Section Category: Assignments

Last week, we started writing the first building block of an efficient, effective query letter: P2.

But while I told you this paragraph will be the second of three, I haven’t elaborated on what the first or third paragraphs are or why this one comes second, and there’s a good reason for that. So many of us don’t pitch regularly because we feel intimidated by various aspects of the process:

• what an editor may say in response
• wondering whether our pitch is “perfect” enough to finally hit the send button on
• how long it may take to put together a pitch in the first place

Overcoming the fear of what an editor might say happens through sending pitches and seeing that editors are human, typically quite nice, and, more often than you’d imagine, prepared to help you find a pitch that resonates with the editor’s publication. A.k.a. this fear can only be overcome through practice.

Not being sure whether your pitch is good enough to send is something that we will work on together as I review the portions of your pitch and ask to take out things here, provide more information there, or clarify what you mean or why you have included a point elsewhere.

But one of the main things that I hear writers who don’t have as much work as they’d like or don’t have the type of work they’d like is that it takes too long to write pitches. This is something that we need to systematically attack because pitches are the lifeblood of more and better work.

During maybe my second full year of freelance writing, I read a quote that I have lived by ever since. I haven’t been able to track down the original, but it goes something like this:

“If you don’t have any work, spend the full 40 hours each week that you would spend just on marketing for a month. You’ll have too much work by the end of the month.”

I just read something very similar in the newsletter of another writer whose blog also emphasizes the necessity of pitching regularly (and quickly!):

“Don’t even talk to me about not making a decent income unless you’re marketing at least five times a day, five times a week, I said to a coaching client a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly, she multiplied her marketing effort and had regular work coming in within a month.”

With this Pitchapalooza program, we are aiming to do something sort of along these lines, but in a less time-consuming fashion, because I want to make sure that we address fear number three from that list above before you go out and try to write five pitches every day.

I hear very regularly that writers don’t pitch enough because it takes them two to three hours to write a pitch. And this is because they start with a blank page.

They don’t start with an idea file or a trip list. They don’t have a three-paragraph structure, as we’re going to work through, to plug that information into. And often they don’t have ideas that editors will buy, and so they spend many hours trying to write an explanatory email of why the editor should care rather than just getting a better idea in the first place.

So, throughout this week and next, as we go through exercises on how to create each building block of your pitch letters, keep in mind the true goal of learning to write pitches in such a clearly structured format. You are not only learning to write effective pitch letters, but we are working on writing them more efficiently (for the reader’s consumption and for our own hourly rate).

Take time on these practice rounds if you need to, but aim at each step to become quicker, to cut more bloat from your time tracker as well as your writing.

Your Task Today
Last week we looked at how to construct the middle paragraph for your department pitches. Today we’re going to do it for your three shorts.

We’re going to begin this section with the same format we used for the other type of article, but then we will plug different information into the end:

“I’d like to propose a piece for your [name of section] on [topic in one to maximum five words], because [line on why the editor cares and keep it succinct!!!]. I know this section typically runs about #### words, and in that length, I would cover [explain—again very succinctly!!—the who, what, where and when of what you want to relay. We’ve already covered the why above.]

Because these short sections are inherently newsy, whether simply relaying a new opening or the events around an anniversary or other special event, we’re using a news-style system of relaying the information.

If you have a blog or have primarily been doing longer-form writing, this can be very tough. When I wrote news briefs for Italy Magazine, this was the bane of my existence and it took months to train myself to do it automatically, but until I did, I used this trick.

Before I wrote anything, I wrote on the top of my page:

Who:
What:
Where:
When:
Why:

Then I filled each in, and then I pulled them together in a sentence that I tried not to let include any other information.

The results looked like this:

“A group of scientists led by American Museum of Natural History curator David Grimaldi has published their discovery of two amber-encased, 230-million-year-old insects from the Dolomite mountains in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

“After twelve years of restoration, Titian’s early masterpiece “La Fuga in Egitto” (Flight to Egypt) makes its last-ever Italian appearance at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice through the 2nd of December.”

“Sergio Castellitto’s highly-anticipated film Venuto al mondo (Twice Born in English-speaking markets) starring Penelope Cruz and Emile Hirsch debuted at the Toronto International Film as the Festival Gala Presentation.”

“The original mould by Leonardo da Vinci’s 1508 sculpture study “Horse and Rider” is touring North America and the UK in the first-ever public exhibition of a three-dimensional work by the Renaissance master.”

You’ll notice these are similar to the log lines we discussed last week, but designed to give a more complete overview of the topic rather than just tease.

Your turn. Write up your P2 for your three short articles and post them in the Day 11 section of the forum.

We’ve looked in the last couple lessons and assignments at how succinctly new briefs and other short articles (and their pitches) must be structured as well as how rigidly departments must follow the format laid out by magazines. Today, we’re going to look at the structure of feature articles and how that translates in your pitch.

In your assignments from days 7 and 9, the clear definition of what exactly the feature articles you’re looking to pitch would cover was something I saw a lot of you struggling with.

In many cases, folks simply gave me the name of a city as the topic for the article or a road trip in a certain area.

We haven’t yet discussed the concept of an article’s “angle,” because I find this popular work for journalists and PR people can really be a catch-22, learning-wise, when you’re new to this kind of writing. Like you should just know it when you see it.

We’ve looked at how to thinly slice different experiences on our trips, text our ideas for fit and relevance to the magazine we’re pitching, and make sure ideas have a clear reason why they should be covered now in the magazine you’re pitching. And these are all ways to “hack” the angle concept for shorts and departments.

But with feature articles, we need to not only have a clear “why” compelling our piece forward, but also a story. Which can sound scary, and, again, hard to define like the concept and an “angle.”

