I sold an article today I’ve been hawking around for six months. It’s something I really, really want to write about and I wasn’t getting a nibble. I changed the pitch every time, zeroing in on a way to explain something that sounded like it might be a term paper in an undergraduate marketing class at a medium-quality university.
There are two big lessons in this:
- Getting overworked editors to know and understand what you is important, because it enables them to see your ideas in context — I write the way I write and it’s unlikely, even if I were trying, that I’m going to turn out an academic treatise on something
- The process of repeatedly pitching something to a disinterested audience should be looked at as an opportunity to hone one’s ideas down to something so easy to understand even an overworked editor will get it
In the last week, I’ve sold two big, sort-of-peculiar articles that have awesome potential. I may be getting the hang of this.