I learned last week that students from 30 Days, 30 Queries recently broke into Discover magazine and The Wall Street Journal. (That’s in addition to acceptances they’ve already received from The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, CNN Travel, Vice.com, Marie Claire, and many others.)
When I ask them—and I do repeatedly—what made the difference, why they succeeded now when they hadn’t before, what was the one thing that clicked, most of them have one of two answers:
(1) I never tried. I never sent out as many queries before, so I never got as many responses.
(2) I saw on the 30 Days, 30 Queries Facebook group that someone else had broken into my dream publication and it made me think that I could do it, too.
The second answer is what interests me most. You see, when I first launched 30 Days, 30 Queries in February this year, I put in a lot of effort into the actual content. I sent out a daily 2,000-word lesson for 30 days discussing querying techniques, building relationships, and keeping on track with your goals when all you want to do is give up. The course covers everything from finding ideas, converting them into angles that actually sell, finding editors, building relationships with editors on social media, and lessons from copywriters that help make your pitch into a sales tool that editors can’t resist.
The lifetime membership to the 30 Days, 30 Queries Facebook group that comes with the e-course was meant to create a place where we could ask and answer questions but I never imagined that it would become the burgeoning community that it has, the safe haven that we could all (including me) go to in order to get advice, contacts at dream publications, friendship, and of course, the kicks up the ass that help us all get those queries sent.
No one is immune from fear and procrastination. I challenged our little Facebook group to target their dream publication last week, to pick that one newspaper, magazine, or website that made their palms sweaty with anticipation and just pitch. Quickly, efficiently, without obsessing about it.
They did, but they also did something else: They turned the tables on me.
Suddenly, after years of saying “One day, I’ll write for the Modern Love column of The New York Times,” and never once pitching them, I reluctantly agreed to do the nerve-wracking thing of writing up an essay for them. Before I could second-guess myself, before I could obsess too much about whether I was too honest, not honest enough, whether this word was the right one or whether I should rewrite the whole thing again, I hit send. Done. Finished. Getting published in Modern Love is one of the top items on my writing bucket list but it’s not going to happen if I never even submit to them.
Which brings me to the first reason that my students give me for why 30 Days, 30 Queries works when nothing has before: “I never tried.” Modern Love is an item on my bucket list, something that I want with all my heart, but that I never even tried. And we’re all like this at different points in our lives. You want your novel to be a New York Times bestseller but have you ever tried finding an agent, self-publishing it, or finding new ways to market it? You want to be published some day in The New Yorker, but have you ever tried pitching them? You want to quit your job to freelance full-time but are you putting in the hours after work to try doing it part-time first?
One of my students emailed me earlier this week to say that she’d only been able to send out six queries last month. She was upset about this for about a week until the responses started coming in. Eventually, she amassed four acceptances from those six pitches, three of them from publications that are recognizable household names that any freelancer would be thrilled to have in their list of credits.
What was the difference? She tried. She found support (and ass-kicking) through the community. And she had the tools and techniques through the class with which to write query letters that were actually effective and that worked.
Those, in a nutshell, are the three things you’re going to need to be successful in anything in life, including your writing career:
(1) The tools.
(2) The support. And most importantly,
(3) The will to try.
What could you do if you only just tried? And if you haven’t started trying yet, do you know what’s stopping you?