Here’s the thing, though. There are also some very easy ways to hack the process of figuring out your story, but they begin with a clear understanding of what differentiates a story from other types of information transference.

We often hear that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But that type of structural approach often leads to diary-like articles, because it seems like the beginning is when you leave on your trip or arrive at your destination and the end is when the trip stops.

So let’s reframe it.

A story has:

• a starting circumstance
• a complication that disturbs the status quo
• a transformation

Rather than arriving and leaving your destination as the bookends for the story, your beginning and middle become the moment before something happens and then the moment after something has happened when you have been changed by it.

This is how you can slice one trip into many features.

You can use this structure to write a more thoughtful feature about a change in perception (a very clear interpretation of these steps), by starting your trajectory arriving in a destination with a preconception of what you’ll find there, having experiences that show you there is really something else that isn’t what you expected that makes the destination unique, and then wrapping up with your changed mindset.

I’m working on a piece like this about Detroit, which we visited expecting to find (as people love to say) “the next Brooklyn,” only to discover a huge disconnect between the area and people creating the hipsterism and the economic depression of much of the city. In a similar vein but with a much more haughty New Yorker take, this Bon Appétit article about Indianapolis executes this structure very clearly.

But another way to apply this structure is the oft-used quest format. The writer heads to a destination in search of something that may be difficult to find or a matter of opinion, like:

• the original recipe for gelato
• a reservation at a top sushi restaurant in Tokyo
• the best noodle soup in Vietnam

Complication ensues when the writer encounters stray paths or inaccurate suggestions from locals. Eventually a conclusion is reached based on the results of these complications.

If you are not quite sure you see how these structures apply to your article ideas yet, don’t worry. We’re going to go through a couple different exercises over the next couple days to set you up with tools to be able to find them on your own once this program is done. But for now, take it step by step.

Your Task for Today
For each of your three feature article ideas, think of three scenes from the trip or part of your trip you’re planning to cover that really stood out to you.

Perhaps you learned something, a preconception was challenged, or you have another type of revelation from outside means.

Post your three scenes for each feature in the forum.

Quick note about feature pitch ideas: if you feel like you’re having trouble coming up with feature ideas or don’t think that you’re up to writing one, spend some time today reading a couple feature articles online.

To make sure you’re getting the good stuff, I highly recommend reading through some of the winners of the Lowell Thomas Award, widely regarded as the most prestigious honor in travel writing.

Like most forms of writers block, if you’re having trouble coming up with feature ideas, you’re most likely blocked because you need more information. If you already read a lot of magazine features and have a good idea of what they look like but still are coming up dry, go back to your trip lists and flesh them out with more experiences rather than activities in search of a moment of transformation.

I’m going to wait to talk more about writing the different sections for features for a couple days so more folks can catch up on yesterday’s assignment.

Even if you’re still solidifying some of your ideas, pick three that are settled and go ahead with today’s assignment so you can start getting a feel for P1 in small batches.

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Today we’re going to talk about something else that seems like the hard, artsy part of writing: ledes or leads.

A lede is the beginning of your travel article, but you can also use the very same lede for your pitch and I recommend that you do.

One of the best ways to get assignments for pieces when you don’t have prior clips or don’t have a lot of clips to demonstrate that you’re a professional that knows how to work with editors is to use your pitch itself as a clip and demonstrate the quality of your writing upfront, from the outset.

Using a magazine article-style lede at the beginning of your pitch also serves another important purpose; it gives you a clear framework for keeping the beginning of your pitch wholly focused on its true goal: getting and keeping the editors attention.

The Real Purpose of the Lede
You need to employ two very different writing styles in your pitch. In the beginning, you write in the same way you would write if you were writing an article, and for the rest of the pitch you write as if you are writing a business email (succinctly and to the point)…because you are in fact writing a business email.

One of the biggest issues I see in pitches that I review, as I’ve mentioned previously, is bloat. But let’s break down more precisely what that consists of so you can begin to know it when you see it.

Bloat in pitch writing is any words that do not contribute to the point you need to get across.

So then we need to be clear on what our point is.

The point of a pitch is to say, “Your readers need to know X story because Y, and I am the best person to tell it to them because Z.”

In P2, we both explain what X is and the why or Y. And in P3 we are going to cover the details of Z (next week we’ll work on P3).

So then why are we including P1, a little snippet of the article, at all?

This is fundamental to writing pitches that editors read all the way through, so ask me questions if you’re not clear on this.

P1 must incorporate X and Y while demonstrating Z by showing your writing style.

So what does that mean in terms of execution? Any scene we choose or picture we start to paint in the lede must directly tie in to what the article is about and why it needs to be published.

Bloat, in the case of the pitch, is any detail about your trip that does not tie into those two things.

For a good example of what happens when this isn’t clear, check out this article I found when I was looking up pieces to share with you for yesterday’s assignment. I tried to skim it a couple different ways, and just couldn’t figure out what it was about.

The author says he’s on a quest for pizza, but neither the beginning nor the end of the piece is really about that. The beginning is painting a scene of Naples being chaotic, and the end is sort of about that and sort of about pizza, but it hasn’t come full circle. The author hasn’t changed or learned anything throughout the text, and I’m not left satisfied as a reader. I feel like I perhaps understand Naples a little better, but I’m still not really sure what the point of the piece was besides painting a pretty picture.

That is not how you want an editor to feel reading your pitch. However, if they make it to the end, that’s often the case.

So it is our job to make sure that the pitch is always consistent and clear in its message. Now, how do we do that with the lede?

Lede Structures
After your email subject line, the lede is arguably the most important part of your pitch.

