I read somewhere that the Atlantic Monthly (also known as the freelance writer's Holy Grail) pays $3,000 per article. I was recently browsing and came upon an article in their July/August issue called Inconspicuous Consumption. It occurred to me that this article was simply an interesting, newsy spin on the results of some recent university research.

I then picked up another of my favorites, Psychology Today, and realized that about 50% of the articles in it were the same thing: take a new finding, add anecdotes and quotes, make the research readable to the layperson, and you've got a story!

Don't mistake this to mean that this is the way to get into these markets, however, it shows that it's really a simple idea that some of the big markets are paying for. Read a year of Cosmopolitan and see what I mean!

Need some more places to find those pitch letter ideas? Check out these ways to capture and generate magazine article ideas.