How to give yourself a better shot landing pitches and gigs when you're starting out
You might not be thinking about these things, but you should be!
I get it. When you’re just starting out, and you don’t have a track record to rely upon, and the publishing industry seems like a black box rendered inaccessible by Catch-22s (publishers look for writers with experience and a platform… which you can only obtain by publishing…), pitching editors for stories and gigs—particularly editors you don’t know—can feel like a crapshoot.
And certainly there’s an element of luck to it. Every day, probably, even in the best of cases, thousands of well-written pitches—penned by writers both previously published and not—go unnoticed in editors’ inboxes, often on account of nothing more than said inboxes being unusually stuffed that day, or said editors opening their laptops in some kind of uncharacteristically impatient mood. (Can’t blame ‘em; being an editor’s hard.)
In the end, though, pitching editors and landing opportunities to write for an audience is in fact more than a crapshoot, in that there’s more to it than luck.
I—your humble and presumptuous interlocutor—can attest! I spent the better part of my writing “career” being left on read by editors. A part of me thought it was because the world was against me. But in time I began to see the error in my ways. This was right around when I started receiving little bits of positive feedback on the pitches and ideas I was sending out into the world. Then—miraculously—I even compiled a string of acceptances, which themselves began to build upon each other, until eventually I found myself where I sit today, that is, before a lap top, drinking coffee, so self-satisfied and harboring just enough editorial momentum to justify this exercise of lending advice.
But let’s not think of it as advice. I’d rather think of it as me simply sharing a few things I think I’ve learned that may or may not be useful to you, dear reader of this funky newsletter.
So what are these things I’ve learned? Well, over the years and really over the last two years, in particular, I do think I’ve gotten better at the more technical elements of pitching. I will not discuss those here. There’s already a ton out there about how to write better pitches (the newsletter Freelancing with Tim is one excellent resource), and the people (like Tim!) providing such advice are far more accomplished and probably a lot smarter than I am, and so why not leave that to them?
Instead, what I want to share are two sort of base-level lessons I learned through trial-and-error that pertain not only to pitching editors but to more generally giving yourself a better shot of finding “success” when you’re in the unique position of being a new (and no doubt immensely talented) writer who has nevertheless not really published much. These lessons both have very little to do with pitching and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH PITCHING. That’s right. This is some of that unique, obvious-seeming-but-also-in-turn-elemental advice that novices tend to take for granted but that are nonetheless important to build your practice around, I think. Have a seat.
Know thy editor
Obvious-seeming point #1: know thy editor. This is sort of like the “know your reader” advice that you hear in Creative Writing 101. But like other lessons learned in those kinds of courses, if you forget about this point, it can hurt you. This, again, is coming from someone who’s been hurt many, many times.
Simply put, it really really helps to know who it is you’re sending your pitches to. And not just, like, their name, but what section of the site/magazine/company they manage, what kinds of stories they seem to publish, what their interests are, even what little idiosyncrasies they seem to possess that you might be able to surface in a pitch in order to grab their attention. This is on the one hand simply not dumb. If you want to write a story about baseball, you should probably make sure you’re sending the idea for that story to whomever at the site/magazine in question manages baseball-related stories. Sometimes magazines will reroute wayward pitches internally, but not always, and in the worst of cases, overburdened editors may interpret the lack of intentionality on your part as the sign they need to write you off.
God, as I type this out it feels more and more obvious, but it also fills me with more and more shame because I ignored this advice for so long. For a long time, upon finding myself enamored with an idea, this is what I’d do: I’d throw together a pitch (or write the whole damn essay), quickly scratch out a list of magazines and editors that seemed, upon first glance, a good fit, and I’d shotgun-blast emails to slush piles and whatever editor on the masthead had their email available. There you go, I’d think. Someone out there will obviously recognize my genius and commission me for $10,000.
