How to Pitch Anything

More or less

Hi friends,

I hope you’re hanging in there. We’re doing the best we can here.

It was really nice of Tim Herrera, client, friend, and editor of Smarter Living at the New York Times, to write today’s newsletter for me. You should go read his article on Nieman Lab about how to best pitch articles to the New York Times, or really any news outlet or website. I’ll wait. It’s worth a read.

Ok, I know there’s a lot to read right now. The basic gist is that Tim and the editors he interviewed see very similar issues with the pitches they turn down. They are:

1. You don’t know what your story is.

2. You didn’t check the archives.

3. You pitched the wrong editor or section.

4. You’re too aggressive on following up.

5. Your story is too low-stakes or narrow.

6. You don’t disclose conflicts of interest.

I’m sure these tips will be helpful to you if you’re pitching news articles or personal essays. Go forth and pitch! But hese are also helpful if you’re querying a novel. Shock of shocks, many forms of writing are similar!

I knew Tim was on to someting when he said in the article “A bad pitch is not the same thing as a bad story idea.” This is so true for me when I evaluate new books/read queries. I reject hundreds of queries that could be good books, or ARE good books, but just aren’t working for some reason or another. They might not be right for ME. They might be genuinely bad queries (which is not a crime and which you can fix yourself) that obscure a good book, they might genuinely good books that I just don’t think I can sell. I know it’s been said over and over, but if your query or pitch gets rejected, don’t automatically assume your idea is trash and you’ll never get published. You might not know specifically why an editor or agent rejected it, but catastrophising isn’t going to help you, either.

But here’s how I read Tim’s tips in terms of queries for books or novels:

1. You don’t know what your story is.

   —I’ve seen so many queries, especially but not limited to non-fiction, that are more or less a collection of writing without a whole lot holding it together. It could even be beautiful writing, but 50,000 words that you just happened to write, put together in one document, is not a book.

2. You didn’t check the archives.

   —In books, this means you don’t know the market. While you can’t read everything and you can’t know what books are already in the pipeline, if you’ve read NO books that are in the same neighborhood as yours, it shows. If you’re writing a vampire book, you can’t just read Twilight. If you’re writing literary fiction, you can’t just read…I don’t know…Nabokov.

3. You pitched the wrong editor or section.

   —This one is obvious—you pitched the wrong agent or editor (but you probably aren’t pitching a lot of editors directly). The good thing with books is you can pitch lots of agents at the same time. You will have to choose (usually) just one at an agency, and that’s an important decision. The only way to make the best decision you can is to do your homework to the best of your ability. There probably isn’t ONE SINGLE PERFECT agent for you, but you have to do the best you can with the information at hand. If you’re pitching me an adult mystery or crime novel, I know you haven’t done your homework.

4. You’re too aggressive on following up.

   —You absolutely can follow up with an agent. And like this article says, you shouldn’t follow up 24 hours later. Tbh, I don’t get a lot of aggressive follow ups. We’ll talk more about this on Thursday in our Q&A, but it’s totally ok to send a follow up email 6-8 weeks after you send a query, or according to any guidance you might get from an agent’s website. You might not get an answer, but it’s not too aggressive to send a polite follow up.

5. Your story is too low-stakes or narrow.

   —This is the biggest problem I see when I evaluate queries. So so, often I look at a story and think so what if this character doesn’t get the love interest? So what if they don’t save the kingdom? So what if they don’t complete the quest? If the reader can say “who cares?” about your plot then you don’t have high enough stakes. “High enough” doesn’t always mean life or death, either. You have to convince the reader to care about your characters and what happens to them. Yes, it’s hard. If it was easy everyone would do it.

6. You don’t disclose conflicts of interest.

   —Ok, this one doesn’t show up too much in books, but if there’s anything the agent needs to know about your book—that it’s been previously shopped, if it’s been self-published already—then you have to tell us. It’s ok if you had another agent before and they read it and didn’t shop it. I don’t necessarily need to know about that, and there’s no harm in that. But I absolutely need to know if that agent shopped the book before. Sometimes that’s the difference between me being able to sell it myself and not.

Writing and pitching! It’s hard for everyone!

Stay strong and be kind. Stay home.

OXOXOXO,
Kate