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Tag: query letter

  • Checklist: How to Write a Pitch That Doesn’t Suck

    Checklist: How to Write a Pitch That Doesn’t Suck

    Are your pitches the reason you’re not getting freelancing work?

    Pitches or query letters are often the scariest part of freelancing for both new and experienced freelance writers.

    But master the art of the pitch, and your freelancing life suddenly gets a whole lot simpler.

    One of the best ways to do it is to stop thinking of your pitches as a creativity showcase and start thinking of them as sales tools instead.

    How?

    Every time you finish writing a query letter or pitch, run it through this quick checklist to make sure all your i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.

    1. The basics

    Since this is a checklist, after all, let’s get the basics out of the way first to make sure you’re not making obvious mistakes.

    • Is the editor’s name spelled correctly?
    • If you’ve mentioned the name of the publication, is it accurate?
    • Did you check spelling and grammar?
    • Does your signature have your website URL in it?

    2. Call to action

    Yes, your query letter is a showcase of your skill and your ideas, but in the end, it’s also a piece of marketing. Most writers will forget that and focus far too much on the story idea and the actual writing in the query letter.

    Remember, all good marketing ends with a call to action.

    That doesn’t mean that you have to reach out to an editor at The New York Times with an email that says, “Buy now!”

    But I do recommend closing with something that requires the editor to respond to you.

    “I’d love to chat over the phone; let me know if that’s something you’d be open to,” is a sentence I’ve used in my pitches.

    “Would you like to see some clips?” is another one that can get you an immediate response.

    If you prefer to keep it simple, “please let me know at your earliest convenience,” is a good way to close, too.

    3. Subject line

    Increasingly, a good subject line can be the difference between whether your email gets opened and read right away or delegated to that “later” folder that never gets looked at.

    It used to be that if you were writing for the web you had to focus a lot on headlines, but if you were writing for traditional media (or their websites), you could get away without much effort. That doesn’t work any more.

    New media, old media, run by a corporation or a solopreneur, we’re all competing for the same attention spans. No matter who you’re pitching, it’s almost imperative you look at the way they handle their headlines so you can package your own story idea cleverly in a format that will fit into that publication’s lineup.

    One way to do this is with a double-whammy headline — using a two-part headline to grab a busy editor’s attention and tell them right away why you must write this article.

    The good news is if you write interesting headlines, you almost guarantee yourself quick responses to your pitches. So it’s definitely worth putting some thought and effort into them.

    For fantastic examples of subject lines (and headlines) that work for news and feature stories, I recommend visiting Mother Jones to see how they tackle some serious issues with clever headlines.

    4. Your first sentence

    Here’s where journalists win out over bloggers every time: Journalists have it stamped on their brains that the first sentence of their story has to lay out pretty much everything. We live for that perfect sentence and — no exaggeration — will spend hours getting it right.

    But in the end, it comes down to this: Does your opening line captivate me? Does it make me smile? Does it make me want to read on?

    That’s a lot of pressure to put on one little sentence, so I typically give students who take my 30 Days, 30 Queries course a bit of leeway. Start with one interesting paragraph. Does it make the editor want to read the next one?

    Here’s an example from one of my own query letters:

    Over her husband’s funeral pyre six years ago, Heena Patel, then 21, was informed by her in-laws that he had died of AIDS.

    Don’t you want to know what happened next? That’s what an effective first line should make you want to do.

    Here are nine of my query letters that sold to top publications, including TIME and The New York Times. Notice how I start each one?

    5. Your bio

    If you’re like most writers I know, you have a catch-all bio that you copy and paste into an email every time someone asks you for one. Don’t make this mistake.

    When you’re pitching, you need to highlight your strengths and minimize your weaknesses in regards to the particular publication or editor.

    So if, for instance, you’re pitching a technology website, you would highlight your degree in information technology — and perhaps not mention that you quit your tech job after two months because you hated the industry, instead starting your own small business.

    But if you were pitching an entrepreneurship blog, that’s exactly the story you’d want to highlight.

    Do away with those generic bios that you’ve been cutting and pasting into everything and start personalizing them for each pitch. It can be the difference between the editor thinking you’re perfect for the job, or wondering if you’ve got the credentials to report on the topic.

    6. Timeliness

    One of the easiest ways to make sure your pitches get quicker responses is to make them timely.

    Editors are notorious for sitting on ideas for months on end, so make your pitches time-sensitive by giving editors a reason they need to publish your work now.

    You can do this by tying your pitch into a current event, an anniversary or a promotion. It won’t work for everything you write, but a time-sensitive angle can fast-track your query process.

    7. Clarity

    Have you made sure your story idea is sound, sliced thinly, and can be expressed in a single sentence?

