Great article, but I'm wondering if it isn't missing the most important piece of information - how did you track down the editors, and their email addresses? Or is this information that can be gleaned from twitter?
The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
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Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#12Storytelling is so critically important for everything in business and life. If you have new ideas or want to create something new you need to be able to captivate the audience with a good story.
You could equally apply this framework to pitching investors, job prospects, customers etc...
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#13This is a brilliant article. It concerns with Magazine publishing but I can guess that the principles apply everywhere. I read the author's pitches with a mind of an editor constantly thinking how would I ever possibly pass it?
The surprising thing about pitching / selling is how oversold is the "magical" knack — of the business guy who knows how to woo. But it's only a matter of understanding that people are willing to listen to you as long as you aren't wasting their time. Editors are more than eager to publish an excellent story, but a pitch like "I want to write about AI" won't cut it.
I have a small blog[1] on which I occasionally write stuff. My process has always been to write a small post, publish, post on HN and disappear with disappointment when they don't catch attention. I think I understand it better now that it's not only a matter of writing novel ideas, but also catching the attention from the first headline, and the first paragraph. In our minds we think of our writing / pitch as a whole, but, for the reader, it's a progressively building story.
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, thanks so much for saying this. It means a lot :) I agree that spreadsheets are an awesome way to organize life. I've become obsessed with Google Sheets. This year I learned the power of all the plugins. For example, I built a stock tracker that pulls live data from Google Finance (with no programming background). I also built a custom dashboard for my business to track revenue. It worked better than anything el…
Very good article. Just after the MacGregor joke, Andrew Stanton says "storytelling is joke telling, it's knowing your punchline". This is illuminating. It's something we probably do instinctively but it helps a lot thinking about it voluntarily. Zinsser's "On Writing Well" is fantastic, esp. parts 1 & 2 and "The Travel Article" which is a story by itself... I so much love this book! What's maybe missing from your ar…
Hey, thanks so much for this feedback. I really appreciate it :)
You're right, I definitely missed some important stuff. I sorta took for granted the fact that emailing people has always been second nature for me. Will do a follow up on this since it's just as important.
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#15Great article, but I'm wondering if it isn't missing the most important piece of information - how did you track down the editors, and their email addresses? Or is this information that can be gleaned from twitter?
Thanks :)
You're totally right. I forgot one of the most essential parts of the process which is tracking down the right editor.
The short version is this: find the most relevant publication, then search for the most relevant section (politics, business, etc). Then look on their masthead (you can google {publication} masthead) to find this for every magazine. There you'll find the editor of the section you want to write for. Then you can do a quick google search on them to find their Twitter or email.
In terms of process I usually tweet them first and ask what the best way to send a pitch is. They'll usually include their email. Then I send an email with subject line "re: twitter" (that gets opened everytime). In that email I include my pitch.
More in-depth story on this to come. Appreciate the idea!
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#16how were you getting the email address to write into? just going through the normal contact us general inbox of the publication or finding one person there and always pitching a specific person?
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#17Hey, I remember reading that Atlantic article and being curious to see other things you'd written! Pity you don't have an easy-to-Google name... A question regarding the spreadsheet: have you found it better to just list every pitch you do in order, even if it's the same story? What I do is have publications as columns and stories as rows, so I can easily keep track of where I have or haven't submitted something, but…
That makes my day to hear that! And you're telling me -- I'll never be #1 on Google.. :(
In a thread above I listed the story I wrote for Quartz. I used to write on these blogs too:
http://www.michaelthomasblog.com/ -- my angsty young person writing, and fiction
http://www.getsimpledata.com/blog/ -- my last company
http://www.insatiablefox.com/ -- more journalist writing
I'm working on publishing in one place going forward for obvious reasons haha :)
To answer your question, I found that helpful in organizing pitches by day. But I agree it can be helpful to organize by publication. I guess a perfect tracker would be easily sortable and have numbering to tell how many times you've pitched a publication.
Appreciate the kind words and question!
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#18Great advice for a new marketing director who hasn't had to deal with PR before!
Hey thanks friend!
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#19Storytelling is so critically important for everything in business and life. If you have new ideas or want to create something new you need to be able to captivate the audience with a good story. You could equally apply this framework to pitching investors, job prospects, customers etc...
That's a great point! I'm really glad you mentioned it. My hope was that this could be as useful to someone pitching their company is it is to aspiring writers.
Re: The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
#20There's more to this story. I was the first person to be interviewed by this journalist (Michael Thomas @curious_founder). He approached me on Twitter to ask questions about digital nomad and remote work life (as I founded Nomad List and have been doing it for years).
I told him it'd be great to see more honest depictions as most articles are heavily idealized making it sound all great, when it's not necessarily. It's ups and downs (just like regular life really).
What happened next may surprise you. He wrote a hit piece on me changing my entire story that I told him over Skype into a clickbait article of how digital nomadism doesn't work and one of the main people doing it for awhile (en public) even settled down and gave up altogether.
http://qz.com/775751/digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-re...
I didn't settle down. I spent the summer in Amsterdam. Cause you know, it's a nice place! But he needed to say this to make a polarized hit piece with an angle. And that piece became viral. Resulting in me having to tell people daily that I didn't and getting lots of flack. You may understand it doesn't help if your entire startup is about something and a journalist writes a viral piece how you yourself don't even believe in that anymore. I contacted the journalist and Quartz but they didn't change a thing.
It's great this meant his journalistic breakthrough but it hurt me in the process.
I'd argue journalists like this are the whole problem we have these days. The articles they write can't be balanced because they need to get pageviews. Every potential to write something interesting quickly turns into clickbait. It turned me off from being interviewed ever again. Doing my own PR by posting comment sections of Hacker News or Reddit seems like a better idea (also see how Elon Musk does exactly this, seems smarter).
So yes, I'd argue don't follow this guy's path, instead be nice, honest and write interesting articles. It might take longer but you'll have more karma and long-term more success. And maybe you can convince me to do interviews again, some day :)