QLTS: 9.1 – Additional Tips 1

You know you’re not supposed to start your letters with “Dear Editor,” need to follow proper formatting protocol, and should always send your queries to the correct person, right? You’ve no doubt also mastered the art of kicking out embarrassing grammar goof-ups, know more about your word process software than you do about your fiancé, and have learned the dangers of the begging routine (also known as the my-mom-thinks-it’s-fantabulous syndrome).

Why then, do most of your neatly-crafted, queries come boomeranging back from cyberspace?

Some more things to consider.

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Blinded By Guidelines

Is following the guidelines a mistake? You bet it is. If you’re relying on them too much, that is. Writers, especially new writers, often assume that guidelines are the be-all, end-all, the ultimate resource on what a publication wants and what they should do to get an in. But frankly, it’s not always black-and-white.

Editors sometimes don’t look at their own guidelines for years, and I know I haven’t looked at the guidelines of most magazines I regularly write for in ages. The thing is, guidelines don’t really cover everything, and there’s a lot of important information they miss out on.

So if you read in a magazine’s guidelines, “No phone calls, faxes or e-mail queries,” and like every good writer, send postal mail, you may just be at a loss. Because these very editors will be handing out the highest paid assignments to your competitors by—you guessed it—phone, fax, and e-mail.

But why?

It’s simple, really. Editors don’t want to broadcast the fact that they’re open to queries by these methods because anyone who’s been an aspiring writer for more than eight seconds will be sending them ridiculous proposals that’ll never work. So they keep these options open for writers they know.

I’ve sent out snail mail queries a total of three times in my whole freelance writing career. That too, because my e-mail access broke down due to website errors and I was driving myself insane thinking about how many rejections this “minor mishap” was going to land me. I didn’t receive as much as an acknowledgement from the three editors. The next time I tried one of these magazines, it was by e-mail. And guess what? They gave me an assignment.

Oh, and just so you know—their guidelines say “no e-mail.”

Sometimes, when a magazine undergoes a complete makeover, the guidelines may not be revised immediately. Heck, I’ve seen magazines that haven’t updated their guidelines in years. So you end up proposing a 1,000-word feature when the magazine now only does 200-word shorts, or sending a personal essay where they’re only using humor.

More than guidelines, look at the actual magazine. And do refer to guidelines, but use them as an additional resource, not the only one.

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Dump the “Formula”

I’ve said this before; I’ll say it again. You don’t have to stick to the same formula queries every time. Once you’ve learned the drill—hook, explanation, bio, closing—and achieved a considerable amount of success with it, move on. As you’ll see my sample queries and the bits and pieces of those I’ve shared already, you’ll find that many deviate from the traditional query letter format. Yours should, too.

Starting a query with a hook is fine, but what if you have thirty years of experience working in the industry the magazine focuses on? Wouldn’t it increase your chances if the editor knew that upfront? Or let’s say you’ve already got Tom Cruise on board for a tell-all interview because he’s a friend of your cousin’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s ex-roommate from college. Wouldn’t it be more likely for you to get the assignment if the editor knew, right there, in the first paragraph that this was a sure-shot deal?

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A One, and a Two …

Like fashion trends, where one color is “in” or “out” by seasons, the advice on how many pages a query letter should be also goes “in” and “out” by seasons. And like fashion trends, it’s something I just don’t understand. At the beginning of the Internet era, short, snappy, to-the-point was in vogue. So professional writers advised sending out one-page query letters. You either wrote a page, no more, no less, or you were doomed to the death of your magazine writing career.

Then suddenly a couple of writers discovered that despite short attention spans brought on by the Internet, longer query letters still worked. News was spread. The community rejoiced. Two-page and longer query letters were here to stay.

Me, I missed all the action. I continued sending in e-mail pitches without worrying about whether I was exceeding some imaginary word-limit and bagged regular assignments. Now that I look back on those successful pitches, I’m still not able to come up with a standard for you. Some were long, because I just had too much information crammed into my brain and I thought the editor might appreciate how much research I could do. In others, a couple of sentences did the trick. Maybe those editors were tricked into thinking I’d be able to fit more information in a less number of words and they’d get away with buying so much more by paying less. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m a good writer, and it didn’t matter how long my query letter was, as long as I was able to get and keep my editor’s attention.

If you’re rambling on just to get to two pages, forget it. The padding will be visible. Similarly, don’t try to cram all your information in one page. Take the space you need to tell your story completely.