Because once an editor has opened your email, it is your first and last chance to get the editor interested in your idea. If you don’t grab her there, she’ll probably hit delete. When I read pitches in front of people, they often tell me that the answer to whatever question I’m asking at the beginning is coming later, but we can’t do that.

An editor is like a bored movie watcher trying to find something to watch in Netflix. If she watches the first five minutes of a movie and doesn’t get what’s going on and doesn’t like it, unless she’s got a really good reason, like a friend told her the movie is really good and she’ll like it, she’s going to turn it off and put on something else.

If you have a really good reason the editor should keep reading, like they asked you at a conference to send over some pitches or a mutual acquaintance who also writes for the magazine recommended you pitch the editor, we’ll add a brief line about that before the lede so the editor knows to pay extra attention.

But otherwise, it’s all you.

Before you write your lede, think about what is the most attention grabbing thing about your story.

• Is it the obesity statistics for New Orleans compared to the national average?
• Is it the colors and density of the flowers in normally desolate Death Valley during the superbloom?
• Is it the tranquility of biking over water as you cruise across a bridge in Japan’s suspension bridge bike trail as opposed to the chirping birds and tree cover of mountain biking?
• Is it a gesture that inspired a local from a normal reticent, foreigner-shy culture to open up and discuss deeply personal topics in an impromptu conversation?

We discussed yesterday how to begin pinpointing these moments in your feature articles, but we need to pull the most poignant fact or statistic, moment or scene, encounter or observation from each proposed article to create a lede for each pitch that accomplishes X,Y, and Z.

If you begin by simply describing a location or a meal or some other sensory experience that doesn’t clearly demonstrate what your proposed article will be about and why it’s important, you’ve lost the editor.

There are three primary lede types, and they each work best for certain lengths of articles, but that doesn’t mean you can’t interchange them if you find a certain structure to be a better fit for your idea. I offer them matched with particular types of articles here so that people who are feeling stuck have more framework to brainstorm within:

• shorts: the shocking fact or statistic lead
• departments: the assumption twist
• features: in media res (in the middle of the action)

The length of the lede would correspond to the length of the piece:

• shorts get a one-sentence (or two-short-sentence) lede
• departments get up to three sentences
• features can get up to two (succinct) paragraphs and are a great place to incorporate dialogue or quotations from people you met on the road

With the shorts, your proposed article is newsy in nature and a similar, short lede functions best, such as, “Hoboken has now surpassed Portland, Oregon, as the per capita brewery capital of the U.S.”

The assumptions twist is one of the easiest ones to do, so you need to take care to give it appropriate heft and details. Rather than, “While people often think of Death Valley as a desolate place free of vegetation, once a year, during the superbloom, the valley is carpeted with flowers,” you want to paint two opposing pictures that better display your writing abilities (while staying on topics):

In February, after the scorching summer and increasingly cold winter evenings, sometimes reaching below freezing, Death Valley is blanketed in silence, stillness and blankness that sweeps from horizon to horizon. But for three brief weeks in March, the bland beige gives way to an effervescent pastiche of violet magenta, crimson, canary yellows, tangerine and azure as the annual botanic awakening known as the Superbloom ushers into Death Valley a period of rich liveliness that eclipses its lifeless name.

For features, the best lede is often a scene from approximately the middle of your story, typically right before something exciting happens. For a piece on extreme sports in Dubai, a student in another workshop settled on the moment before his sky dive, as he looked at Dubai from a very different angle, giving him a new perspective on the city. The pizza piece I mentioned above has a very similar lede.

Your Task Today
Take three of your article ideas that you’re settled on (the ones you feel most comfortable with are fine for this assignment!), pick any lede structure that you think is a good fit, and write your lede.

If you chose to incorporate a quotation, don’t be overly concerned about getting it exactly word for word unless you are attributing it to a person directly by name. Saying, “the shop owner,” “my guide,” “the elephant trainer,” etc. in the context of a scene rather than direct attribution to a particular person during an interview is understood to carry a bit of artistic leeway.

(We’ll go more in depth on things like the specifics of how to quote individuals next week when we polish pitches; for now, feel free to have a little freedom with it and don’t let worrying about getting exact wording from your notes or recorder hold you back.)

As you write your pitches, particularly your ledes, it is very easy to fall into the age old telling-rather-than-showing trap.

But while the admonishment “show, don’t tell,” has always struck me as one of those mystic instructions, like, “feel the force,” that you really have no clue how to accomplish based solely on the directive itself, I’ve found a different name for the problem that makes it easier to conquer: lack of journalist detail.

What Constitutes Journalistic Detail
This is one of those writing skills that editors can sniff out a mile away, and it consists of some key characteristics that we can easily pinpoint and attack systematically in our writing:

• Do you use vague words like “amazing,” “beautiful,” “various,” “several,” “many,” etc.? Cut them!
• Do you use estimates or vague descriptions when something more specific is available? (A massive change vs. an increase of 165%; estate with various historic buildings vs. the 1642 manor house is accompanied by a baroque carriage house from 1786 and a more rustic barn from the estate’s original construction in 1502.) Do the research and get specifics!
• (In the lede or final article.) Do you demonstrate the conditions that lead to your conclusion so the reader can follow along and believe you or simply state it outright? (Quebec City is worth a visit for the festivities of its 450th birthday celebration this year vs. With a new festival honoring the city’s history as the first major new world settlement every weekend, eight major museum renovations finally opening their expanded collections to the public, and new hotels at all price points coming online to accommodate every type of incoming traveler, 2018 is the year to visit Quebec City.) Show don’t tell 🙂
• Are you using four or ten words when one would do? Try writing everything twice as long as it’s supposed to be and forcing yourself to cut out half. It will show you what you’re including that really doesn’t need to be there.