    The one thing missing in most pitches, and probably the top reason most queries get rejected, is clarity. If you don’t clearly know the angle, the purpose, and the gist of your story, how do you expect the editor to get it?

    The clarity in your pitch has to be both about the idea and the execution of that idea. Or simply, what do you want to say — and how are you going to say it? You need to be able to answer both those questions in a single sentence each.

    For instance, for my first story for The New York Times, I pitched a story on how plastic roads in India were solving the problem of both the battered and damaged roads, as well as improperly disposed waste plastic. That quick summary tells you pretty much everything you need to know about that story. (Read the pitch and the resultant article here.)

    New writers who have trouble selling ideas have often overburdened one poor article to do too many things. You need to able to define your story idea in one single (short!) sentence. Coming up with a good headline, as discussed above, can help you achieve this clarity.

    Remember, querying is not creative writing. In trying so hard to write well, we forget that in essence a query letter is as much about showing off your writing prowess as it is about making a sale.

    Your queries, basically, are sales tools. They’re a means for marketing.

    And with the checklist above, you’ll be well on your way to making that sale.

    If you’d like some help perfecting the craft and joining the hundreds of students I’ve helped break into top publications, including The New York Times, TIME, CNN, ABC News, National Geographic, Vice, Marie Claire, O, the Oprah magazine, and so many more, check out my course 30 Days, 30 Queries. See you there!

    This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase through our links, you’re supporting The Write Life — and we thank you for that!

    This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

  • What 200 Rejections Taught Me About Being a Freelance Writer

    What 200 Rejections Taught Me About Being a Freelance Writer

    When I started freelancing many years ago, it was with great enthusiasm and very little knowledge.

    I had a bachelor’s degree in journalism studies, graduating as one of the top students in my class. But whereas I could tell you all about the social meaning of news, I had no idea how to sell an article.

    I graduated a year before my husband, and while I waited for him to finish his degree, I decided to take up freelancing on the side. We were living in a small coastal town with limited media outlets, and I supporting us by working as a breakfast waitress at a local hotel. I reckoned freelancing would be an easy way to get a foot in the door and start establishing connections within the industry.

    I was wrong.There was nothing easy about it at all. I had a vague sense of the importance of market research, but decided I would be better off carpet bombing the whole market with ideas.

    Determined to get my first few assignments, I would send out query letter after query letter, indiscriminately. They went out to local papers and national newspapers, to regional magazines and high end consumer magazines.

    Each time I licked the stamp (Yes, really! This was at the time when SASE was still a familiar phrase) or hit the send-button, I did so with great confidence that this was a winner; this was the pitch that would land me an assignment.

    I was wrong a lot that year.

    In the course of 12 months, I sent out about 220 ideas. Around 20 of those ideas ended in assignments. In other words, I had a rather abysmal success rate of about 10 percent.

    But being turned down 200 times in one single year taught me a thing or two.

    1. Being rejected isn’t the end of the world

    Heck, not even 200 rejections equals the end of the world!

    I’m by nature introverted and conflict-averse. A single “no” could make me curl up in a corner, but being flooded by 200 of them? The sheer amount of them short-circuited my natural response and I quickly learned to just shrug them off and move on.

    You’re gonna be better at dealing with rejection than any of your friends, since about 80 percent of your job is composed of running headlong into it, according to Jamie Cattanach. If you give up after a few rejections, you are probably not fit for the freelance lifestyle.

    To survive as a freelance writer you have to get used to being turned down. And the only way to get used to it, is by trying and failing. Fail fast, learn fast, succeed fast.

    2. You can save time by spending time

    By the end of my year of rejections, I finally started to realize I was wasting a whole lot of time shipping out half-baked ideas that never got anywhere. I wised up and learned that you are better off pitching one good idea to the right market than a dozen mediocre ideas to whoever.

    By studying the market, pinpointing the publication that best matches your idea and making sure you truly understand the audience they are aiming for, you will stand a far better chance of getting a yes from the editor.

    It is always better to take the time to do the research that will get you a “yes” than to waste your time writing generic query letters that will only get rejected.

    3. Get curious

    The 220 ideas I submitted didn’t just teach me about rejections. They also taught me a lot about what it takes to get a “yes” and which ideas will end in an instant “no.” When I left freelancing, my acceptance rate had gone from the abysmal ten percent to being closer to 75 percent.  

    So what had changed between the 10-percent and the 75-percent conversion rate? Mainly one thing: I had learned how to generate ideas that sell to paying markets.

    If you find yourself being turned down continuously, learn from it. Don’t get defensive, get curious. Figure out how you could have done it better and then apply the lessons you’ve learned next time you submit your ideas.