Whether you’re bordering on one page or two, let the words flow. An editor’s not going to stop reading an interesting pitch simply because it exceeded a page limit. Oops, longer than one page, gotta stop reading.

Say what you need to, then shut up.

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The Fact-Checker’s Nightmare

Some mistakes are excusable. You know, forgetting the “n” in insomnia, or writing “there” instead of “their.” Everyone does it from time to time, and as long as the rest of your work is coherent and devoid of grammatical inaccuracies and spelling mistakes, you’re good to go.

No, it’s those other mistakes that cause a problem. Like getting your facts muddled up and calling Harlan Coben a romance writer, or talking about Pakistan in the 1920s. That’s where the editor sees that this writer has no clue what she’s blabbering on about and is likely to have an article falling apart at the hands of a fact-checker.

Make sure you’ve done your research well before you actually send the query. If an editor calls you with an assignment, she’s expecting you to be the expert and answer her questions on the subject. If you’ve left a major portion of your research for later, she’s not going to be much satisfied with your answers. This doesn’t mean you have to get a Ph.D. on the subject, just that you need to have enough information to be able to intelligently talk about the scope of your piece. The more thorough your research, the better your chances of first landing the assignment, and then doing it fabulously.

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Caught in a Time Warp?

When writers would send me queries for WritersCrossing.com, they would sometimes include a time element. It usually ran along the lines of “If I don’t hear from you within a month, I’ll assume you can’t use the idea,” or “I can have this article ready within a week.” That’s fine, and as long as they were on my regular e-mail list, I would usually get back to them even sooner. But sometimes, I’d have a busy streak, and I’d decide to put all the queries and submissions in a folder to be looked at later and assigned in one go.

Now consider this: if three weeks later, I see an idea that catches my attention but has a time factor in it, I’ll know that I have a 50-50 chance of using it since the writer may already have pitched it elsewhere. Since I already have a pile of more queries, I’ll fall back on this one only if I don’t find anything else to fill my spaces. That may or may not happen, cutting this writer’s chances substantially.

In a national magazine, you can count on it not happening.

Most editors can live with a deadline if it’s in a follow-up e-mail, but if you’re contacting an editor for the first time, it could be months before the editor even sees your e-mail. If you’ve given her a deadline, you’re almost definitely bringing a rejection upon yourself. Talk about aiming at the stars and shooting in the foot.

What about the writer who thinks she can have the article ready in a week? Now I’m no skeptic, and have written fabulous articles within hours myself, but if the article is research-heavy, I tend to think, “Really?”

One persistent woman would send me an e-mail every day after I’d given her an assignment, to tell me exactly when the article would be in. She did this for three days before I finally asked her to contact me only when it was ready. As I had anticipated, the article arrived after deadline, was below quality, and wound up getting rejected.

Was this woman a bad writer? Nope. Her query was one of the best I’d ever seen!

The problem was, she needed way more time to whip the article into shape than her self-imposed deadline gave her. The thing is, I didn’t even need the article for a few more weeks; I was working on my own schedule and would happily have given her a longer deadline.

And that’s not the only problem with the “I can send you this article within a week” sort of pitch. Sure you can. You know this. Even I’ll grudgingly acknowledge this with a bit of envy. But unless you’re working with a news magazine, speed does not work in your favor. Let the editor dictate lead times and deadlines. Give her the option of making the final call. And don’t shoot yourself in the foot by getting less time when you could indeed have worked with much more.

QLTS: 8 – The “Other” Types of Queries

Sometimes–and this is usually after you’ve sent out the first dozen or so pitches and received a couple of acceptances–you won’t need to send out query after query to solicit assignments. You’ll still be proposing ideas and asking for work, of course, but the query letter itself changes with time. It graduates from being a formal well thought out proposal to an informal what-do-you-think question. These are the types of queries we’ll discuss now.

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The One-Sentence Pitch

The one-sentence pitch or the quick query is usually just a sentence or two at best and should be used only when the editor is already familiar with your work. If you’ve never written for Parade before, and you send the editor an e-mail saying, “Hiya Bill, want to see an idea on new tax laws?” you can say hello to the virtual trash can. But if you send the same e-mail to your editor at the city newspaper for which you write regularly, you’ll be better received.