I never landed one pitch this way. When I did start landing stuff, it was after finding editors I had reason to believe might be interested in my idea, following them on Twitter, learning their stylistic preferences, and catering my pitch to those specifications. I also kept an eye out for topics such editors seemed to be interested in. (This isn’t that creepy; often editors state as much via pitch calls and what not.) Then I’d keep that in mind as I opened up my laptop.
Paying attention to that kind of stuff suggests to editors that you’re serious, that you’ve done a bit of your homework, and that you’re likely not going to be a flakey or otherwise unreliable writer to work with. Finding a common interest with an editor can also prove a crucial foothold that helps your pitch stand out. Those are all things editors are looking to affirm when they read pitches everyday.
Why should YOU be the one to write this story?
Now the big one. Let’s assume you—unlike younger me—are doing your homework and sending pitches to people you have reason to assume might be interested in them. Now you have to ask yourself the potentially more discomfiting question: why would the editor be interested in you?
More specifically, why would the editor think you’re the right person to tell this story? For much of my twenties, I pitched stories that I very much wanted to write, but that no one in their right mind would have ever asked me to write. I’d want to write, say, a profile on Green Day, which I’d want peg to their upcoming album. Lots of magazines publish such essays in the lead up to a band’s new album, I thought. This will be great.
But… why the hell would any editor ask me to write such a thing?
Especially if you’re just starting out, there’s little reason an editor would give you such an assignment, because they’re likely going to give it to someone they know or that has an established track record in the relevant field.
Some introspection is needed. Every pitch should include a “why you” element. Which means, long before you pitch, you have to develop an identify a “why you” answer.
Other writers have talked about this. On Scott Galloway’s podcast recently, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose described what he did to stand out early on in his journalism career. I’m paraphrasing, but he in effect said that he “Pitched stories only he could write.” One such story he landed was a deep dive into the stressed-out mental states of college grads working in the financial sector. Because he was young, living in New York City, and enjoyed access to these sorts of people at the time (through friends, for example), this was a story he had unique access to. “Those people were more likely to open up to me, a peer, than they would have been some big-shot writer,” he said. He mentioned that in the pitch. His pitch in turn not only reflected the soundness of his idea, but why he was the right writer to take it on.
There are other ways to convey as much. In my case, I over time began to develop something of a niche, which I’ve increasingly been able to point to as reason why I am the right person to tell the stories I want to tell. This didn’t happen in a way I’d expected, really.
Imagine it’s early 2021. What success I’d had writing up to that point in my writing career had come mostly from writing personal essays. But then I landed an essay with Oaklandside Magazine about the Oakland Coliseum—a sort of retrospective on that building’s history and why it is misunderstood today. (I’d pitched that story sort of as a fan of the team that played in the Coliseum, and the building was in the news a lot, at the time, and Oaklandside is sort of small, and so all that played in my favor and probably played a role in convincing my editor—bless his soul—to give me a shot.) Anyway, that essay did well, and my editor there then gave me an opportunity to write more pieces about local sports and the way they were intersecting with history/politics here in Oakland. These pieces did well, too.
The point is, I’d suddenly begun to establish a niche. Again, I’d not expected this to happen, and I resisted it for a little while, but then I leaned into it. I tried becoming more of an expert on this intersection of issues. I read a lot on it. Then I came up with an idea in roughly the same subject matter ballpark (see what I did there?) and pitched it to a bigger pub: this time the SF Chronicle. And guess what! I was taken seriously over there because I’d built up some credibility and subject matter expertise in precisely the topic I was suggesting they let me write about. The same thing happened again several months later when I pitched a related idea to The Ringer, where I’ve since picked up a few more assignments I’m unreasonably excited about.
There are other ways to check this particular box. (Maybe you’re already a subject matter expert in, I don’t know, fly fishing, or horseback riding; pitch stories on those topics!) However you do it, though, this is very much something you should be thinking about before you start sending out ideas.
In fact, that’s a good point to end on: it’s important to be thinking, in general, before blasting your ideas out into the world. Set yourself up for success!
Okay, excuse me while I ease myself off this soapbox. I think that’s enough. Let us part ways. We both no doubt have writing to do.