I just had my fifth article published in GunUp Magazine and I'm working on two more for the next issue. So far I've had one article per issue since the first issue in March.
I've been writing as the Michigan Firearms Examiner for three years but have been banging my head on the door writing for firearms magazines ever since I sold my first article to Concealed Carry Magazine back in 2005.
Now that I've got a streak of recent published magazine work I'm hoping I can leverage this to more assignments this year and next with other pubs.
Btw, this all started because I offered to let them reprint an article I wrote for Examiner.com on "The Guns of James Bond" for free for the first "promo" issue of GunUp. I saw they had a "Guns of James Bond" headline on the mock-up of the promo issue and guessed, correctly, that they hadn't actually written the piece yet.
The editor said they were writing everything in house as "they had no budget for the promo issue" and couldn't pay me. I offered to let her use it for free, she did, and was so pleased she promptly gave me the first assigned article for the magazine after that.
So, while I generally believe "don't give it away" sometimes it is the thing to do.