Here’s an example of an assignment when absolutely everything went wrong. I’ll show you how I recovered, and then I’ll show you how I went on to make that relationship so good and so long-lasting that the editor offered me payments in advance and made me a contributing editor at that magazine.
(For those of you just joining us, welcome to part three of my behind-the scenes series on some of my biggest, most profitable, and most prestigious assignments. This is all my way of saying thank you for being my readers and for supporting my work.)
Now, on with the story.
(Not a) good Indian girl
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m Indian.
This means that I’m always looking for a bargain, I negotiate like no one’s business, and I’m super ambitious.
It also means that I grew up in a country and household where I heard “no” a lot. “No, you can’t talk to boys.” “No, you can’t go for a sleepover.” “No, good Indian girls don’t smoke or drink alcohol.” You get the drift.
Therefore, like most not-good Indian girls, I did the exact opposite. Whenever they said “no” to something, I made it my personal mission in life to do exactly that.
And so, soon after I became a freelance journalist and was told, “No, you can’t head off to South India to cover the South Asian tsunami,” I listened to them, resented them for it for about a year, and then just before the first anniversary in 2005, decided I was going anyway. There were stories to be told and I wanted to tell them.
I had never actually done any sort of reporting before this point. Sure, I’d written your usual health and personal finance how-to articles, but a piece that actually involved sitting down with someone and accurately telling their life’s story was new to me. It scared the pants off of me. But I didn’t let that hold me back. I felt the fear down to my very toes and decided to go ahead and do it anyway.
I lined up a photographer, as broke and eager as I, and we came up with several angles for stories we could sell. I sent pitches to dozens of publications and in the end, wound up with seven assignments, including one from Elle magazine’s Indian edition.
None of them offered to pay expenses.
Everything goes wrong
In the November before the first anniversary of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, my photographer and I, both based in New Delhi, traveled to the coast of Tamil Nadu. The way we traveled made budget travel look downright luxurious.
We were on a train for 48 hours. We ate once. Then we got a bus. It leaked. Then another bus. It leaked too. Yet another one, same thing. People stared at us constantly—this north Indian girl with a white photographer in the middle of who knows where. There were times we didn’t even know where we were. The rain was pounding down, the buses were being thrown off the road because the weather was so bad, and the news was that there was going to be another tsunami. Everyone was panicked. Transport services were shutting down all over the place, and the only people boarding these “killer buses” as they were being called, were people who were desperate to get somewhere. Well, that, and stupid young journalists.
We eventually got to our destination, did ten days of reporting in which basically everything that could go wrong did. We almost ran out of money, our sources lied, and we got followed and threatened by the local fishing community until one of our contacts explained that we were friends, not foes. The lack of trust in journalists at the time was high and we became easy targets. But we got the job done.
We arrived back in Delhi exhausted and overwhelmed. I’d actually lost ten pounds. But we were stoked.
Now all I had to do was write the stories, get them to my editors, and watch the accolades pour in.
The rewrite begins
“It’s not quite what I had in mind,” my Elle editor wrote in an email. She told me I had some fantastic narrative and incredible stories but that it felt like a news story. I’d left out the key part of the story: Me.
This, of course, was news to me. I was supposed to write about ME?
But I had an assignment, from Elle magazine no less. I had amazing and incredible stories from people that needed to be told. And I had strong coffee. The only thing standing between my byline and a fantastic spread in Elle’s pages was me.
So I holed myself in a small room for 24 hours and got out of my own way.
I wrote about how we almost died, several times, on the way to report the assignment. I wrote about the lack of trust and faith people were feeling towards us because we were representative of something bigger, of something that had taken advantage of them. And I wrote about walking on the beach where dead bodies had been buried, beneath our feet, a year ago because there was simply no more space in the cemeteries. I didn’t think. I just felt. And I wrote.
One day later, I received a note from the editor. “It made me cry,” she said.
In which I never pitch again
Three months after my first Elle clip, I had still not pitched them another story. That I hadn’t quite gotten their style from the get-go was still something that was in the back of my mind, and now I didn’t feel like I had any new stories to tell. Plus, my personal life was going to hell, I’d decided to do yet another bad-Indian girl thing and move out of my parents’ place to start living alone, and my confidence was at an all-time low.
In the midst of this, my editor emailed. “Why have you not pitched me more stories?” she wrote.
This is where the “I’m 23 and stupid” part kicked in. This editor I didn’t know? I told her everything. Moving out, family drama, hating India, feeling trapped, being the black sheep always, always, always.
Gold, she wrote back to me. Pure gold. “Write about it for us.”
I did. My editor was bombarded with reader fan mail. I was a hit.
My family stopped speaking to me.
I pitch again
This time, I decided not to wait too long to pitch the Elle editor again. I was motivated by my success, eager to get out of Delhi and away from its shackles, and ready to add more fun and adventure to my life.
I proposed a seven-part series to my editor at Elle on amazing women-led projects that were changing the country. Projects like an Indian women-only peacekeeping mission that was headed to Liberia and a newspaper written exclusively by women that was hyperlocal and bringing criminals to justice. They were scattered around the country, these projects, but I didn’t have the courage yet to ask for expenses, and so I didn’t.
Instead, in order to pay the travel costs and still have a bit left over, I decided to resell the series before I’d even written it.
So I pitched editors in the US with completely different audiences and ended up placing the stories in several international publications. Some editors offered to run them as a series and others picked the stories they most liked and would run just one-offs. I even offered them to trade publications (for instance, a story on women-only compartments in Mumbai locals sold to Trains magazine).
My massive pitching operation had been successful. Even though I wouldn’t get paid until I reported and wrote the stories, I now felt confident that with the sales of all these stories, I was going to not only break even, but have a pretty hefty profit.
Five days before I set off, I received an email from my editor at Elle.
“Why have you not asked me for expenses?” she wrote. “Because, for you, I will be happy to pay them.”
I become a regular
I started writing regularly for Elle. A few months after the women’s project series ran, the editor offered to start paying me for several stories in advance to help with my cash flow issues and to enable me to focus on the work and not the money.
Then, when it seemed like I was writing for her almost every month, she asked if I’d like to become a contributing editor with a fixed monthly payment and ten articles a year.
Guess what I said?
(YES!)
Lessons learned
1. Feel the fear. But take action anyway.
2. Never leave home without an assignment. Or seven. Even as an inexperienced writer who wanted to travel and learn and would have to pay her own expenses, I made sure to secure enough assignments as to make the trip break even, if not profitable. If you learn how to write good queries, this can often be the easiest part.
3. Everyone goes on and on about how professional you have to be, but you know what else you need to be? Personal! I mentioned two days ago that one of the main reasons I got on as well as I did with my editor at Time was because we got on as people, and that’s further proved by my experience with Elle. The editor already liked and respected my work, so my problems didn’t make me seem unprofessional, they made me seem real. (And someone her readers could relate to.)
4. Don’t ever stop pitching, people. Once I started pitching this editor regularly, I was writing for her magazine almost on a monthly basis. That’s how you become a regular contributor, a contributing editor, even a staffer if that’s what you choose. You don’t become any of those things by sitting silently in the sidelines. You have to, you must, I urge you to pitch, pitch, pitch.
So, what’s next? Tomorrow, I’ll talk about selling good news in a bad news world and differentiating yourself from the crowd. In the meantime, remember, I’ve put together this packet of pitches that sold to top publications that will help you when you’re writing your own. Don’t forget to download them.
I’ll see you tomorrow!
(Missed part of the series? Here’s Part 1. And Part 2. Part 3 lives here. Click here for Part 4. And the final one, Part 5.)