How to Pitch an Article and Communicate with Editors
Timing the Pitch
Research the outlet so that you know when to time the pitch. Monthly print magazines often assign articles six months in advance. Some online outlets expect a two-week turn-around on an accepted pitch. And still other outlets prefer to see the completed piece, which is more common with personal essays than reported or researched articles.
Subject Line
In the subject line of your pitch email, put information that matters to the editor. Here’s an example: Article Pitch | Title of Subject of article | Last Name. If your article is related to unfolding news, add the word “Timely.” If it is tied to an upcoming event, indicate that.
Connections
The easiest way to land an article with a larger outlet is through a connection. Do you know any editors directly? Do you know anyone who does, maybe a writer who’s published there? In a pitch, if you can say you were referred to the editor by someone they have previously worked with, it can establish your credibility. If you do not have such connections, you might try to find a co-author who does. (One of my professors co-authored an article with another MFA student and me.) Not only does collaboration often produce more exciting results, it can open the door you need to land that first article—and once the door is open, you have a publication credit to include in future pitches.
Previous Publications
Do you have any prior publications that illustrate your familiarity with your proposed topic? If so, state what they are and why they are relevant. Particularly if the relationship between what you have written in the past and what you want to write now isn’t obvious, you’ll want to make it obvious. The more connections you leave for an editor to make, the less control you have over the ones they draw.
A Strong Outline
You can’t predict the exact shape your article will take before you write it; what you can do is show editors you have a constructed a solid plan for how you will execute it. Will you conduct interviews? If so, with whom? Why? Have you secured their permission? Will you include external research? If so, from what sources? It’s possible the answers to these questions will change once you begin constructing your article. That’s okay. If you communicate with the editor, most are willing to be flexible. But to earn that flexibility, you must first secure your pitch, and to do that, you need to come across as an expert with a plan. The pitch must establish trust.
The Follow-Up
For myself, and many writers out there, the waiting game is the worst part of freelance writing. Because many outlets receive more pitches than they can respond to, rather than a “no,” you will simply not hear anything back at all. Such silence can be hard to cope with, especially when you are dealing with a time-sensitive topic. Unlike with a story or poem, most outlets do not accept simultaneous submissions. This means you can spend quite a lot of time waiting for a response that may never come.
The follow-up is how you navigate this dreadful silence. To ensure your pitch was not a casualty to an overwhelming inbox, you send an email to check-in with the editor and make sure they did in fact receive it. And when is it time to send this follow-up? In some cases, the answer is easy: it’s listed with the publication’s submission guidelines. But more often than not, it’s up to your discretion to decide what length of time makes you seem proactive writer rather than a nuisance the editor would choose to avoid. To prevent the latter, I would recommend two weeks as the minimum; you want to give editors some time to sort through their inbox.
Once you decide it’s time to send that follow-up, write it in a way that requires no response from the editor. For example, instead of “Dear Editor, did you receive my pitch?” you might write “If I do not hear back from you by [insert date], I will begin to pitch elsewhere...” This way, if the editor does ever make it back to you, there won’t be any hard feelings if they find you placed the article elsewhere. Even better, have a new pitch ready to go so that you can reply with another option.
Sadly, in some cases, you can lose communication with an editor even after your pitch has been accepted. Don’t give up on the article that gets ghosted. While most outlets prefer pitches to finished articles (or interviews for that matter), there are outlets that will consider completed articles, especially if you can make a compelling case for why it fits their outlet and indicate openness to edits.
Revision
Any piece of writing you submit will—hopefully—receive some editorial suggestions. However, because the parameters for reviews and interviews tend to be largely pre-defined, suggestions on those sorts of pieces tend not to be very extensive. Articles, on the other hand, have a million directions they can take, and the direction you choose may not always align with the one the editor had in mind. In this case, editors might ask you to develop, condense, or rewrite sections or even your entire piece. Your favorite sentence may be on the chopping block. It’s up to you how to decide how much you are willing to give in these situations.
Remember, a freelance article assigned based on a pitch is not meant to be a pure artistic representation of the writer. The editor may have a different view of the piece than you do, but that editor’s goal, like yours, is to bring something meaningful to that outlet’s readers. The article should be true to your ideas, of course, but if you want to see it published, it also needs to meet the magazine’s demands.
Content by Sam Risak
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0
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