Once you’ve mastered the basics, get ready to move beyond mediocre to stellar queries that’ll put you several levels above the competition in the rush for assignments.

While formula queries may be extremely popular with writers, they look pretty average to the editor who receives a hundred or so good ones each week. Editors know how easy it is to copy a writer’s successful pitch and repackage it. And come on, editors are human too. They get bored of seeing the same stale pitches landing in their Inbox day after day. If you can do something interesting and different, you’ll be remembered. And hired.

In her book Feminine Wiles: Creative Techniques for Writing Women’s Stories that Sell, Donna Elizabeth Boetig suggests thinking of your query as a love letter. She advises readers to toss out their conventional notions of a query letter and instead focus on passion, emotion, a sense of urgency, and even a bit of breathlessness. Only by writing this way will you shake the editor from the stupor evoked by reading all those staid, letter-perfect proposals, she says.

Your excitement about a topic, your belief in why something should be written about, your enthusiasm for going out and finding people to talk about this story—it’s all tangible. It comes across in your writing. Which is why, for new writers, I always suggest starting with topics that mean something to you personally.

To put that extra oomph in your pitches, you’ll also need to show the editor what else you have on offer other than impeccable research abilities and a keen eye for detail. Depending on the piece, you could offer photographs, important but not overly written about statistics, and quotes that bring interesting findings to light. I’ll discuss all that in this section.

But an important question before we begin: why put so much effort into one query in the first place?

There are a lot of different opinions on the subject, including the uncertainty of doing so much work up-front for no reward, and the argument that this brings down the hourly rate. You’ll find a lot of reasons for not doing all this research and writing upfront, and maybe that will work for you.

For me, it all boils down to two things: is there a story here, and can I sell it?

Before I take on (or even propose) a topic, I need to know whether there actually is a story there. For that, I need to talk to people who’re involved in those issues, see the current research, and figure out what exactly I want to say. If I don’t know what I want to write, how do I expect my editor to?

Secondly, can I sell it? Since I’ve been doing this for a fairly long time, I can almost certainly be sure of at least one market where my article can be placed. So I have that security and can do some (or a lot) of work upfront.

But let’s consider you. Let’s say you’re a new writer. Let’s say you don’t have much previous writing experience. Let’s say you’ve found a brilliant story, say on new research that could possibly cure AIDS, and you want to propose it to an editor at a national magazine.

What reason does the editor have to hire you?

The more you give to an editor upfront, the more she’ll come to trust you. After you’ve worked with an editor a couple of times, you have a relationship. Indeed, I’ve sent single-sentence ideas to some of my editors and they assign the story. I’ve already proven that I can hack it. But until you have those relationships, my opinion is that you’ll need to do a bit of work upfront to make yourself valuable.

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Get to the Point

One of the biggest pet peeves that editors have is that writers will send them pitches for list articles, such as twenty ways to find freelance work, and then not list any of the ways. How is an editor going to assign you an article unless he knows what you’re planning to say? Your tips could be brilliant, or they could have been done hundreds of times already. Give the editor a sample or two.

In my experience, editors will often ask you to flesh out a point or two to make sure it works in the magazine’s format. So if you’re proposing eleven ways to make Christmas special, go ahead and list a couple of ways. Or if you want to talk about the five health checks you need to get done regularly, talk to a doctor and mention his list of recommendations.

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The Name of the Game

The most important “secret” that I’ve learned so far has nothing to do with negotiating, finding fabulous ideas or even querying. It has to do with envisioning.

Yeah, that sounds pretty inspired. But what does it mean?

It means “visualize.” Visualize the cover of the magazine with the title of your article in bold letters. Visualize the page on which the article appears, along with pictures and illustrations. Visualize how the designer will place the text and interweave it with the images to reach the desired effect.

And now help your editor visualize the same thing.

Come up with a working title for your piece. And make sure it’s according to the magazine’s format.

How do you come up with riveting titles? Here are some suggestions from Shaunna Privratsky’s book Pump Up Your Prose:

Alliteration: Choose words with the same beginning letters or sounds, especially for articles, such as “Garage Sale Guru,” “Confessions of a Coupon Queen,” or “Kudos to Kindergarten.”

Play on words: For instance, “The Purr-fect Pussycat,” “Oops! My Dot-com is Showing!” or “The Write Path.” Try to avoid the ones already done to death.

Get poetic: Rhyming your title is a sure attention-grabber. Shaunna’s article about finding an inexpensive wedding dress is titled “Spend Less on Your Dress.”

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Easter in December?

Being timely isn’t just about sending Valentine’s ideas in October or Christmas saving tips in March. It’s about converting those evergreen topics and giving them a certain time factor. Ways to do this are to associate your idea with a news item (after 9/11 many journalists wrote about dealing with death), linking with a recent survey or study, an upcoming anniversary (September 2004 marked thirty years to the birth of ATM), or a calendar holiday.

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Picture Perfect

While editors at national magazines and newspapers generally assign their photography to professional photographers, some articles may call for the writer to supply pictures. This is especially the case if you’re writing a profile for a regional publication or a how-to crafts article. If you know that a magazine buys pictures and pays extra for them, suggesting their availability in your query letter is a super idea.

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Sneaking in With Sidebars

Here’s a winning prospect: offer sidebars. Editors love sidebars, readers do too. So on top of earning brownie points for thinking up extra ways to make the article work, you also get paid for those tip boxes.

Sidebars don’t just have to be tips though. They can be short quizzes, fun facts or statistics that didn’t fit into your article, or quotes. For instance, in an article on what to do if you’ve failed college, I included some concentration techniques in a sidebar (and then sold a whole article on concentration techniques to the same magazine), and in an article on avoiding spam, I included alarming spam statistics (way back when spam was actually new and of interest.)

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Read, read, read

Another technique that you can play on is the I’ve-read-your-previous-issues sell. It’s not enough to get you the assignment, but combined with all the other elements, it makes for an irresistible query letter. Here’s a sample of what I’ve used in my own pitches:

Inspired by the feature “Name of Article” in your latest issue, I began to think about how much romance has changed in the digital era. The guy who gave me RAM on my birthday just a couple of years ago graduated this year to a comic book created with our caricatured heads as characters. So simple and so much fun! This tech-savvy girl returned the favor by sticking his head on top of a Shrek body. The picture now sits on a photo frame in his living room.

Would you be interested in a piece on fun and DIY tech gifts for the “Name of section” department?

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A Note on Overstuffed Queries

It can be quite tempting to include quotes from all your experts, the timeliness factor of your piece, each of the fifteen ways of organizing your home that you’re proposing, details of all three sidebars, and research that shows organized homes make for happier people.

But chances are that you’re not only making it harder for yourself to actually send the darn thing out, you’re also wasting the editor’s time.

That’s not to say that you should leave out all these important elements. Just don’t over do it. The elements I’ve described here are optional. Sometimes you use them, sometimes you don’t. But in no case do you stuff your pitches with all of them. You need to see what works best for your piece and which of these elements could be included. Do you have great pictures but no title? A bulleted list of points but no sidebar ideas? Put in a couple of quotes, state the points, mention the pictures, and send it out. Mix and match. There’s only so much a two-page query letter can do.