I typically use this kind of pitch right after I’ve submitted a piece or received copies or a check for a previous assignment. When I’m thanking the editor, I might add a line such as, “Oh, and I have an idea that would fit perfectly into the fitness department—working out techniques for couples. Would you like to see a full proposal?”

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Multiple Pitches

Ever had an editor ask you to send across your ideas? I did, and I freaked out. How many did she want to see? Was she going to buy all of them? Did I have to work up full queries for each idea or did I just have to give a few brief ideas and leave it at that? With experience, I’ve found that I can safely send 3-5 two-line ideas to an editor I’ve worked with, but a new-to-me editor would need more detail.

The advantage of this kind of pitch is that it saves you a while lot of work. You get to know immediately which ideas the editor is interested in, and you could also end up getting many assignments in one go. However, if you’ve proposed an idea once, you can’t use it again with the same editor, so if she has the space or the budget for only one, the others will have lost the battle even before they’ve had the chance to prove themselves.

The method for submitting e-mail and postal queries varies a bit. If you’re sending multiple pitches by post, make sure to include each pitch on a different page, and flesh it out like a proper query letter. The editor could then keep these pages in file for later use. Don’t squish all the ideas on to a single page.

E-mail works a bit differently. Your editor’s hardly going to have the time to scroll through ten pages of idea after idea. Just send a brief paragraph about each idea, and offer to send detailed proposals for whichever ones she finds interesting.

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Complete Submissions

Before we begin, let’s get a few things straight. Firstly, if your aim is to write for national magazines, quit sending them full submissions and concentrate on getting your query letter right. You’re not going to go far with full feature submissions. Sure, you may land a byline or two in a regional magazine, but unless that’s where you want to be stranded for the rest of your career, think queries.

Secondly, just because you’re sending a full submission does not mean that you can get away with not writing a cover letter. Even if it’s just two or three lines, the cover letter needs to exist. Instead of looking at it as a necessity, think of it as an opportunity. An opportunity to tout your credentials, ask for more work if this idea doesn’t fit, mention the rights offered, and anything else that you might want the editor to know.

So when can you send a full submission? If the article is a reprint or a personal essay. In both these cases, you need to submit the complete manuscript. This is what your submission should look like:

Dear [Name of Editor]:

I’d like to offer my essay “Broken” for your consideration for publication in the [Name of Department] section of [Name of Publication].

A bit about me: I’m a freelance journalist currently based in New Delhi, India, and my essays have been published in ELLE, Parade.com, and Chicken Soup for the Soul, among others. I have also written for Marie Claire, Ms., US Airways, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm Regards,
Mridu Khullar

QLTS: 7 – Off They Go

You may have written the perfect query letter, but if you’re going to send it on florescent, scented paper, you can kiss your submission, as well as the accompany paycheck it may have brought, goodbye.

Stick to regular mail format. In fact, dump the regular format, and be welcomed into 2008 by going e-mail only.

I’m only partly kidding. Some writers still do send work by postal mail, and some editors still do accept it. Some editors claim to work only with writers who mail in their proposals. But they are very rare.

Personally, the last time I sent anything by mail was in 2004. It didn’t get a response. I sent the same proposal by e-mail, and I received an acceptance.

For those very rare times when you may need to format your submissions to send through postal mail, I’m including a short section on how to do that below. For the most part though, stick to e-mail. It’s convenient, it’s faster, and it’s the preferred mode of communication. It also saves trees.

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Formatting Fundamentals: Snail Mail

Formatting isn’t all that tough as it’s made out to be. Reading all those articles in writing magazines, you’d think you’re up against heavy competition and one misplaced comma is going to wreck your life. Not so. In fact, the query letter is just like any other ordinary business letter. If you got through sixth grade English without a problem, you probably already know how to do it. But sixth grade was a long time ago. So here’s a crash course.

* Use high quality white paper. Make sure the sheet is clean and there’s no smudging from the printer ink.

* Use a standard font or typeface. Times New Roman, size 12 is a safe bet. Avoid excessive bold, italics or underlining.

* Your name, address, phone number, e-mail and website address should be in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. You can also use your own letterhead, in which case your contact information will already be printed on it.

* Use a margin of at least 1″ on all sides.

* Address your query to a specific editor, preferably the department editor of the section you’re targeting. Don’t send letters addressed to “The Editor” or “Whoever it May Concern.”

* Your query letter should always follow a block format, which means no indentations, an extra line between paragraphs, and single line spacing.