When You’re Feeling Stuck, Refill Your Well
Writing the lede for your pitch and your article can truly be the most writers-block-inducing part of the process, but I invite you to create a habit for systematically fighting writer’s block.

When that knot of stuckness starts to tighten around you, immediate switch to a different screen and do something else. Either work on something else entirely, or get inspiration from reading rather than trying to pull words around thin air.

As you practice this technique, I invite you to add daily reading of works that fill your depleted creative coffers and give you inspiration to draw from in moments of stuckness.

Looking for examples of articles with journalistic detail to share with you as part of this lesson, I was also confronted with page after page of Google results with examples of writing like this:

“After a 25 minutes ride with the speedboat, we reached Bandos Island Resort.

My first impression: Oh my gosh oh my gosh… this… is… SPECTACULAR!!!

The island was quite small, it took me only 15-20 minutes to surround the island walking in a slow pace and get back to where I started.

Does it really look like those typical postcards or desktop wallpapers? Actually it does. It was incredibly beautiful, a tropical paradise. If there is any place on this planet to escape the real world then it is here, for sure. It’s surreal.”

Even if you have a blog and need, obviously, to continue writing it during this program, I encourage you to change your reading up so that you are taking in writing patterns and structures to emulate in your pitches and print articles.

Articles in respectable major publications that are positioned as first-person experiences often have great examples not only of a journalistic level of detail but also how to move a story forward with detail, rather than just getting bogged down describing a static place:

“We sallied cautiously forth from our bungalow in the shadow of one of the most exotic, larger-than-life hotels we had ever seen. A cross between the Bellagio and Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport, Rhode Island. A tiny terra-cotta reflecting pool with carved marble swans swooping in for a landing, mouths gaping, greeted our arrival. The most informal restaurant we could find was the patio, adjacent to the crescent-shaped, resplendent Moorish structure that Mrs. Post had designed, having recruited from Vienna the same architect who had worked for Emperor Franz Joseph.

The clientele was dressed to kill. Lacquered blondes, their hair the color of ginger ale with five-inch Louboutins sat expressionless, their faces frozen in feigned ennui. Were they from Texas? Brentwood? Boca?”

– From Vanity Fair’s Two Major Democrats Go Behind the Scenes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

Introductions to pieces profiling a destination also often have excellent examples:

“When the train arrives in the small, historic city of Hudson after only a two-hour ride upriver, city slickers do a double take. There are no platforms here. Baggage in hand, I leap onto a footstool and then onto the asphalt and gravel lining the tracks, the tired hulk of the massive silver train shuddering behind me. Nothing makes me happier than that loose track gravel banging on my city shoes, the feeling of entering one of nature’s privileged strongholds.“

– From Travel + Leisure‘s Escape to New York’s Hudson Valley

And some of the best examples, especially for writers newer to this type of writing, often come from hotel reviews, in which the write seeks to make the hotel in question unique from all other hotels, a feat most easily accomplished by focusing intensely on the details:

“Upon arrival in early November we were greeted by hot cider, workers outfitted in Fjallraven apparel and a two-story lobby with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the impressive landscape and a central hearth that adds to the homey appeal.”

– From Town and Country Travel‘s Scribner’s Catskills Lodge

Your Task for Today
Pick three more articles from your list of ten and write your ledes, then post them to the forum. Next week is all about polishing these, so if you’re behind, just start doing the ideas you feel good about.

If you ever watched “Sex in the City,” you may recall that the characters frequently referred to the city of New York as a friend, companion, lover, and generally as integral part of the group as the four primary female characters.

When we write evocative travel pieces, we need to approach the location we feature in a similar vein, as a character in the story rather than mere setting, so as I discuss methods of crafting compelling characters today, keep in mind that you can use these techniques to flesh out both the people and places you feature in equal measure.

What Makes a Character Live in Three Dimensions?
In what seems like another life–though not a past one, just a very different one–I worked in professional theater. I came to theater later than many, in high school, and was drawn to the more overarching roles of director and stage manager, joining several repertory companies in high school and college as well as starting my own.

When you direct theater, you really do get that question people use to poke fun at actors (what is my motivation when I say this line?), quite a bit. But I think it has become more of a popular joke because most people don’t grasp the incredible power of motivation to define who we are.

Intention or motivation drives the manner in which a person completes every action–languid or hurried, disconcerted or lackadaisical, with an intense, strained focus or as if the mind is more preoccupied with another plane of existence.

But motivation also reveals much about a person, in terms of what they value or judge to be more important than something else in a given moment–like the famous George Bush clip used so artfully by Michael Moore to show the president calmly reading a book to school children when he knew the World Trade Center was being attacked. As you’ll notice in this example, you can never know what a person’s motivation is exactly, only speculate through observing their actions, and this is what we need to lead readers of our pieces to do through the details we share about our characters.

The Devil is Always in the Details
I know I spent all of yesterday’s lesson on details and have been needling many of you about why you have chosen to include certain details in your ledes or P2s, but that is because one of the things that clearly separate writers who are not just subjectively good but who objectively get more work and accolades is their use of details.

It isn’t enough to simply punch up your pitches and final pieces by incorporating more specific facts and descriptions rather than generalities. Everything you choose to include must also serve a purpose–supporting the specific image you aim to create for the reader, which is centered in your why.

As you describe the people who populate your profile pieces, you must not only share the details that illuminate a vision of the individual, but those that invite the reader to imagine the person’s motivations, what drives her, what conflicts she must overcome, and what strength she has to do so.

