Archive for ◊ May, 2008 ◊
I’m on vacation again for the next two weeks. I know, a girl could get used to this!
I’ll have limited e-mail, no phone, and very little motivation. I totally intend to sleep fifteen hours a day, take three hours to eat breakfast, and have long philosophical conversations until my brain cells explode. Oh, and movies. Lots and lots of movies.
(P.S. Big life changes happening, people. Stay tuned.)
I’ve posted about this before. But it bears repeating. E-mails get lost in cyberspace, editors forget, things get busy, and your submission may be deleted without being looked at. It happens. Follow-up. Follow-up on queries. Follow-up on Letters of Introduction. Follow-up on any correspondence that needed a response and didn’t get one.
I usually follow-up no more than once, but I do know of writers who follow-up on their follow-ups as well. For me personally, that’s pushing it a bit, since I tend to assume that if the editor was interested, a query and a follow-up would have gotten a response. However, it has known to work. So it’s a personal choice.
Today, look over the work you’ve been sending out over the past one month. Is there anything you should be following up on? Do it.
(And with that, we come to the end of the Month of Marketing. Any successes? Any more tips? Share in the comments.)
Are you Linked In yet? Linked In (www.linkedin.com) is a professional networking website, and it helps you get in touch with old colleagues, current clients, and even other writers and journalists.
I haven’t had much luck with the website so far, though it has helped me connect with some colleagues, but if you’re active, you can get and give references, apply for jobs, make contacts, and sometimes even find work.
Create your profile today, and try and get connected with some people you know.
That dream market? You know the one that arrives every month in your mail? The one whose pages you touch lightly, turning them carefully as you read every line, every paragraph, every advertisement? You know that magazine that makes your knees go weak every time you think of having your name in it? You know that magazine you want to write for not because it’s a big name or because it’s tough to break into, but because being in it would mean that you achieved that level of writing ability that you could be proud of? You know that dream magazine of yours?
Pitch it.
It’s likely you haven’t already. Or maybe you have and received no response. Doesn’t matter. Pick that one dream market, and take that first small step. Send an idea, call their office, or send a Letter of Introduction. Doesn’t matter what you do. Just take that one small step today.
One idea, many target audiences. I’m a big believer in milking an idea for all it’s got and pitching it to non-competing publications. If I happened to come across new research that linked creativity to motivation, for instance, I wouldn’t just pitch the idea to a writer’s magazine and be done with it. I’d find a way to use it in stories for work-at-home moms, college students, even senior citizens.
This is something you should be doing for new articles, but can you do it with old ones as well?
Take out articles from your files that you still find interesting and find ways to reslant them for non-competing markets.
Also, since these are non-competing markets and you’re reslanting ideas, the research will be the same (with some additional information, of course), but the article itself will be new. Ask for full rates for these pieces instead of reprint rates.
Of the say, 100 writers reading this, 99 will take absolutely zero action on what I’m about to say, even after I’ve made a convincing argument. That one rare person who does, will later write to me and thank me for giving him the best freelancing tip of his career.
So I’m not going to make a convincing argument. I’m going to tell you that it’s the single-best thing I did for my writing and advise you to take one step towards arranging a meeting with an editor. And I’ll leave it at that.
There is no one way to fix a meeting with someone you have worked with or want to work with. It depends on a lot of factors, including how charming and sociable you are, how good you are with people, whether you’re confident cold-calling, and the relationships you have with those editors.
There’s an editor who e-mailed me to give me work, but I didn’t feel our visions matched at that point in my career. Now we’re very good friends, go out for drinks every time we’re in the same city, and I still haven’t worked with him. The meeting came about like this: I e-mailed him a week before I was leaving India and basically told him that I was going out of the country in a few days and if he needed anything from Africa, he could let me know. He suggested we meet up and discuss ideas. We did.
There’s another editor I work with almost on a monthly basis, and we have only met once. I happened to be in the same city as her so I e-mailed to say I would love to drop by the office. She said that would be great, and in that one meeting, I got to know the entire staff at that publication.
Another editor had been sending me detailed rejections on my ideas for over a month. If I liked something, he didn’t think it would work, and the few times he suggested improvements, I wrote detailed arguments as to why I didn’t believe in them. One day, he decided we needed to talk on the phone. More convenient, and maybe it wouldn’t take us weeks to reach an agreement on one bloody idea!
My window of opportunity.
I suggested we meet instead. So we did. We had a huge brainstorming session, and what would have taken months of researching and pitching was accomplished in two hours.
Once you’ve worked with an editor a couple of times, I really do suggest taking it one step further if you can and getting some face-to-face time, if possible.
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