To finish up on a theme -- how to make yourself the kind of writer that magazine editors want to work with -- here are four simple tips. If they seem like they’re lifted from The Book of Duh, I apologize. But it’s remarkable how often writers fail to follow these rules, and make an already difficult living needlessly harder.

Never miss a deadline. By that, I mean: never. And never ask for an extension. Magazines run on the principle of on-time delivery.

They have to have the copy at exactly the right time to keep the whole operation moving toward the blessed moment when the issue is closed. So if we’re given a deadline three months out, we deliver the piece on that day. Not before (unless the editor asks for it early), and certainly not after. This isn’t an optional courtesy. It’s as unbreakable a law as gravity.

Write to word-count. I know that this, too, seems like a no-brainer, but I am continually appalled by writers who, when asked for 3,000 words, deliver 5,000. They seem to believe either that their prose is so deathless that the editor erred in setting a limit, or that it’s not up to them to impose their own discipline. Hand an editor a story that’s wildly over the assigned word-count and you’ve just made her life more difficult. Why would she work with you again?

Addendum in response to Glenn Fleishman’s comment below: Hitting the exact word count isn’t necessary, but I wouldn’t recommend going more than ten percent over.

Deliver clean copy. Edit and re-edit your story before sending it in. Better still, have somebody else do it. Don’t make the editor at the magazine stumble over awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, sentences ending in prepositions, redundancies, and so forth. Don't separate independent clauses with commas. Don’t split infinitives. Make sure your subjects, verbs, and adjectives agree. Don’t write “it’s” for the possessive. You don’t have to be brilliant; you just have to be clean. Dig out Strunk & White and re-read it.

Deliver what you promised. If you sold a piece about right-wing loonies on the Mexican-U.S. border, don’t wander off into a long self-indulgent riff about the role of the churches, no matter how intelligent. Save it for another piece. The magazine has ordered up art for the right-wing-loonies story. It may have sent out promotional material about it. It has balanced its whole issue around the piece it expects. Throw no last-minute curveballs.

Simple, right? Any magazine editors out there who want to add a comment about how often writers violate these grade-school directives?

None of these -- or any trick -- is a substitute for having the goods. You still need to have dug up an interesting, well-documented story and written it compellingly. But you’re competing against a lot of people who can do that. Editors want to work with people who can do all that and make their lives a little easier. After a quarter-century of freelancing, I maintain that obsessively obeying these rules has been as important to our ability to make a living as the quality of our reporting and writing. Ignore them at your peril.