When you choose how to create a person’s physicality, chose metaphors and examples that fit the conclusion you want to lead the reader to. An astute barista leading the craft cocktail movement might have a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his leather elbow patches–part professor part blue-collar worker–while he pulls yellowed tome after tome off the shelf to show you his original pre-Prohibition cocktail manuals.

(For more examples, I highly recommend this post on Writer’s Digest, though a few of the points get a bit tedious and more usable for fiction than non-fiction in the middle.)

Choose details that create an image of movement and action rather than describing a static scene to not only pull the reader into the story (as with the lede I shared yesterday of the writer hopping off the train in the trackless station in the Hudson Valley), but also paints the motivation of your character…even if that character is you.

Painting the Character of You in Your Pieces

I’ve held onto this until the end of our heady ride on writing characters because it can be intimidating to embark on this journal of creating people who, while based in fact, become inherently fictional once you begin to recreate them.

But it’s important to keep in mind that each time you write a first-person piece, you must also recreate yourself as the protagonist in each story, to introduce yourself to new readers, and to reframe your motivation and characteristics for the story at hand.

Some days you will highlight yourself as the curious archaeologist, others as the sweets lover who secretly scouts the best bakeries in town before any trip, and other articles will need you to delve back into your memories as an adolescent arriving in a foreign country for the first time as you contrast it with your experience of the same locale today as a wizened traveler with both more curiosity and a reassuring familiarity in confrontation with foreignness than the trepidation that marked your youth.

Your Task for Today

Write ledes for the remaining pieces that you haven’t already written them for and post them in the forum.

Once they’re all ready to go, combine them with the appropriate P2 (or three poignant moments in the case of the features) and post them in the forum.

Next week we’re going to work more on polishing the sections that we’ve already created (you’re more than halfway there!), so if you’re behind, don’t worry, it’s a good opportunity to catch up. You have some space here.

Later in the week, we’ll add P3 and our email subject line/proposed article headline and get them out the door. (If you’re using a magazine that you found yourself, we’ll also look next week at some ways to find email addresses for editors.)

I’m always surprised how many writers get tripped up by the “about me” paragraph in their pitches, but I think it happens for two main reasons:

• they miss the point of this paragraph (why they are qualified to write *this* particular piece, rather than be hired for a staff job at The New York Times)
• they don’t feel very qualified at all, so they hem and haw over what is “good enough” to include

Let’s nip all of these obstacles in the bud right now. I don’t want you to ever struggle with this paragraph or even spend more than two minutes on it again.

The job of P3 is not to convince the editor you’ve sent your pitch to to assign you a piece. The quality of your idea and your clean, clear, concise writing should have already done that for the most part.

The point of this paragraph is to reassure the editor that her inclination to assign you this idea is a good one by checking three key boxes:

• making it clear that you in particular should be the one to write this piece because of your connection to the story (because you’ve already experienced it and/or you have a background in the subject matter that makes you particularly qualified to speak to this topic or bring special insights to the piece that another travel writer couldn’t)
• proving that you have some writing experience and will actually be able to follow through on writing up the piece you’ve pitched
• showing that you have worked with editors in the past and know how to work to an assignment and deadline and incorporate feedback from editors

That means our P3s should include three key things:

• your experience with the topic, destination, and particular trip proposed in this piece
• a general overview of your writing background
• the names of some outlets that have published your work

Here’s how that shakes out into formula. For sentence one, it’s hard to give an exact formula, as you need to concisely include the most important reason(s) you are uniquely qualified to write the piece. Some examples:

I’ve recently returned from Botswana, where I spent two weeks traveling with local guides and learning their stories.

I’ve lived in Medellin for six years and worked as a relocation guide for newly settled expats, introducing them to the best ways to experience the city as someone who doesn’t speak the local lingo.

I have a degree in Byzantine history, specializing in the origin of the hermetic practice in Eastern Europe, and have connections to top experts in the field to interview for this story.

Sentence two is roughly a fill-in-the-blank situation, but I recommend you spice it up, make it yours, and then use the same thing over and over again and never give it another thought:

I’m a travel [journalist/author/writer/blogger/etc.] based in [PLACE] that has covered [YOUR FORMAT OR TOPICAL OR GEOGRAPHIC SPECIALTY] for ## years.

This could mean:

I’m a travel journalist based in Dubai that has covered profiles of new businesses, local trends, and luxury travel for five years. (Someone who has previously worked as a broadcast general journalist and is switching over to travel writing)

I’m a travel writer based in Dallas that has covered local food, events, and attractions for three years. (Someone who has only been published on local sites like Patch, DNAInfo, the neighborhood paper, or her own blog.)

I’m a nomadic travel writer currently living in Ljubljana that specializes in guides and service pieces. (A military wife who has primarily written about personal finance for years and is segueing into travel writing).

As you’ll see in these examples, I’ve left out a lot of the story of what these (fictional, but based loosely on real) people do and write about. Because it doesn’t matter to the editor. The only things they need to know are what qualify you to do this particular piece of writing.

Finally, sentence three is the easiest of all:

My work has appeared in [LIST EITHER THE THREE BIGGEST PLACES YOU’VE BEEN PUBLISHED–NO MATTER HOW SMALL, JUST CHOSE THE BIGGEST—*OR* THE SINGLE BIGGEST PLACE AND TWO OUTLETS THAT ARE VERY RELEVANT TO THE TOPIC AT HAND].

Your Task Today
For each of your ten stories, fire off an “about me” paragraph that’s all about the editor—or at least how your background is the perfect fit to write the story at hand for this editor’s magazine—following the formula outlined above.

The second and third sentences will often be exactly the same, and that’s fine; they should be. Don’t make yourself worry about rewriting them every time. It’s the first sentence on your relationship to this particular piece that you should change out and hone tightly to each pitch.

