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.