We’re at the half-way point of the pitch challenge!
From our Friday afternoon Q&As, I know that plenty of you have already landed a few commissions and that some people have even had their pieces published already.
For some of us, though, there’s been a lot of unanswered and rejected pitches. First of all, I want to stress: this is completely normal. I’ve been pitching ideas in both a freelance and in-house capacity for over ten years now and I still get plenty of rejections.
So much so that I’ve built anticipating rejection into my pitching process. I expect to get some of my ideas turned down. It’s why I’ve set this challenge to pitch five ideas a week – I don’t expect all of those pitches to get accepted straight away. The aim of this challenge is to build a regular pitching habit because consistency is the only guaranteed way to succeed.
So rather than dwell on the rejection, I wanted to do a little bit of trouble-shooting this week. More often than not, pitches go unanswered which is so frustrating because it’s hard to know what you did wrong. So how can we learn from them if we don’t get any feedback?
I’m going to walk you through a self-diagnose exercise to help you figure out why your pitches might not be landing. All you have to do is go back over your pitches and run through this checklist. All I ask is that you’re brutally honest with yourself as you go through the questions below.
1. Did you pitch a story or a topic?
Start with the most important check first. Did you actually pitch a story – or was it, in fact, a topic?
As a refresher, a topic is a universal theme, whereas a story is a vehicle to understand that theme. A topic is often abstract, while the story is a specific example of how it plays out.
To give some examples, “gentrification”, “mental health” and “vinyl music” are all topics. Whereas their corresponding stories might be: “Rising rents force a 150-year-old family-run shop out of business”; “A school in California offers students mental health days”; “The environmental impact of the vinyl revival”.
Go back over your pitch and make sure you included one clear line that sums up the story in a sentence or two.
How to solve the issue: A really simple way to figure out what the story actually is about is by trying to describe it out loud. Imagine you’re telling your friend about the story in the pub, how would you explain it?
2. Did you tailor the pitch to the publication?
Much like a cover letter, when you pitch an idea you have to demonstrate that it was written specifically for that recipient.
How you write your pitch is an editor’s introduction not only to you but also your writing style. You want to strike a tone that matches that of their publication. For example, if you’re pitching a story to Vice, you’ll probably phrase your email quite differently than if you’re pitching to the Telegraph. Beyond the tone, there are other ways you can signal that you’ve read the publication and understood what they are looking for – for example, by pitching an idea about a topic that they cover regularly, but from a completely new angle.
Go over your pitch and make sure it’s clear that your pitch was written with the specific publication in mind.
How to solve the issue: To make sure you’ve tailored your pitch, you should be able to fill in this blank: “I think this story is a good fit for X publication because ____________”.
3. Have you found the right home for your story?
This leads on from the previous point, but was the publication really the best fit for your idea?
If you pitched a national or international publication, was your story big enough for them? The bigger the publication, the bigger the story has to be – a huge news outlet wouldn’t be interested in hyperlocal news unless the story has a much broader appeal. At the same time, not every story is right for every publication. Nor is every story going to be a Guardian or BBC feature. If your idea is niche, pitch it somewhere niche.
Be honest with yourself about whether the idea actually was a fit for the publication.
How to solve the issue: The best way to address this is by looking over the publication to figure out if they even cover this kind of story. For example, if you’re pitching an idea about gentrification, search “gentrification” on the publication’s website and look at the previous pieces they’ve run to get a sense of the type of stories they accept.
4. Was it timely?
A pitch needs to have a news hook (also known as a peg) or needs to demonstrate a reason why this story needs to be told now.
At its basic level, a news hook is the timeliness of the story – something is about to happen or has just happened. For example, the launch of a new app that tackles loneliness. Where features are concerned, the hook is more about the impact of something that’s already happened. For example, the unexpected impact that app had on a community.
Go over your pitch and make sure you included a couple of lines that demonstrate why this idea is topical.
How to solve the issue: If you’ve realised that your pitch was missing a news hook, you need to spend some time finding one. Is there a new study that came out that ties to your idea? Can you demonstrate that it’s part of a trend? Are people talking about it on social media but it’s hasn’t been covered in a media outlet yet?
5. Did you make a silly mistake?
I ask this in full acknowledgement that I often fire off a pitch without always reading over it properly. Not all, but some editors are real sticklers for grammar and spelling mistakes, so it’s worth taking an extra minute to make sure a small error didn’t trip you up.
And lastly, I generally warn against copying and pasting pitches, but let’s be real – we all do it. Just make sure you didn’t paste a different editor’s name in along with the rest of the pitch. I’ve definitely been guilty of that myself in the past and it did not go down well...
How to solve the issue: Double-check your emails before pressing send!
The next Q&A will be on Friday at 3 PM (GMT) and we’ll be going into more detail about trouble-shooting your pitches. You’ll get an email about it on Friday, or you can leave your questions here in advance