Even if the other sections of your pitch are still a work in progress, you can still work on your P3s and post them in the forum.

 

Today we put the cherry on top, somewhat literally.

After you’ve written your query letter, adding the subject line for your pitch email can be a superfluous afterthought. But the subject line is arguably the most important part of your pitch.

If those eight or so words don’t brew interest, all the other ones you’ve labored over will never get a read.

Plays on Words Don’t Play
Writing titles for your articles is hard. There’s a lot of science (psychology) to it.

That’s why, when you write a piece for a major magazine that is sold on newsstands, the editors almost always rewrite your headline. Those magazines use the headlines on the cover and in the table of contents to sell the magazine, so editors put considerable time into brainstorming them, never choosing the first one that comes to mind, and I encourage you to do the same.

If you have a blog, I want to mention here that print headlines are often quite different than blog headlines (unless you’re pitching an article to a women’s magazine on “52 Ways to Have a Better Orgasm Tonight” which I don’t think any of your are!).

The type of headlines that inspire clicks online tend to be:

• more mysterious
• longer
• packed with a promise the article will deliver on

With print, the titles tend to be much shorter, maybe two to four words, because they also include something called a deck or sub-head that is often a full sentence and bears more resemblance to the headlines you’d use on a blog post.

The point of these headlines is to establish quickly for the reader what the article is about, preferably in a way that is more interest-piquing than encyclopedic.

Crafting and Using Your Headline in Your Pitch
I always use my article headline in two places in my pitch letter:

• the subject line
• the closing sentence

We’ve talked about P3, the “about you, but really about how you’ll help the editor” paragraph that ends the main body of your pitch.

After that, I include the very brief sentence:

May I write [HEADLINE] for [MAGAZINE]?

This accomplishes a couple key things:

• encourage the editor to respond to your email right away, even if the answer is a no (and we’ll talk next week on how to use no’s to your advantage)
• continue to establish that this pitch is written expressly for and angled for the magazine in question, rather than something you’re haphazardly sending around everywhere

Using this construction gave me excellent response rates from newsstand magazines even when I was just starting out.

But for them to respond, they need to open your email, and that’s where the headline in the subject line comes in. My pitch subject lines are always very simple:

pitch: [HEADLINE] for [SECTION NAME] section

When you set up your subject line like thus, the editor knows exactly what she’s in for. When she’s in her inbox looking for pitches, she can find your email easily, and if your pitch comes in and she particularly needs pitches for the section you’re pitching, she’ll probably open it right away.

Also, including the word “pitch” makes it clear that you are a writer pitching an idea that you want to write, not a PR person pitching something to be written in house.

So how do we write our actual headline? Super easy. Just look at the headlines the magazines has used in this section in the past and write it exactly like that. Seriously. That’s all there is to it.

It’s very tempting to come up with something clever, but then it’s not clear from the subject line what the pitch is about and it might never get opened.

If you don’t have a copy of the magazine in front of you, don’t fret. There’s another easy formula here. Get the destination you want to cover (with state name and country name if not easily recognizable) and your topic in there, and you’re all set. It could be as simple as:

• pitch: 3 Days in Ubud, Bali (for Hemispheres)
• pitch: Minneapolis Vegescape (for VegNews)
• pitch: A Perfect Day in Death Valley
• pitch: Quebec’s 350th Anniversary Celebrations for the “Why Go Now” section
• pitch: Field Museum Reopening Key Exhibits for “What’s Hot” section
• pitch: Rediscovering My Native American Roots feature

Your Task Today
Write headlines for each of your pieces and share them in the forum.

The group will remain active indefinitely for you to continue to share questions and successes after the course, so I encourage you to keep sharing there and checking out the edits on other folks’ pitches to see if they help with your own even if you’ve fallen behind in submitting your assignments.

No?

You save that for when you get an assignment?

Give yourself a better celebration when you get that assignment and use the happy dance now. Getting pitches out when it feels hard is an incredibly difficult process of fighting inertia.

Even if you’ve been sending out pitches, finally emailing that dream pub that you’ve always wanted to write for and never pitched, or, after sending countless pitches to big magazines because you never expect to hear back, reaching out to editors at magazines where there’s a high chance you’ll get the assignment and you’d be disappointed if you don’t, is scary. You’re vulnerable.

You’re putting yourself out there and trusting the universe (and your abilities and knowledge of the way things work) without knowing what’s going to happen.

The Real Purpose of Your Pitch
When your pitch leaves your outbox, you should feel a little thrill that it’s done for now. But it’s really important not to dwell on what happens to your pitch AFTER it leaves your care.

This is very important, because a lot of things can transpire to make your pitch not get the attention it deserves even if it’s a great pitch and completely targeted to the magazine.

I say this in all of our webinars on pitching, and I’ll say it again, because it’s so fundamental:

As much as we have put careful time and energy into crafting these ideas and pitches for pitch, coherency, and evocative detail, the actual purpose of your email is not to get an assignment for the particular article you’re pitching; it’s to audition your ideas and writing skills for an editor and open the door to a conversation about what article you can write for the magazine.

So, there’s an important distinction here. Even though you shouldn’t cling too tightly to any particular idea, they all still need to be excellent and well-matched to show an editor your skills.

How Magazine Editor Responses Really Work
When your pitch lands in an editor’s inbox, there’s a chance that she might read it right away, if she’s checking her email, has some time on her hands, and likes your subject line. But even then, she’s not likely to respond right away unless your email falls into one of two buckets: a clear ‘yes’ (that she has the power to give, more on that in a minute) or a clear ‘no.’

“If it’s a yes: 15 minutes. If it’s no: half an hour. If it’s maybe: forever.”

