBers.

In that HUBBers and BCFers can live my experience vicariously and perhaps be inspired to have their own adventure.

TWO's £150 offer is fairly insulting a jaunt down to Spain cost me nearly £1500, my trip across Russia later this year via the Stans will cost me upwards of £3-5K probably more.

I suppose many people will get sucked into this due to the look at me appearing in print type reasoning, but I suppose there are better methods about this as Motosyberia manage to get a fair bit of sponsorship in return for reports / blogs / DVDs printed out.

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http://www.itchystravels.co.uk/Bigone2009.html

Oh and btw bikechatforums destroyed visordown pretty much when VD sold out to TWO BCF took up all the refugees.

On a related comment , we recently had a discussion on BCF about how the BCF was destroying paper magazines due to the interactivity and stuff you don't find in traditional bike magazines.

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http://www.itchystravels.co.uk/Bigone2009.html

Fair enough, but you have to realize that your own grammar, lack of it actually, renders your writing valueless anyway. No editor would bother to take the time needed to decode your writing. I needed to read your post four times to get the meaning. There is good money for quality work. Linzi.

Do I detect Journalists fearing for their jobs? All those expense accounts and freebies disapearing down the tubes? I'm sorry, I have very little sympathy having dealt with newspaper types who want you to write the article for them (past life working in the truck industry). Get this months street fighter magazine and you'll see an article on the Dragon Rally. It's copied and pasted from a website by a so called professional journalist who was supposed to give credit to the real writer but forgot. This publication at least has the decency to own up and should be printing a correction.

I've got news for you; print journalism is dead. No one employs typists anymore, spell checker put them out of work in the '90's. Everyone else in the world says what they want to say directly, it avoids misinterpretation. The last fling for bits of paper has to be pieces from the internet, it's the only efficient way. A pound a word explains why a magazine is £3.20 and I'm sorry, I simply won't pay that. MCN is now £1.90!

As for "quality", have you read anything by Jeremy Clarkson? He can cut and paste his own articles, they are all the same!

So, here's a dare. Direct us to two recently published articles, one by a journo and one by Joe public. See who can actually spot the "quality".

I think £150 for something you'd write up on here for free is a great deal and very honest of TWO not to simply C&P it.

Andy

I´ve written mostly travel-related stuff into a mc-magazine in Finland from 1995 onwards. Here the whole business is much, much smaller, but I still would not sell a whole story, with photos, for 150 pounds (which is maybe about 200 euros).

This is because good-quality work cannot be done properly for that cheap. I paid over 2000 euros for the SLR camera body only, and over double that to have all my photo gear. The photos from that system do beat the hell out of any pocket-size cameras (and naturally it depends on who´s shooting them, too, that´s just one important part of your know-how), and sure you could get 90% of that quality with a much smaller investment. I want to get that last 10% into my work, because it may be the difference, that´ll make it feel like something special.

I´ve never done this full-time, its always been more like just a hobby-based extra, but I do take it seriously, and wouldnt want some company to make money out of it, and paying very little in return. Everyone knows travelling costs serious money these days, and these magazines arent doing what they do for charity, either, so why should the writers.

Just my 0.02 cents...