3 things every writer needs to know about where to pitch
Welcome guest editor Susan Shain!
This month, I invited my friend Susan Shain to share her tips for writers. Susan is a full-time freelance writer and traveler. She founded Where to Pitch, a website that helps writers find homes for their stories, and she sends out a monthly newsletter with freelance writing tips (highly recommend both!).
When you’re a freelance writer, figuring out where to pitch your work is right up there with invoicing and reading contracts as one of the most dreaded tasks you’ll have to face.
But it’s also one of the most important. No matter how great your story is, you’ll never place it if you don’t pitch it to the right publication — and the right editor — at the right time. (Zero presh tho!)
While there’s no foolproof formula to get your pitch accepted, here are a few strategies to pitch smarter and make your life easier.
3 things every writer needs to know about where to pitch
1. Rely on calls for pitches
To take the guesswork out of it, find editors who want exactly what you’re selling.
No, I’m not talking about mind reading; I’m talking about calls for pitches, where editors literally tell you what types of stories they’re looking for.
Editors usually make these calls on Twitter and Facebook — but there’s no need to become a social media addict. Several newsletters compile them for you. My favorites are:
Opportunities of the Week: $3/month for 2x per week
One More Question: $5/month for 1x per week
Study Hall: $4/month for ~1x per week
2. Use Where to Pitch
On my site Where to Pitch, you can type in your story’s vertical, whether it’s sports or relationships, and it’ll pull up a list of potential outlets.
When available, it’ll include their pitching guides or mastheads, too. Et voila!
(If you want more goodness and freelance writing tips, sign up for the monthly Where to Pitch newsletter.)
3. Search the news
Still stuck? If you’re, say, writing about an endangered Amazonian frog, run a few searches on the topic. Think: “Amazon + frogs” or simply “endangered species.”
But don’t search on regular Google — search on news.google.com. That way, you won’t pull up blog posts or websites about frogs, but will instead find recent news stories on similar topics.
See which outlets have published those articles, taking careful note of the sections they’re in, as well as their length, style and headlines.
Want to know how to get your pitch accepted? Here are five things that’ll keep an editor from tossing your pitch email before they’ve even read it.
Further reading
🧡How to Pitch a Story: 9 Insider Tips for Contacting the Right Editor (The Write Life): Once you’ve figured out which outlet you want to pitch, use these tips for finding the editor’s name and email address. Tip from Susan: In the subject line, include “Pitch: [Headline modeled after the pub’s other headlines].”
💚 How (and Where!) To Pitch Your Writing (Ann Friedman): This comprehensive post compiles pitching tips from editors, plus a huge list of outlets and resources with calls for pitches.
💜 Where to pitch, based on data from the website Who Pays Writers? (Columbia Journalism Review): The website Who Pays Writers? is a treasure trove of information for pro writers that’s been around for at least a decade. But it’s not the easiest database to navigate. This article from CJR pulls out some of the top data points from the site and — in case you’re into crunching the numbers yourself — makes the dataset available to download.
💙 How to Show a Blog Editor You Understand Their Audience (Be a Freelance Blogger): In this guest post, I share my tips for quickly getting to know a site’s audience — this information is key to pitching the right outlet and writing something the editor will love.
💛 Publications to Pitch (And They Pay!) (The Writing Cooperative): Writer Stella J. McKenna shares her collection of bookmarked pitching and submission guidelines for publications that pay for personal essays.
Image by Lisa Fotios via Pexels