– Peter Fish, editor-at-large Sunset (at the time)

There are three different reasons you can get a clear ‘no:’

• the pitch would never fit in the publication
• the same story has already been assigned to another writer or is appearing soon
• a different story on the same location or topic has already been assigned to another writer or is appearing soon, and it’s something they can’t cover frequently in the same time period because it’s too niche
• the time peg on the pitch doesn’t work with the magazine’s timeline/space availability

Pitches in the very first category often don’t get a response. But you’re not pitching any of those. Pitches in the last category can be avoided to a certain degree, but not always. You can’t know if an editor has recently planned out their “A Perfect Day” section for the rest of the year to get through their pile of pitches.

The second and third categories seem like they suck and definitely can’t be avoided, but it’s actually a great problem to have because it means the editor knows you are able to come up with ideas that fit her magazine.

When you get a ‘no’ for this reason (well, any reason, but especially this reason), you fire off another pitch to that editor right away.

BUT you also fire off your pitch to another magazine, leaving the lead, P3, and much of P2 intact, and just subbing in a different section (and its formatting requirements if applicable), from the new magazine.

What to do When You’re a “Maybe”
The dreaded limbo zone! You can get stuck in it for so many reasons:

• the editor needs approval from someone else to confirm a story
• assignments are only set during monthly editorial meetings to ensure consistency across departments
• the editor isn’t 100% sold on your idea and is just thinking about whether or not they feel good about moving forward

We can’t do anything about the first two issues here, and sometimes editors also won’t clue you in that they’re happening because they don’t want to get your hopes up.

And in the third case, editors will often simply write you back right away with some quick (or, at times, very lengthy) follow-up questions.

But what do you do when you simply haven’t heard anything? No quick assignment, no quick ‘no’ you can respond to with another pitch, and no questions you can answer to assuage the editor’s doubts about assigning you the piece?

You follow up!

Depending on the piece, I recommend either following up one week after you’ve sent the pitch or two weeks (less for shorts or other newsy things, longer for features and other longer things). And if you don’t get a response, do it one more time in the same interval. Then, the next time that one- or two-week mark comes up, you send a new pitch.

You will be shocked how many assignments you get if you just rinse and repeat this process. Seriously. Even the biggest, baddest, gate-keptist magazines can be breached with this formula.

Your Task for Today
This is optional, sort of a bonus task, if you will, but something I recommend you start working into your pitching process as it becomes faster and easier for you.

When you were looking for sections in magazines for different stories, you no doubt evaluated and discarded some for different reasons. Maybe:

• you wanted to start with a bigger name publication (as you should!)
• the story as you envisioned it didn’t fit into that section’s format
• you were going for a feature or a department rather than a short or visa versa

But now I encourage you to queue up those other magazine sections as backups for each idea, so that if you get a ‘no’ response to a pitch, you already have a place set up to turn it around to.

The other layer for this future pitch planning is to have another idea queued up for each editor you’re pitching now, either another option for the same section or something for a different section. These can often be subject to change based on an editor’s feedback, but it’s good to have a starting point so that when you get that nice ‘no’ because the story has already been assigned, you’re not delaying getting another idea out.

So for each story, you might have something like this:

• Pitch: A Perfect Day in Gunnison for Sunset (mountain edition)
• Re–pitch: Enroute‘s “Getaway” section (check that out here)
• Next Sunset pitch: A Perfect Day in Death Valley (Southern California edition)

Or:

• Pitch: Adventuress profile for Darling
• Re-pitch: “Insider’s Guide” in Enroute or profile in Mercedes Benz (Canada)
• Next Darling pitch: Morocco city guide feature focusing on experiencing food like a local

Post your pitching plans in the forum under the assignment for day 21.

Ever since The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map came out, I look at blog posts about how much money writers can make very differently.

I’ve had people say all sorts of things to me about the concept behind the title–that it’s even possible to earn six figures as a writer. One person who came to see a talk at a conference I gave said they just automatically assumed it was a scam.

But it’s been really heartening to see an increasing amount of content online about how to make six figures as a freelance writer generally and a travel writer specifically. The thing is though, you will never bring in those higher rates if you settle.

As I said yesterday, you should do a happy dance when you overcome inertia and get a pitch out, but there is something greater when you get an assignment.

You get to put on an even bigger celebration (and your pride will naturally swell up), though, when you get an assignment at a rate that you weren’t sure you deserved.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 though, right?

How did you get rates you don’t think you deserve if you don’t think you deserve them? There’s only two ways.

1. People spontaneously give them to you when they quote their pay rates, without you dropping a number first that leaves money on the table.
2. You simply always ask for more no matter what just to see what you can get.

The first option happens, and that’s how a lot of folks move their rates up; they accept whatever they’re given, and as they become more experienced, it sometimes goes up over time.

But the second option isn’t any more scary than pitching, and it’s what I recommend.

When asking for a rate increase, it’s always going to be an adrenaline rush (in a scary way), but there are a lot of “preset” phrases you can use to take the edge off:

• “I was thinking more like $##. Would that be possible?”
• “I typically receive more like $## for work like this. Would that fit in your budget?” (Don’t worry; even if you’ve never done “work like this,” there’s a way to say this without lying.)
• “Could we do $##?” (This is sort of the ballsiest of them all, but, as a result, it also gets great results.)

When you come back to an editor with a rate change request like this, there are only three potential realms of what he or she can say:

• “No, that’s not possible.”
• “I can’t do $##, but I can make $## work.”
• “Yes, we can do that.”

Editors don’t take your assignments away when you ask for more pay. (If you do come across one that does, please let me know. They’re probably completely not worth your or anyone else’s time, and it’s worth circulating their name to the community to see what’s up.)

