Like a longer message? This is from my fortnightly newsletter, and you can get in on that action if you want more. Just enter your information here, and I’ll be poppin’ into your inbox before you know it!
We’ve been getting a lot of replies from people who are beginning to submit their ideas and articles more, using the calls for pitches we’ve been searching out and sharing in newsletters for the past couple issue.
I’m so glad you are finding them helpful, and putting yourself out there!
One of the top replies we get, though, is from people asking for advice on how to pitch or how to get over the anxiety of knowing whether your ideas are “good enough.”
I get it. Putting yourself out there can be scary. And rejection totally sucks.
So here’s my pep talk for you, complete with some picture evidence (so make sure you have images “turned on” in your email view):
No matter how bad you think your pitch or submission is, if you are putting in an effort and some serious thinking time, you are already ahead of 10-25% of the competition in an editor’s inbox.
I’m not just saying warm fuzzy things to make you feel better. Here are a couple recent submissions we’ve gotten in our own and various client submissions queues.
And this doesn’t just apply to pitching articles. I occasionally get pitches from publicists and PR firms asking if I’d be interested in signing on with them. Those ones are crafty, because they aren’t obviously templates (that are badly executed, like above) and they seem to have actually done some research. Yet they almost end up being worse, because they drip of falsehoods and feigned authenticity. When you only pretend to do the work, it’s painfully obvious.
(That last one almost got me to consider a positive reply…until I saw that it was suggesting that the could help me get on Forbes (where I had my own online column for a half-dozen years) and referenced a podcast I did in 2012 in which I was supposedly talking about a project I worked on in 2016. Damn, I’m a soothsayer!)
Like I said, if you are putting in the effort and time, you really are ahead.
So go out there and be the email/pitch/proposal that someone actually wants to read today.
