"I'm the former Co-Editor of Mashable and the author of a book that publishes next month. Yes, A LOT has changed in the last 16 years. Magazines have obviously been hit very hard by the changing economics of journalism and storytelling. This must be taken into account. With that said, what King is saying is that writing credits are a very good thing to have. It's a resume builder. But there are lots of ways to do it: 1) A popular personal blog with a decent amount of traffic 2) A decent-sized social media or email following (this is a huge deal to a lot of publishers now -- if you come in with a built-in audience, you're going to get a deal) 3) Credits in recognizable publications in your industry. It's obviously different if you're going for fiction vs. non-fiction, but getting published does matter. It shows your stuff has been vetted by others. In the end, you HAVE to be more than a greater writer -- you have to show that you're unique among the others applying and have the chops to..." - Ben Parr