Only you decide if you aren’t going to do an assignment because the rate isn’t high enough.

But what does that mean? What is or isn’t high enough?

I hope you’ve installed and started using your time tracker, because it’s all about your hourly rate.

A $300 feature can totally be worth your time if you’re writing it up off the top of your head, from research you’ve done already, and you’re a fast, decisive writer.

But a $100 short for a major newsstand magazine wouldn’t be worth your time if you have to rewrite it from scratch six times as different editors weigh in, and the angle changes, necessitating new research, three times.

I can’t tell you what is a “good” rate, because it completely depends on:

• how difficult the editor is to work with
• how much research is required
• how long it will take you to physically write the piece

You need to set an hourly rate that you feel good about working for, measure your time to have accurate estimates of how long it takes you to do different aspects of the writing and research process, and then stop accepting work below that rate.

This isn’t for financial reasons. It’s for psychological ones.

The best clip in the world, if it is a huge drag to work on because you feel like a slave laborer for the actual hourly rate you end up with at the end of the day, is going to take energy, enthusiasm, and focus away from your other work, bringing down your hourly rate, and thus earning potential, on everything you’re working on concurrently. (This is why I stopped working with major newsstand magazines early on in my magazine days!)

Even if you’ve been at it for a while and have great estimates about the time it takes you to write and research something, a lengthy editorial process can throw your estimates all out of whack and make you wish you’d never accepted an assignment.

But what if you don’t have estimates yet of how long it takes you to do things? No problem.

1. Set an hourly rate you feel good about.
2. Measure your time when working on assignments.
3. Don’t repitch magazines that aren’t worth your time once you’ve wrapped up the first piece with them.

If you want very, very broad rules of thumb for what to shoot for, I suggest the following:

• If you are absolutely new, it’s totally fine to accept print work in the $0.10-0.15/word range. You aren’t experienced, so don’t beat yourself up over not commanding a higher rate. For now.
• If you’ve got some clips under your belt and a process for writing and research articles at a good pace, try for $0.25-0.50/word for smaller, niche, or regional magazines or $1.00/word from newsstands. The smaller the magazine, the less editorial intervention and thus the better the hourly rate.
• If you’ve been at this for a while and are looking to move up, negotiate for $0.75-1.00/word from these smaller markets and $2.00/word from national titles.

Your Task for Today
Start getting your pitches into your email composer and out the door.

Even if you only have a couple that you “feel good” about, it’s time to practice the daily (or hopefully at least weekly!) practice of pushing them out into the world.

If your ledes and P2s are still being edited, there’s nothing stopping you from writing your P3 and headlines so you can get these puppies on their way as soon as the middle is polished.

Let us know in the forum which ones you’re sending out today so you can inspire others and all get some well-deserved back-pats!

When you first get a new batch of acceptances after sending out a big batch of pitches, it’s easy to feel both like the work is over (of pitching) and it’s just begun (of writing the articles you’ve been assigned).

Neither is conducive to pitching more articles!

The freelance travel journalists that have been working as freelancers for years if not decades, consistently bagging articles in places like AFAR, The Independent, Travel + Leisure and Islands have time regularly set aside for pitching for three main reasons:

1. They know if they want to keep getting longer assignments from bigger and better magazines, they need to get in front of new editors regularly rather than just taking assignments their regular editors hand them.
2. They have places they want to go and stories they want to tell and understand that it’s possible to do all of that and get paid well for it by pitching their pants off and focusing on those places and those stories.
3. They know the only one looking out for them and their bank accounts is themselves and that their editors won’t always just think of them magically at that moment when they really need more assignments; it’s their job to let editors know regularly that they are ready to work and have great stories to tell.

No matter how many clips you have or what magazines they’re from, pitching regularly is part of the job. It’s what ensures that you don’t have nothing to do after that cushy luxury feature for Islands, making you go from gourmet ceviche to poor man’s ramen.

But how? How do you make the time?

Especially when you’ve already got other work and life on your plate besides freelance writing. “Folks who do this full-time can set aside a whole morning once a week to pitch, but I don’t have that kind of time to open up,” you might be thinking.

This is why you’ve learned to pitch in baby, bite-sized steps.

Rather than sitting down and researching and writing a whole pitch in a day, start spending just ten minutes every day doing one of the following things:

• leafing through a magazine or the travel magazine database and jotting down all of the ideas you have that look like a fit for certain sections
• reading back issues of a section you’re interested in to see if your idea really fits
  taking one past article from the section and using it as a template to write your P2
• use your notes from reading past examples of the section to pick a framework for your lead
• brainstorm some scenes from your trip or find some compelling facts that could make a good lead
• write your lead
• polish your P3 to fit the piece at hand
• check out the magazine’s headlines and craft those formats into something that fits the article at hand
• find the editor’s direct email address
• proofread and hit send

You really can do any one of these actions from your phone in ten minutes a day when you’re waiting to pick up take-out, catch the bus, pick your kid up from school, or cook the pasta sauce for dinner.

And the best part of working in these 10-minute snippets isn’t just that slowly, but surely, the work gets done, it’s that sometimes you have a little time and get into the grove and get much more than this done.

As the steps become faster and more second nature, you’ll find yourself going from around three pitches a month (doing the steps above one per day and repeating) to five, then seven, then ten. And soon you’ll see that you not only can do this (pitching), but that you’re getting good responses from good editors and if you aren’t already, you really can do this (freelance travel writing) full-time.

Your Task for Today
Think over your average day or week and identify three to ten common chunks of time like I’ve mentioned above when you’ll have a chance to do a little pitch research or quick writing on your phone and post them in the forum.