A few weeks ago I offered to bust readers’ excuses for not pitching magazines — or, if they’re pitching, for approaching only low/no-pay pubs. (By the way, if you have an excuse you’d like me to bust, you can send it to [email protected].)
Here’s Steve’s excuse: It’s not that I don’t pitch or query, but that I don’t do it enough. There are mindsets that tell me that I can’t truly pitch unless I visit the bookstore and read up real well on the market, and also the fact that is has been drummed into me to avoid magazines and just write for businesses.
I certainly don’t want to tell you that you shouldn’t research your markets, but if it’s something that’s keeping you from pitching, you need to find a way around it. Here are a few tips:
1. Research the market online. Most newsstand magazines now have websites with content and even sometimes their editorial masthead. There are many directories of newsstand magazines online, and I recommend tradepubs.com to find, well, trade pubs.
2. Pitch the magazines you already read. No research required! (You do read magazines, right?)
3. Find a niche. It’s not very efficient to come up with an idea on, say, martial arts and then spend five days at the bookstore examining every magazine in the martial arts section. You probably know what topics you’d like to write about most. Get to know the magazines in those areas over time. Whenever you head to the bookstore, read through an issue or two. Soon you’ll pick up a good, broad knowledge of the markets. You don’t need to cram for pitching!
4. Idea first, then market. Many writers, like our own Diana Burrell, like to find the market first, and then formulate a pitch for it. I prefer to come up with an idea and then find a market to match. Both ways are fine, but in your particular case, if you brainstorm ideas first, you won’t be stymied by the fact that you don’t have a perfect knowledge of the market yet.
As for writing for businesses instead of magazines: Well, business writing certainly pays more! But it’s always good to diversify so that if one market dries up, you still have others to rely on.
I hope that helps! [lf]
Did you ever think it’s not the economy, of the toughness of the industry, or just plain bad luck that’s keeping you from flourishing as a freelance writer — but your own limiting beliefs? Many aspiring freelancers are wonderful writers with salable ideas, but they can’t break out of the writing-for-cheap (or worse, writing-for-free) stage and make a full-time living doing what they love. And even while they complain about their lack of success, they have plenty of seemingly-reasonable explanations for why they aren’t even trying.
Here are some of the excuses I’ve heard from my mentoring and e-course clients — and how you can bust those limiting beliefs.
Excuse #1: “I have to pay my dues.”
Many writers believe they can’t write for magazines that pay a decent fee until they “pay their dues” by writing for markets that pay peanuts. But who decides what constitutes paying your dues, how long you need to do it for, and even that you have to do it at all? The term “paying your dues” is meaningless, because no one has defined exactly what it is and when it ends.
When I hear someone say they have to pay their dues before pitching the magazines they really want to write for, I know it’s a stalling tactic. I never hear a writer say, “Well, now I’ve paid my dues and it’s time for me to get cracking on my dream markets.” Because there’s no defined limit to paying your dues, writers just keep toiling away at sure-thing markets instead of risking rejection by the big guys. It’s the perfect excuse for not making the leap to better markets.
I’ve never heard an editor, when approached by a writer with a brilliant query and stellar writing, say, “I can’t possibly accept this — this writer hasn’t paid her dues.” In fact, consider this:
* I have a friend whose very first clip was for Cosmopolitan. She went on to have a successful freelance writing career and even write books on freelancing.
* Last year one of my students landed an assignment to write a short for SELF magazine. She had not a single clip before that. Now, she’s working on an assignment for Parenting that’s worth $1,300. She’s had only two assignments and she’s never worked for less than $1.50 per word.
* I recently had a mentoring client who kept “paying her dues” by writing for exposure and wondering why she wasn’t making more money. I convinced her to stop writing for free and cheap, and within ten days she had an assignment that was worth twenty assignments from one of her el-cheapo clients.
* My very first assignment, based on my very first query back in 1996, paid $500. I never paid a dime of dues.
Look: Paying your dues is just an excuse. No one is tracking what you do and judging whether you have written for enough peanuts-paying clients to start pitching your dream markets. If you have a great idea and you present it well, no one will care whether you slogged your way up from the bottom or just burst onto the scene.
Excuse #2: “I need to learn more.”
I hate to say this since I teach e-courses of my own, but some writers take every writing course they can find yet never feel like they know enough to actually get started pitching markets. “I can’t get started because I don’t know every single thing there is to know about query writing.” “Well, now I know how to write a query, but what happens when I get an assignment? I
