I’ve always enjoyed writing stories about family experiences, experiences so memorable that no matter how much time passed, my mind goes back to them. However, not being targeted for a specific market before I wrote them, they were hard-sells.

For example, I wrote a short essay about taking my 12-year-old granddaughter hunting on a family ranch in Texas where, under the guidance of a hunter friend, she bagged her first deer. I went along on the hunt, and although it was a memorable moment and I wrote about it, unless you’re a hunter, which I am not, it wasn’t likely that I could sell it to a hunting magazine. No other magazine was likely to purchase an essay about a 12-year-old killing a deer. But I took a chance and sent the essay to North American Whitetail anyway. They published it on their back page column and I received $250.
https://www.northamericanwhitetail.com  

Another time, I wrote about a large flock of Canada geese that made a temporary home on the river that ran by my home in Wisconsin. Again, I wrote it for the simple reason that it was a memorable moment, and I liked the geese, not considering that I had no specific market for it in mind. I sold it to a hunting magazine also—On Wisconsin Outdoors—even though the magazine is geared toward shooting geese, not admiring them. (The editor’s wife liked it for the same reason I did, so there may have been persuasion on her part.) I was paid $75. http://www.onwisconsinoutdoors.com

Several years later, I came across guidelines for Creation Illustration. For some time I had wanted to write for children, so I sent my geese story to them. As another granddaughter had been staying with me at the time the geese gathered on the river and she had always walked to the river with me to observe them, so I simply added her to the story. Voila! Creation Illustration bought it. https://www.creationillustrated.com

I’ve written several articles for Your Teen even though I’m now in my 70s and no longer have teenage children. I simply write from past experiences of having raised four teenage sons and first-hand experiences with teenage grandchildren, though they also are no longer teens. Even though I saw no articles written by grandparents when I read their guidelines, I took a chance and sent articles based on my experience as a previous parent and grandmother of teens. It worked! https://yourteenmag.com/about 

More recently I sold a couple of articles—one about visiting the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado and another about a visit to The Chapel of the Holy Cross in Arizona with intentions to sell each as travel articles, but, for various reasons, they never sold as such. They eventually sold to a spiritual magazine, Unity, for their “Sacred Journeys” column, and I earned $300 for each.
https://www.unity.org/static/unity-magazine-writers-guidelines

There is a market somewhere for that essay you wrote for no other reason than you felt compelled to write it or you wrote it without a specific market in mind. Don’t just send it somewhere randomly, of course. Do send it, however, to some place where it might have a chance of acceptance, even though that chance might be remote. This mindset has worked for me numerous times. It’s worth repeating, however, to never send anything to a publication when you know there’s zero chance of acceptance. Never waste an editor’s time. . . or your own.

BIO – Barbara Weddle is a self-taught freelance writer whose stories, articles, book reviews, and essays have been published in magazines such as Earth Island Journal, The Blue Mountain Review, The Southern Review, Unity Magazine, Your Teen Media, and countless others.