    It might take time to succeed, but it will go a whole lot faster if you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

    What have you learned from the rejections you’ve received as a writer?

  • Here’s What a Literary Agent Looks for in a Query Letter

    Here’s What a Literary Agent Looks for in a Query Letter

    Here’s my confession regarding query letters: I don’t pay much attention to them.

    As a literary agent with Kuhn Projects, I know there are entire how-to book chapters and webinars and conference sessions dedicated to writing “the perfect query” or “the query that will let you skip the slush pile.” And if your plot (in fiction) or central argument (in nonfiction) is exceptionally complicated, yes, by all means, walk me through it in a concise cover letter.

    But I don’t need a sprawling, Mad-Men-worthy pitch, especially if you’ve included the first several pages of your manuscript or proposal, which my agency and many others require you to do. If all I need to do to get to your actual material is scroll down on my computer screen, chances are I’ll do that regardless of the query letter. After all, I’ll eventually be selling your manuscript, not your query.

    This, however, is not to say that I can’t imagine some hypothetical flawless Dream Query floating around out there. So I thought I’d share some key features from that vision, in no particular order.

    Here’s what literary agents like to see in a query letter.

    1. A personalized salutation

    This means using my name in the introduction as opposed to “Dear Agent,” “Dear Sir or Madam,” or simply “Hello.”

    When I see one of these generic openers — especially if it’s paired with the fact that I’ve been bcc’d instead of emailed directly — I immediately doubt that this project is going to be a good fit for me.

    This email has likely been blasted to dozens, or maybe hundreds, of other literary agents, probably without regard to what kind work any of us represent, and odds are good that one of those other agents will be able to jump on this before I can, even if I do end up liking the project.

    2. Why you picked me

    Include one or two lines on why you’re writing to me or Kuhn Projects (if you’re coming through our submissions account).

    How did you find me or us? What made you decide to write to us about your project? Is your novel or nonfiction project similar to one of our authors’?

    3. Your manuscript’s genre

    What genre are you writing in? You might answer this question with specific descriptors like “political thriller” or “self-help,” or you might tell me what other well-known books yours is similar to, like “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point” or “Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.”

    (Though if you compare your book to a very famous one, explain what the two titles have in common. E.g. “Like Netherland, my novel is set in post-9/11 New York and features a disillusioned businessman as its protagonist.”)

    4. Your manuscript’s word count

    If you’re pitching fiction, share the total word count of your novel, which ideally will fall somewhere between 70,000 and 110,000 words.

    5. Zero indication that what you’re sending me is a first draft

    This is as simple as not referring to your manuscript or proposal as “the first draft of my proposal” or “my first complete draft.”

    An agent you’re contacting cold shouldn’t be the first person to read what you’re writing, and even if she is, it’s in your best interest not to tell her that.

    (You’d be surprised by how many query letters say something like “I hope you’ll consider my novel, TK TITLE, the first draft of which is now complete at 90,000 words.”)

    6. Good writing, spelling and grammar

    Give me a sense of your vocabulary and grasp of syntax, or at least show me nothing that makes me think either is a problem.

    A typo in a query letter isn’t a deal-breaker for me, but the use of one word when you clearly meant another (e.g. “once and a while” instead of “once in a while”) or an especially tortuously structured sentence puts my guard up.

    One way to cover this base is to… well… be an excellent writer. Another way is to keep your query brief, simple and straightforward.

    7. A note about any simultaneous submissions

    Include one line about whether your proposal or manuscript is currently on submission to or under the consideration of another agent or agents.

    8. A note about this manuscript’s previous submissions, if any

    Have any editors or anyone else at a publishing house has ever seen any version of this project? Include a line letting me know, though no need to mention this if not.

    9. A note if you’ve self-published this project

    If you’ve already self-published this book or manuscript, tell me. I shouldn’t be left to find this out on my own.

    10. Any relevant background info

    Have you been published before and, if so, where and when? Do you have a website? Do you have a professional (or personal) background that lends credibility to the subject you’re writing about?

    If you’re submitting a novel, do you have a degree in creative writing? From where?

    If the answer to all these questions and any similar ones is no, just let me know this will be your first book and sign off. But if there’s any outside information I should know as I read, this is the time to send that information along.

    Again, the above is a checklist for my ideal query letter. I routinely read submissions whose queries are missing many of these features because, at the end of the day, it’s the material that I’ll actually be working with if the author signs with me.

    But if a query comes through my inbox that checks all of the above boxes, I’ll begin reading with great confidence and enthusiasm. And that confidence and enthusiasm will put the project ahead of many other projects that come my way.

    What other questions do you have about query letters?