* If your list of credits is going on too long, or you’d like to include a resume, consider attaching a separate sheet with only your credits or resume.

* Avoid fancy fonts, illustrations, goofy pictures or anything that is normally absent from formal communication.

* Don’t staple the pages together. Use a paperclip.

* Include a SASE or postcard for a reply and mention it in your cover letter.

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Formatting Fundamentals: E-mail

When I wrote this section just two years ago, I advised readers to keep a healthy balance between snail mail and e-mail. If a magazine doesn’t take e-mail queries, that’s fine, I said. Keep your options open.

In my experience, those days are now gone.

I have communicated with editors at some very well-respected publications, and most of them handle their business via e-mail. In fact, even if you make the first connection via snail mail, you will likely be asked to continue the relationship over e-mail.

Personally, I no longer use regular mail. But again, I recommend keeping options open. Whatever works.

The most overlooked aspect, and perhaps the most beneficial, of e-mail pitches is that the editor has to read at least one part of it—the subject line. So make it work for you. The format I usually follow is “Query: Creative Article Title.”

Be extra careful about your titles. Service pieces are the ones most in danger of being filtered out as spam as they tend to be of the how-to or take-an-action-now variety. The trick is to find some way to phrase the subject line so it doesn’t have any words that trigger off the filters. With a little care, you can easily turn your title “Lose Weight Now” to “10 Weighty Mistakes Smart Women Make.”

As a side note, don’t even try to disguise the fact that you’re sending a query letter. The last thing you want to do is have the editor think that your e-mail is spam and hit the delete key.

Another element unique to e-mail pitches is the “From:” header. What does yours say? The correct answer is your name. In my case, for example, all the e-mails I send are clearly marked from “Mridu Khullar.” However, I frequently get e-mails from people with cutesy nicknames of the JellyBeans or FloatingIce variety. Very unprofessional!

In a traditional query, your name, address, and other contact information go on top of the page. In an e-mail pitch, this information goes below your signature line. I sometimes create a separate “Contact  Me” block so that the editor can see it easily if she scrolls down the page. Include your phone number so the editor has the option of calling you.

If you don’t do so already, keep the graphic elements, including dancing crocodiles and silly emoticons out of professional correspondence. If you wouldn’t stick it on top of your professional letterhead, don’t stick it on top of (or below) your e-mails.

Finally, learn the difference between text and HTML e-mails. Better yet, learn the difference between text, rich-text, and HTML e-mails. Without getting into too many details, I’ll give you a simple tip that’ll save you a whole lot of headaches in many e-mail clients including MS Outlook and Outlook Express.

Open up a new e-mail, paste your query letter, look for the “Format” option and select “Plain Text.” That’ll change your e-mail to plain text, removing all peculiar formatting and symbols. Now look through the e-mail and change anything that looks like gibberish.

There are also options to make the default settings plain text. See if you can find them so that you don’t have to do this every time you send an e-mail.

You’re now officially ready to send your query letter.

Don’t miss out on this important step though. Unless you’re a computing pro—and even if you are—you have no idea what the e-mail is going to look like on your recipient’s computer or e-mail client. This way, at least you can be sure she’s going to get legible characters and not a bunch of gooblydoogock.

One last thing—certain spam filters will require people who send e-mail to you to confirm their identities by authorizing themselves through various methods, including identifying certain characters on the screen, counting the number of cats or dogs in a picture, or some other such time-consuming method. Editors don’t have the time to jump through hoops for you. If an editor wants to send you an acceptance (or even a rejection) and is required to go through various levels of spam filtering, she’s simply going to delete your e-mail address and give the assignment to someone else. If you’re using a method like this, whitelist your editor before she has a chance to e-mail you.

QLTS: 6 – Get the Oomph

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.

QLTS: 5.3 – Parts of the Query

The Briefing

This is where you really start to get into high gear and move towards the hard sell. Present the details of your article, exactly what you plan to cover (”7 Stressful Situations and How to Handle Them”), whether it’ll be descriptive or have lists, and any information that will help the editor decide whether or not it’s the right fit. Remember, by the time you’re finished with this paragraph, there should be no confusion in the editor’s mind about what you’re offering.

One way to present all the facts to the editor is to make a list of bulleted points that the article will cover. That makes it so much easier on the editor’s eyes and puts all the information right there to view, at a glance.

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What Do You Have on Offer?

