by Krissy Brady
The steps to scoring a byline in your favorite publication are straightforward enough: Come up with a mind-blowing article idea for your target market. Write an attention-grabbing query letter. Submit it to the appropriate editor. Rinse. Repeat. But there’s one aspect of the pitching process new writers tend to ignore that could spell disaster for them down the line.
Once you’ve got the nuts-and-bolts of query writing on lockdown, your primary goal as a writer needs to shift from learning how to write quality pitches to learning how to write them more efficiently. As assignments start rolling in (and they will), you’ll inevitably have less time to dedicate to pitches—and the last thing you want is your income stream slowing to a trickle.
By making the following tiny changes now, you’ll not only avoid the whole assignments vs. pitches tug-of-war as your portfolio grows, but churn out top notch query letters in a fraction of the time. (This is not a drill.)
Make sure the focus of your primary writing goal is laser sharp. Don’t just decide the category of magazine you want to write for: Pinpoint your exact target demographic within that category, the exact magazines that cater to that demographic, and the exact section you want to break into. Focus your attention on the bullseye, not the entire dartboard. It will make the process of breaking in much less overwhelming—and once you’ve built a solid relationship with the editor of one department, you’ll have an automatic referral once you’re ready to branch out into others.
Know your markets better than you know yourself. Keep files on each market you’d like to write for, and track everything you learn about them along the way. Include submission guidelines (which you score by signing up for a Mediabistro.com premium membership), the name of the section you want to break into, as well as the name and e-mail address of the editor who runs that department. If they also accept pitches for their website, add their web editor’s info to your roster as well.
For unlimited access to your target markets (not to mention years worth of back issues!), sign up for a Texture.com account. Keep track of the articles that are being published in your section: List each headline and sub-headline in your file, along with a brief description of how each article was packaged (feature with sidebars, list post, as told to, etc.). As each new issue launches, update your file. Finally, visit their website on a daily or weekly basis and track what they’re publishing online.
Sure, it’s a little cyber-stalkerish, but studying your markets on a regular basis takes the guesswork out of what to pitch, who to pitch to, and how to package your ideas, putting you miles ahead of the competition. Over time, your files will become a treasure trove of information that other writers would hand over a kidney for.
While it’s important to subscribe to sites like ScienceDaily and EurekAlert! for the latest news on studies and scientific breakthroughs, they’re not the best places for new writers to find interesting stories—especially if you don’t already have a relationship with the editor you’re pitching the story to. More often than not, a staff writer or regular contributor will have written the story before you’ve so much as decided on a lede.
Instead, visit sites like Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), and ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com). Search for interesting studies that haven’t hit the mainstream using keywords that best describe the topics you’re most interested in writing about. Best of all, all three sites let you create alerts based on your fave keywords, so you can have the latest studies sent directly to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis. Not sure if a study is worth writing about? Grab a copy of Basics for Evaluating Medical Research Studies: A Simplified Approach, by Sheri Ann Strite and Michael E. Stuart, M.D. (Delfini Group, 2013) to help you wade through the medical jargon.
Set up an e-mail address specifically for subscribing to scholarly journals, press release websites, and newsletters by the top experts in your field. Each time you read a new article in your niche, look into the studies that were mentioned, where they were published, and subscribe to notifications from those journals. Add the experts that were quoted to your contact list for future reference, and follow them on social media. If applicable, introduce yourself to the PR people who represent these experts and let them know you’d like to be kept in the loop on interesting developments. Use digital doo-dads like Flipboard (flipboard.com) and Nuzzel (nuzzel.com) to streamline your news hunting experience. Instead of scouring the Internet for new material (which almost always leads to hours of unnecessary Facebook and IMDB creeping), all you’ll have to do is check your e-mail and voila—so many ideas, so little time.
No, but seriously. Focus on the quality of your pitches, not on how fast you can send them out. Once the process of building a solid query is second nature to you, the speed at which you write them will increase naturally. In the meantime, think each of your ideas through from head(line) to toe, and thoughtfully decide which markets you’re going to submit them to. I now send one-quarter of the pitches that I used to, but receive (way) more acceptances than rejections—which is the only statistic that matters.
Ditch the business speak and write your pitches like you’re writing an e-mail to a friend. Allow the editor to hear your voice as they read your words. I’ve built an entire writing career using my emotional baggage as bait, and you can too. Define what makes you quirky, and run with it.
Once you’ve worked with the same editor a few times, you don’t have to be as formal with your query letters since they already know you’ve got the goods. But your pitches still need to pack a punch, and this is where the art of packaging comes in handy. Each time you come up with a new idea, search articles that have been written on the topic in the past and brainstorm ways to package your idea to make it stand out. Consistently putting this habit into practice means the next time a breaking story hits your radar, you’ll be able to send your editor an insta-packaged idea that just might lead to an insta-assignment.
Eventually, you’re not only going to have multiple assignments on the go at various stages of completion, but multiple pitches circulating that will need to be followed up on at specific times. Use a program or app like Story Tracker (andrewnicolle.com) to remind yourself of when to touch base with an editor—and when to send your pitch elsewhere.
Like you, I was told the odds are slim-to-none that two editors will show interest in the same pitch. And then it happened. Twice. In a row. Naturally, I wasn’t prepared, and didn’t know whether to do a happy dance or throw up. Save yourself the panic attack by developing 1-2 backup angles for each pitch that can be offered to the second editor if they work for a non-competing market, and a backup pitch that’s of equal or higher value if they work for a direct competitor.
Typically, editors only respond to the ideas they’re interested in publishing, which means it’s on you to determine why your rejected queries were... well, rejected. We’ve all sent out pitches that were slightly off or “almost” worthy of a sale, and it’s important to take stock of what went wrong to refine your process. Compare them to pitches you’ve nailed in the past, and you’ll find the answers are right in front of you: Maybe your intro wasn’t catchy enough or your angle was too vague. Maybe your headline was a snore or you sent the pitch from a place of impatience instead of finality. You don’t need an editor to write back and confirm your suspicions, because deep down you already know what you need to improve on.
Pitch stories you’re drawn to and have a legit interest in covering; don’t just pitch an idea because you think it’ll sell. If you come across a study that’d make an excellent front-of-book piece for your target market du jour, but you find the subject matter blasé, your query will reflect that. Editors can tell the difference between your heart calling the shots—and your empty wallet.
Krissy Brady is so out of shape, it’s like she has the innards of an 80-year-old—so naturally, she became a women’s health + wellness writer. Since turning her emotional baggage into a writing career, she’s been published in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health, as well as on websites like Prevention.com and Shape.com. You can follow her shenanigans at writtenbykrissy.com (you know, if you want).