An issue begins many, many months before it ends up in your hands. Approximately six months before the first issue of a calendar year, let's say the January 2008 issue, we decide on our column schedule for the next calendar year, in this case the January 2008 through December 2008 issues. These decisions are malleable and do change over time, frequently in response to your feedback about your interests and content desires for the magazine. Nevertheless, by July 2007, we have a pretty good idea of what our columns will look like for the following calendar year of issues. Note that this doesn't mean actual column topics. For example, we may decide that the Security Briefs column will run every other issue starting with the January 2008 issue, but that doesn't mean we decide at that point in time what each of those columns will be about. That would be silly; in an industry that moves as fast as ours does, how could we possibly predict what would be relevant so far in advance? On the contrary, we take pride in the flexibility we provide to our columnists, and it's usually the columnists who take the lead, with some direction from us, on what a particular column will be about. And that decision doesn't need to be made until a few months before the cover date for an issue. As an example, the columns for the January 2008 issue will need to be written and submitted to us by September 15th, 2007. That may seem like a long time, until you consider that the January 2008 issue is actually in the mail to subscribers at the end of November 2007 (it may even be in some subscriber's mailboxes by then), and is online for everyone to view for free by mid-December 2007. In order for the January 2008 issue to be in the mail stream by the end of November 2007, we need to have it to the printer by the beginning of November 2007. That means we have around six weeks with an issue from the time the content is in to the time we need to ship it out; not a whole lot of time to put out a complete, top-of-the-line product, especially when you consider that our team (which does both MSDN Magazine and TechNet Magazine), has to ship twice a month to handle both magazines.

At the same time columns are due, the feature articles for the issue are due. Feature articles are typically assigned anywhere from two weeks to three months in advance of their due date. Whereas the topics for particular column editions are mostly determined by our columnists, with some guidance and input from us, we take a much larger hand in determining the topics for feature articles. These days, in a typical month, we'll receive upwards of 60 article ideas/proposals, some from authors who have written for us previously, some from members of the product teams or other groups here at Microsoft, and some from talented folks in the community we haven't had the luxury of working with in the past. In any given issue, however, we typically only run five to seven feature articles (along with typically 9-12 columns). This is a vast amount of content, no less than 80 pages of content and frequently closer to 90 or more. But even with that, we don't have space to run all of the content we'd like to bring to you each month. As such, we have to make hard choices in narrowing those 60+ submissions into the 5-7 we can handle, and that doesn't include the articles that are generated as a result of us reaching out to specific individuals to create specific content we desire (which typically amounts for 1-2 articles in each issue).

As a note to those folks interested in writing for the magazine or who have submitted proposals in the past that haven't been accepted, please keep these numbers in mind when you submit ideas. We genuinely want to hear all of your ideas and are excited to receive them, and frequently a rejection is simply due to us not having enough space. Of course, sometimes rejections are due to other reasons, such as us already having run or planning to run similar content, an abundance of content on similar topics elsewhere accessible to our readers, the timeliness of the topic, or any one of a myriad of other reasons. Please don't let this discourage you; we want to hear from you, and if you have a good idea (or better yet, several ideas) for articles you feel will be timely and very useful to the general Microsoft development community, please send those to us. The best way to submit proposals is at or (for MSDN Magazine and TechNet Magazine, respectively); we review every single submission we receive and do our best to respond in a timely way, but if you don't hear from us within a week or two, please resend your proposal as it likely got lost somewhere along the way. My friend and counterpart on TechNet Magazine has already written a good post on the TechNet Magazine blog about what makes for a good submission, so I won't reiterate that here.

Though I can't speak for MSDN, if you're ever interested in writing for MCP or Redmond, please don't hesitate to drop me a line. I can help get you connected to the correct people.

You can read the full post at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnmagazine/archive/2007/05/14/2630317.aspx

Related to this, you can also read an excellent post from TechNet on what makes a good article proposal. This should also be required reading for anyone interested in writing:
http://blogs.technet.com/tnmag/archive/2007/02/15/what-we-look-for-in-an-article-proposal.aspx