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Wordsmithing the Perfect Magazine or Website Pitch
It’s a part of the process that many writers neglect.
You might be Shakespeare incarnate when it comes to writing your actual manuscript — but when composing your initial pitch, it pays to be something of a chef. Just as a chef might spend untold hours boiling down a sauce to its essence, you need to take your (possibly sprawling) tale and distill it down to a paragraph, one so brilliant that an editor has virtually no choice but to plead for you to deliver it on deadline.
Unfortunately, pitching is also something of a neglected art. Two informal surveys (one over beers at the corner bar; the other via email) of my fellow editors and freelance writers seemed to confirm that, while many will happily spend hours or days picking apart sentence structure or poring over documents, few give “pitch wordsmithing” the same degree of obsessive attention. Indeed, after couple of years in the freelancing business, most writers have developed connections with editors that allow them to pitch with an informal sentence or two.
Whether you’re just starting out in writing or you’ve been in the game for some time, it pays to refresh yourself occasionally on the nuts and bolts of the pitching process, if only because there will always be new magazines and websites to conquer… and new editors…
