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The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
- danso 10y agoThis is all excellent advice. I especially love that the OP uses a spreadsheet to systematically track his pitches and their status. I think using a spreadsheet for such structured list keeping is the best way to get comfortable with spreadsheets (if you're "just" a writer) while being the optimal way to improve your own work and note-taking. I do it for public records requests and searching for Craigslist apartments.
- mike2477 10y agoHey, thanks so much for saying this. It means a lot :) I agree that spreadsheets are an awesome way to organize life. I've become obsessed with Google Sheets. This year I learned the power of all the plugins. For example, I built a stock tracker that pulls live data from Google Finance (with no programming background). I also built a custom dashboard for my business to track revenue. It worked better than anything else up to $30k / mo in revenue. Some great resources on this Zapier post -- https://zapier.com/learn/google-sheets/best-google-sheets-addons/ https://zapier.com/learn/google-sheets/best-google-sheets-ad...
- danso 10y agoWas just going to edit my own comment but since you've shown up with a reply; maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I couldn't find your name anywhere on the page. Not as a byline or at the footer. Might be worth adding it as not everyone will come through your front page. It'd also be helpful to see links to your published stories :)
- mike2477 10y agoAh that's a great point, haha. Sometimes I forget to do the most obvious things :) I linked to them, but right now my CMS isn't underlining links (WTF, right?)
- mike2477 10y agoIn the meantime, here's The Atlantic and Quartz story. Two more FastCompany stories on the way :) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/spacex-is-cribbing-from-boeings-roaring-twenties-playbook/498773/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/spacex... https://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-remoteok-founder-pieter-levels-explains-why-he-has-quit-the-nomadic-lifestyle/ https://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-r...
- bambax 10y agoVery good article. Just after the MacGregor joke, Andrew Stanton says "storytelling is joke telling, it's knowing your punchline". This is illuminating. It's something we probably do instinctively but it helps a lot thinking about it voluntarily. Zinsser's "On Writing Well" is fantastic, esp. parts 1 & 2 and "The Travel Article" which is a story by itself... I so much love this book! What's maybe missing from your article is who do you pitch to? How do you find emails of editors and how do you get them to open your message when you're starting out and nobody knows your name?
- mike2477 10y agoHey, thanks so much for this feedback. I really appreciate it :) You're right, I definitely missed some important stuff. I sorta took for granted the fact that emailing people has always been second nature for me. Will do a follow up on this since it's just as important.
- danso 10y agoIt's so fascinating to me when people ask how to find editors. Journalists are notoriously addicted to Twitter. Not only are they very discoverable by doing a search for their name/job title with "+ Twitter", many of them are also unable to not reflexively reply to someone who follows them on Twitter. Or even if you don't follow them -- just read Glenn Greenwald's feed and look at how many randoms manage to get his attention. That said, it's hard to do a pitch via Twitter. I'm just saying use Twitter as a way of getting acquainted. And honestly, reading someone's Twitter feed helps you understand a bit about their personality and where they are coming from, which again, is helpful knowledge in any cold call situation.
- elastic_church 10y agoI feel like this is such a basic skill that I'm surprised this is even a discussion.
- danso 10y agoSadly it isn't. People who don't use spreadsheets see spreadsheets as some bean-counter tool, i.e. working purely with numbers and calculations. They don't see the immense value of structuring your notes, at least compared to just dumping them free form into a Word document.
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- mrwinterje 10y agoGreat advice for a new marketing director who hasn't had to deal with PR before!
- mike2477 10y agoHey thanks friend!
- bbctol 10y agoHey, I remember reading that Atlantic article and being curious to see other things you'd written! Pity you don't have an easy-to-Google name... A question regarding the spreadsheet: have you found it better to just list every pitch you do in order, even if it's the same story? What I do is have publications as columns and stories as rows, so I can easily keep track of where I have or haven't submitted something, but I'm curious if you see an advantage to the straight list.