Now you swoop in and show the editor just how darn amazing you are. Tell her how you’re going to make her job easier by naming the experts you’ll interview, provide her with a terrific working title, list the sidebars, and mention the department it would fit in.

If you’re a new writer, you need to make extra effort in this paragraph so that when the editor moves beyond it and finds that you have absolutely no experience, she’ll still think you’re capable enough to handle it. (If you’re new, getting all this information arranged in your head will also help you think that you’re capable enough to handle it.)

I’m going to stress again the importance of having studied the magazine. If you’ve already visualized what your article will look like in this magazine’s pages, you’ll be able to clearly convey that to the editor as well.

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Why You’re So Darn Fabulous

Like most writers, I started my career by dreading this part of the query letter. Now I’ve learned to make it the most powerful weapon in my writing arsenal.

What’s worse than sending a sloppy pitch filled with errors and completely unsuitable for the publication? Sending a terrific and decorating it with your newbie status. Because while your first query sucked, the second one will likely bring the same response: No.

I’ve personally seen many pitches of the sort. They’re perfect, right until the end, when the writer kind of loses it and becomes desperate.

Please let me write this article for you and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. (I should be pleasantly surprised that a professional writer will send me a good article?)

I’ve never been published before but will you take a chance on me? (Uh, why exactly?)

I have no clips, but I have hope. (Good for you. But no.)

All from real queries. All rejected.

All of us were newbies once. Being new doesn’t justify being unprofessional, especially in a line of work where a lot depends on the way you communicate. Editors don’t want to work with people who don’t know what they’re doing. The editor needs to know that you do. So even if you have no experience, act professional, project confidence, and get the job done without resorting to begging or pleas of sympathy.

So what do you do if you have no qualifications? You make the best of your life experience. Are you a parent? Tell that parenting magazine that in your ten years of full-time experience with kids, there isn’t a single problem you haven’t seen first-hand. Graduated with a technology degree? Tell that gadget magazine editor. If you want to write for a college magazine, mentioning that you’re still in college and have personal and extensive knowledge of what problems a student faces is a neat idea.

Editors want to know why you’re the best person for the job. While writing credentials play a role, they’re not the sole factor. Your idea is what will eventually determine whether or not you get an assignment. But credentials are nice, and if you have them, tout them. Some other credentials that you can mention include:

Professional experience: In an interview with WritersCrossing.com, Kelly James-Enger said that her first published article, in Cosmopolitan, was based on her own personal experience. Having just quit her job as a full-time lawyer, James-Enger wrote about surviving the last two weeks on the job. By putting her own experience into play, she landed a great assignment in a national magazine, even though she had no prior credits.

Academic Qualifications: If you have a degree in computing, you can be sure that technology magazine editors will consider you an expert. Not just degrees though. You might have taken a short course on entrepreneurship and that would make you a business expert, a history minor in college would give you a certain expertise, and vocational courses count as qualifications as well.

Personal experience: The most common of all. Don’t hesitate to tell the editor when you’ve faced similar situations to those you’re proposing to write about. Many of my earlier articles were born out of personal experience, and I always made a note in my query, even if the experience was something I wasn’t particularly proud of. I failed my first year in college, and when pitching an article on the topic, I told my editor that I knew what students went through. When I graduated, two of my editors at college magazines were among the first few people I told. (We e-celebrated.)

One thing to remember is that you must modify your bio according to the article you’re proposing. When I was proposing an article to Writer’s Digest on writing for technology publications, I didn’t highlight the publications for writers I’d written for, or that I ran one such publication myself. Instead, I mentioned how I frequently wrote for technology publications and mentioned the names of the nationally-known ones.

A few more things to consider:

Leave out the wishes: I’m looking for publishers for my first novel. I’m a part-time writer hoping to go full-time in a couple of months. Leave it out. All of it. Just state the facts. What you’ve done, what you’re in the process of doing, what you’ve sold. If you’ve sold your book and have a release date, perfect! If not, save it for when you do.

Networking: Listing every online writing group or club that you’re a part of is a very bad idea. Who cares? On the other hand, if you have professional memberships of relevance to that publication, let the editor know.

Don’t be humble: Now’s not the time for it. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard how hard it is for writers to tout their own credentials. Do it anyway. No one else is going to do it for you. So go ahead, name every big magazine that’s published you, even if they’ve done it while violating your copyright, and making you beg for that paycheck. You’ve earned it.

