a poet learns to pitch (and you can, too!)
everything I know about pitching (essays, not baseballs) + lots of links and resources
Today I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.
In advance of a panel I’m moderating at AWP this weekend about poets writing prose, I wanted to round up everything I’ve learned about pitching. Below, you’ll find a mix of philosophy and tips, plus tons of resources and a genuine Pitch That Worked. This one’s a little long, in part because I’ve shared a full (successful!) pitch in it, so if it cuts off in your email, you can click on the headline and read it in your browser.
I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.
I was never particularly Funny on Twitter™, and now I’m not really there at all, but I stand by this one:
Sometimes pitching really does feel like just taking all your best ideas and chucking them into space. But the thing is: that’s the only way you’ll actually know what lands.
So many things about writing and publishing can feel really obtuse and unnecessarily complex, and I’ve found this to be really true as I’ve moved from poetry (a genre in which I have a significant amount of training) to prose (where I still sometimes feel like I snuck in and am about to be found out at any moment). In my MFA, we got some explicit instruction around submitting to literary magazines—write a brief, normal cover letter; keep a spreadsheet to track where you’ve sent things and what happens—and a kind of overarching philophy—the idea that submissions are the business side of writing, like doing your laundry. You have to do it, but you don’t want to let it encroach on your writing time.
But once I started writing prose, I discovered there was a whole other process I didn’t know anything about. It turned out that, in lots of places, you didn’t submit your work. You sent a pitch. The only problem was that I didn’t know what that was or how to write one.
There’s tons of good advice on how to write a pitch on the internet, and I’ll round some of that up below, but what I really want to offer is a kind of philosophy of pitching—how pitching can help refine your ideas and develop your sense of the audience for your writing.
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pitching is an engine for new ideas
One key difference between pitching and submitting is that a pitch is an idea. It’s not yet a finished product, or even a draft. It’s an outline, or a promise.
And to write a good pitch, you’ll need to learn to think not just about the quality of the writing but about the readers you’re hoping to reach and what you’re offering them. If you’re pitching something, you’re thinking about the fit between your piece and your target publication. So that means you need to be able to not just say what you’re going to write but also why now, why this publication and this audience, and why you should be the one to write it.
Those are the key components for a good pitch (more on that below), and they also provide a framework that can shape your reading and generate new ideas. If you have a topic in mind, thinking about the publication, audience, and specific kind of piece you want to write can help you brainstorm possibilities. The same topic—say, pelvic floor physical therapy—could be spun out in a ton of different directions: a personal essay for a women’s magazine, an op-ed about difficulties accessing women’s healthcare and the pernicious expectation that our bodies will just be a little broken after pregnancy and birth, a piece of service journalism about why you might want pelvic floor pt and how to access it. (Can you tell I’ve pitched that idea around a ton? It hasn’t landed . . . yet.)
And this process can also go in the other direction: if there’s a place you’d love to be published or an editor you want to work with, see what they’re publishing and how your work might fit into that. Twitter used to be especially great for that—editors would just tweet out the kinds of pieces they were looking for. Has anything replaced that? Is that happening on Threads? Let me know if you’ve got good ideas for finding editors and pitch guidelines.
Looking for series or recurring features can be especially helpful. (I really love the New York Times’s Letter of Recommendation and Vox’s Even Better series, though I haven’t cracked the code in either spot yet.) Once you’ve got your eye on a particular series or feature, read a ton of them, then think about how your work might fit in.