- mike2477 10y agoThat makes my day to hear that! And you're telling me -- I'll never be #1 on Google.. :( In a thread above I listed the story I wrote for Quartz. I used to write on these blogs too: http://www.michaelthomasblog.com/ http://www.michaelthomasblog.com/ -- my angsty young person writing, and fiction http://www.getsimpledata.com/blog/ http://www.getsimpledata.com/blog/ -- my last company http://www.insatiablefox.com/ http://www.insatiablefox.com/ -- more journalist writing I'm working on publishing in one place going forward for obvious reasons haha :) To answer your question, I found that helpful in organizing pitches by day. But I agree it can be helpful to organize by publication. I guess a perfect tracker would be easily sortable and have numbering to tell how many times you've pitched a publication. Appreciate the kind words and question!
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- sfashset 10y agoGreat article, but I'm wondering if it isn't missing the most important piece of information - how did you track down the editors, and their email addresses? Or is this information that can be gleaned from twitter?
- mike2477 10y agoThanks :) You're totally right. I forgot one of the most essential parts of the process which is tracking down the right editor. The short version is this: find the most relevant publication, then search for the most relevant section (politics, business, etc). Then look on their masthead (you can google {publication} masthead) to find this for every magazine. There you'll find the editor of the section you want to write for. Then you can do a quick google search on them to find their Twitter or email. In terms of process I usually tweet them first and ask what the best way to send a pitch is. They'll usually include their email. Then I send an email with subject line "re: twitter" (that gets opened everytime). In that email I include my pitch. More in-depth story on this to come. Appreciate the idea!
- chinathrow 10y ago> (that gets opened everytime) If I were an editor, I would simply blackhole all personal mails which include tracking pixels.
- hawkice 10y agoI've thrown people in the spam filter for a lot less. "re: twitter" as a subject line is even more objectionable to my personal tastes -- but I dislike journalists who are intentionally trying to mislead their audience, even in an email subject.
- nthnclrk 10y agoConfused as to why there is any objection to this. He stated that it'll typically get a reply that includes their email, and he is simply creating context within the subject line – this advantageous for the receiver. If it were me (and I had indeed shared my email to the person reaching out on Twitter) I'd appreciate the reminder of how/why they are reaching out on email.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoStorytelling is so critically important for everything in business and life. If you have new ideas or want to create something new you need to be able to captivate the audience with a good story. You could equally apply this framework to pitching investors, job prospects, customers etc...
- mike2477 10y agoThat's a great point! I'm really glad you mentioned it. My hope was that this could be as useful to someone pitching their company is it is to aspiring writers.
- shubhamjain 10y agoThis is a brilliant article. It concerns with Magazine publishing but I can guess that the principles apply everywhere. I read the author's pitches with a mind of an editor constantly thinking how would I ever possibly pass it? The surprising thing about pitching / selling is how oversold is the "magical" knack — of the business guy who knows how to woo. But it's only a matter of understanding that people are willing to listen to you as long as you aren't wasting their time. Editors are more than eager to publish an excellent story, but a pitch like "I want to write about AI" won't cut it. I have a small blog[1] on which I occasionally write stuff. My process has always been to write a small post, publish, post on HN and disappear with disappointment when they don't catch attention. I think I understand it better now that it's not only a matter of writing novel ideas, but also catching the attention from the first headline, and the first paragraph. In our minds we think of our writing / pitch as a whole, but, for the reader, it's a progressively building story. [1]: https://shubhamjain.co/ https://shubhamjain.co/
- aaron-lebo 10y agoBut it's only a matter of understanding that people are willing to listen to you as long as you aren't wasting their time. No, no: people are willing to listen to you as long as they think you aren't wasting their time. Whether you are actually wasting their time doesn't matter. What this means is there are two ways to catch people's attention: bullshit and say what they want to hear, or actually say something meaningful. The first is exceptionally easy, the latter not as much. Remember, the person who's job is to sell something is probably selling you something. There's a pretty good chance that what they are selling you is not as valuable as they say it is. This guy is doing an exceptional job selling, yes, but whether he's wasting your time...? Based on the first post in this thread, who knows. That's why these narratives are often misleading and self-serving, intentionally or not. He's selling right now. You bought it. What's the real value?