QLTS: 5.2 – Hook ‘em Right

The first sentence of your pitch is by far the most important thing you’ll write in the entire duration of your article’s life. If you get this one line right, you have hope. Lots of it. If not, you’re out even before you’ve had a chance to tout your credentials, show the editor how unique you are or why this article is great for her audience.

Busy editors are generally pulled in or turned off by this “hook” so it needs to grab her attention from the get-go.

The leads I talk about below are mostly from queries. Some are also from articles. Most writers, including me, pretend we’re writing the actual article and start our queries the way we would our finished piece. The idea is that eventually, you’ll need to work on a lead to hook your reader as well. Why not do the grunt work initially and increase the chance of getting the assignment?

But be warned: writing the lead is for most writers, the toughest part of the piece. It takes practice and it takes work.

(A wonderful article on leads:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=52&aid=35609)

Here are some of the leads I’ve written over the years.

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The Problem-Solution Lead

It’s no surprise your friends will come banging on your doorstep trying to drag you to a party right when you’re in the middle of studying for an exam. Or, you sit down to write a report, but find yourself thinking of the latest season of The O.C. instead.

If you constantly find yourself wishing you’d rather do your roommate’s dirty dishes than finish your assignments, you might have some concentration issues, and it’s likely to reflect in—gasp!—grades.

This hook is usually used for service pieces, and is meant to outline a problem that concerns a large number of the publication’s readers. You should be able to convince the editor that this is an issue that is important to her readers and that you’ll be providing the solutions to this problem through the article. In the lead, of course, the challenge is to convincingly describe the problem. New twists on a common problem or new problems that are coming up due to modern technologies are very popular these days.

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The Personal Experience Lead

I grabbed my coat, begged dad to lend me his car, and drove as fast as I could to college. As I anxiously walked through the gates, an emptiness in my stomach warned me of what was to come. I pushed along the crowded corridor to stand by the group of students eager to find out how they had fared. A glimpse of the notice board made my heart sink. The worst had happened.

I had failed.

I often use the first-person, “I’ve been through it” approach since it immediately tells the editor that I’m familiar with the subject matter, and can provide great anecdotes and insights. It also suggests that I can give advice from the standpoint of a person who has been there, done that. I know what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. It makes me an indirect expert, it builds reader confidence, and it validates my advice.

A good idea is to look at how articles in the magazine you’re targeting are handled. If they start with first-person, this lead will almost always work. It won’t work with news pieces and trend stories though.

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The “Wow, really?” Lead

Over her husband’s funeral pyre six years ago, Heena Patel, then 21, was informed by her in-laws that he had died of AIDS.

Till then, Ms. Patel had repeatedly questioned his frequent illnesses and received nothing but silence. After he died she had to face the reality that not only had her husband and his family known about his HIV-positive status when he married her, but that she was infected as well.

This is a hook that should make the editor go, “Wow, that’s crazy!” or “Really? I did not know that” or “Oh no! What happened then?” She knows that if she has that reaction, most of her readers will as well. A startling fact, a little-known anecdote about a famous person, or something about a different culture that may be seem bizarre.

This is a great way to open, but of course, remember not to push it too far. You’ll also be required to tie in the shocker with the actual article. And you have to validate it. You can’t use something purely for the shock value. Make sure it’s relevant.

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The Scene-Building Lead

Inside the walls of the Cleopatra restaurant, the atmosphere is serene. Soft music plays in the background while laughter comes in spurts from the tables across the room. Women talk over empty cups of tea and half-eaten sandwiches, and apart from a mobile phone ringing in a woman’s purse, which she scrambles to find and answer, there is peace. The sign on the door reads: “No Male Entry.”

Sometimes, especially in travel pieces, you need to take your editor (and your readers) to some place with you. That’s when you’ll need the scene-building lead. It should be clear very soon though, exactly why you want to take the reader with you on this journey. The scene-building lead works better for articles than it does for query letters. But sometimes it works. In the example above, for instance, I wanted the reader to discover for herself that there are no men allowed inside the restaurant, rather than flat-out saying it. I used this in my article, but if I were querying, I’d use it as well.

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The News/Study/Event Tie-in Lead

The facts: People with disabilities are among the most excluded in Indian society. According to a new World Bank report, disabled adults have far lower employment rates than others–reduced from 43% in 1991 to 38% in 2002.

While estimates differ, most show that people with disabilities form between 4-8 percent of the Indian population, that is, approximately 40-80 million people.