- andrewfromx 10y agohow were you getting the email address to write into? just going through the normal contact us general inbox of the publication or finding one person there and always pitching a specific person?
- mike2477 10y agoHey! This is a great question and one raised by others. I plan to write more on this (totally spaced it on this article somehow). If you CTRL + F search "The short version" you'll see the short version of my answer to this question. More to come!
- pieterhg 10y agoThere's more to this story. I was the first person to be interviewed by this journalist (Michael Thomas @curious_founder). He approached me on Twitter to ask questions about digital nomad and remote work life (as I founded Nomad List and have been doing it for years). I told him it'd be great to see more honest depictions as most articles are heavily idealized making it sound all great, when it's not necessarily. It's ups and downs (just like regular life really). What happened next may surprise you. He wrote a hit piece on me changing my entire story that I told him over Skype into a clickbait article of how digital nomadism doesn't work and one of the main people doing it for awhile (en public) even settled down and gave up altogether. http://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-remoteok-founder-pieter-levels-explains-why-he-has-quit-the-nomadic-lifestyle/ http://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-re... I didn't settle down. I spent the summer in Amsterdam. Cause you know, it's a nice place! But he needed to say this to make a polarized hit piece with an angle. And that piece became viral. Resulting in me having to tell people daily that I didn't and getting lots of flack. You may understand it doesn't help if your entire startup is about something and a journalist writes a viral piece how you yourself don't even believe in that anymore. I contacted the journalist and Quartz but they didn't change a thing. It's great this meant his journalistic breakthrough but it hurt me in the process. I'd argue journalists like this are the whole problem we have these days. The articles they write can't be balanced because they need to get pageviews. Every potential to write something interesting quickly turns into clickbait. It turned me off from being interviewed ever again. Doing my own PR by posting comment sections of Hacker News or Reddit seems like a better idea (also see how Elon Musk does exactly this, seems smarter). So yes, I'd argue don't follow this guy's path, instead be nice, honest and write interesting articles. It might take longer but you'll have more karma and long-term more success. And maybe you can convince me to do interviews again, some day :)
- 6stringmerc 10y agoThis is a great article if somebody has unlimited resources to pay rent, buy food, and focus on obtaining a basically temporal literary achievement; however, it offers no practical utility with respect to actually getting paid to write and earn a living by way of the craft, so...uhh...if you need a textbook fluff piece, here ya go.
- missn 10y agoAgree. The article had good points with the part about pitching especially helpful. I do get too that the focus of this piece is more on how to get into these publications. I do wish though that the author spoke a bit more on how he survived as a freelance writer. If you're a good enough writer with good ideas and you keep pitching persistently, you'll get traction soon enough. It's whether or not you're able to survive the unstable early goings that's the issue. From my experience, if you're jumping into freelance writing without any savings (and starting from scratch with no connections with editors, no previous published pieces, etc.), it's hard to survive. Pitches take time (some editors might take months to reply). Writing/research takes time (you're essentially unpaid until your piece gets published). Even harder is the invoicing. You have to hound some publications to pay you (some take 45+ days to pay after your piece gets published). You really have to plan your pipeline well. When I tried doing it full-time for a bit, I planned ahead in terms of income (i.e. income from this month came from all the work I did in November). The moment you slow down or you stop pitching though, you know it's going to affect you in two months time. Getting through the gates is tough but the hardest part is trying to find sustainable work that can pay your bills month to month. If you can develop relationships with editors (who consistently greenlight your pieces or give you regular assignments), that helps a lot. But, if you're starting out without any of that, the constant grind to find something regularly is stressful. I still do it because I love it but I don't do it full-time anymore because I need to pay my bills.
- criddell 10y agoAt the bottom there's an email link to get access to all the pitches. Why not remove the friction and just post some links?
- Nomentatus 10y agoLike the article. Hey, an informative article, whoa... Re the controversy over article one, it is astonishing what shitty reporters we humans are, almost to a person. Just astonishing. I don't exclude myself. Everyone thinks they're a great, accurate reporter so they think reporting well must be pretty easy. Wrong on both counts.
- yoshko 10y agoSuper informative.