These are some very important, and very interesting statistics. Not to mention, representative of a huge problem. Which is why, even though my article itself was about a project and an industry taking positive and remedial measures, I’ve focused more on the statistics.

In the article itself, I started with the human picture. I began my story by talking about a person’s struggle getting employment. But for my query, I needed to show my (American) editor that the problem (and hence the solution) involved very large numbers.

That’s what this kind of lead does. It doesn’t always work for the final article. But it’s very effective in query letters. This is because it shows, right there in numbers, why your article is important.

Be careful though. Use statistics and research that are new. Also use them only if they actually are interesting and relevant. Numbers for the sake of numbers will mean nothing.

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The Not-What-You-Thought Lead

Picture a Tibetan Buddhist monk and what do you see? A man with a shaved head, maroon and yellow attire, and rosary beads dangling from one hand?

How about speaking English, carrying a cell phone, or releasing a music album?

This is a lead I’ve developed over the years, and that I continue to love. It works so that it starts with one idea, and shocks you with the next. It also sometimes embraces contradictions and challenges stereotypes. Another example of this lead:

Think stereotypes, and you’ll have a variety to choose from. Americans are obese, ignorant and arrogant. The English drink tea, talk posh and assume they’re better than you. Africans are uncivilized. Italian men are womanizers. And Indian women who live alone are morally flawed.

I am one such morally flawed woman.

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The Look-What-She’s-Doing Lead

On September 24, 2006, in nothing more than jeans and a t-shirt, Line Tvete, 48, left her home in Norway, got on her bicycle and started a journey around the world.

Over the last eight months, Lena has cycled through Norway, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and India. I met up with Line in McLeod Ganj, India, where she was volunteering, teaching Buddhist monks English, attending yoga classes and taking a small break from her physical and spiritual journey before heading to Nepal, Tibet, China and then Thailand.

There are many variations to this lead. The above lead is for a personal profile, for instance. But, look closely, and you’ll find that it’s often used for feature articles or service pieces as well. For instance, using the above lead, I could write a whole trend story about how women these days are packing up and taking off for solo trips around the world. I’d interview experts about this trend, I’d locate more women who had done similar things, and I’d cite research and statistics.

Or using, the very same lead, and similar research, I could write a piece on how you can plan a cycling trip around the world. I would interview Line, and instead of focusing on her life story, I’d ask her for tips that she could give to other women. Instead of digging into her personal life, I’d focus more on what she packed, what she read, and how much money she needed to save. Then I’d write a step-by-step piece for my readers.

Needless to say, this is a very popular lead. And it enjoys a high success rate. So much so, that it has an official name– The Zimmerman lead.

The only problem with this lead is in the execution. You really need to spend time with people (your sources) to get the kind of information that would make this lead effective, and like I’ve discussed before, that’s a bit of a problem if you don’t actually have an assignment.

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The Lead that Misleads

A theater troupe consisting of unemployed job seekers, hawkers on the streets of Kolkata, and people who’ve been told they have no prospects in life, come together each evening to sing, dance and hone their acting skills.

Earning little more than Rs. 100 per show, they perform in small theaters, villages, local parks, even on the roadside. Their movements are perfectly coordinated, their dramatically delivered dialogues impressive. And it’s only when you see the ropes placed strategically around the stage to demarcate the boundaries that you begin to question, that you look closer and realize—almost all the performers in the troupe of Anyadesh are blind.

This is a complicated lead, and used very rarely. I’m including it here because I thought I was very clever when I wrote it, though I feel less clever now.

After reading the first paragraph, my reader tends to think that this is a story about very poor people turning to art. I continue to lead my reader down this path of thinking, but then throw in the shocker at the end—-the real story—-the performers are visually impaired.

Now, poor people turning to art is a great story in itself, but by adding another layer, I’ve raised the bar higher. And it comes suddenly. Which is what makes it work.

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The Holiday Tie-in Lead

How often do you run out of cash before you run out of holidays?

The holiday tie-in is very popular. Let’s say you’re thinking of an article on how to lose weight, and it’s April. Considering lead times for national magazines, it’s the perfect time to be proposing a Christmas idea. That’s when people are putting on a lot of weight. And they’re out shopping a lot. Bingo! An article on how to lose weight while you shop.

Any idea can have a holiday tie-in, some holiday tie-in. Think Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, World AIDS Day… so many national and international events that can be tied into your ideas to make them timely.