In my last post, I promised we’d talk about selling good news in a bad news world.
We’ll do that today in part four of our behind-the-scenes of my biggest, most profitable, and most prestigious assignments, where you can learn a little bit about what’s worked for me in the past and I can tell you about this free little ebook that I’ve put together in which I share some of my pitches that sold to top publications and will help you write your own.
Okay, now let me tell you a story.
How it began
So the time is 2006. The New York Times is still publishing tired old stories about elephants and monkeys on Indian roads or, when they run out of new angles on that, the poverty, oh my God the back-breaking poverty and these desperate, miserable people with lives of “quiet desperation.”
The poorest people I’ve come across in India are often far happier than the richest Westerners I’ve known, so this pisses me off. (And there’s no such thing as “quiet” desperation in India. We’re very loud, very vocal people.)
So sure, I want to focus on what’s going wrong so it can be righted, but I’m also increasingly seeking good news stories because my personal life is down the toilet, I’m not getting on with my family, and man, I could use a lot more inspiration and kick-assery. I decide to travel the country in order to bring positive women’s stories to the forefront and sell them to Elle magazine (among others), like I mentioned in the last case study.
Anyway, I return from a tour of India, having reported on seven positive news stories and not only did I enjoy reporting them, my editors loved them and the readers responded to them. My editor has received a note from a superstar editor at one of India’s leading news magazines, asking, “Who is this reporter?” Life is good.
I’d always thought I’d specialize in women’s and human rights issues. I now decide that I’m going to add positive women’s stories to the mix.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s time to change perspective
Nothing, as it turns out. We all love good news. Editors, readers, even us writers.
I start nerding out on Google. “Unique projects women India” I enter into Google and it throws up hundreds of thousands of results that have nothing to do with unique projects or women or India. But I wade through them, right until page 50, try again, keep on trying. Eventually, I start hitting the right keywords and discovering amazing stories. Stories that haven’t been reported previously in any national or international media.
This bit is important: Stories that haven’t been reported previously in any national or international media. These are, as far as I know, NEW stories.
Anyway, so since no one has written about these projects before and they are powerful enough to deserve attention, it’s going to be easy for me to sell them to big international newspapers and magazines, right?
Wrong.
What I discovered
When I first started pitching my “good news” or “unique project” stories, I’d send my editors queries with specific details of the women running them and the good work they were doing. I’d say, “This woman in rural India is running a clinic for HIV-positive people who want to find love,” or “these local female journalists got three rapists convicted.”
The reactions would be “eh” or “not really relevant to our readers” or “yeah, so?” or “I don’t know how to say this, but it’s too… India?”
The stories were great, so I thought about it and realized that the flaw was in my pitching, in the way I was presenting them to my not-familiar-with-India editors.
The editors didn’t realize why these solutions were so awesome because I hadn’t first described to them the underlying problem.
So, I started doing that. “These local female journalists got three rapists convicted in a village where the police are corrupt and often arrest the woman for filing charges,” sold much better and became such a popular story that I was interviewed on NPR for having reported it.
The AIDS clinic story? Here’s how I began my pitch:
Over her husband’s funeral pyre six years ago, Heena Patel, then 21, was informed by her in-laws that he had died of AIDS.
Until then, Ms. Patel had repeatedly questioned his frequent illnesses and received nothing but silence. After he died she had to face the reality that not only had her husband and his family known about his HIV-positive status when he married her, but that she was infected as well.
Then I went on to talk about how Patel found a husband through a clinic in the city that has become the matrimonial hub for HIV-positive people seeking love. In the UK or US, this may not be anything out of the ordinary, but in a country and town where wives find out about their husbands’ HIV-positive status over their dead bodies, a clinic that helps them overcome the stigma and find love again is nothing short of incredible.
So now we know why this story should sell and be published.
(It did and it was.)
What happened next?
I continued to… and still continue to… find good news stories and sell them in a world that is obsessed with the bad.
These are not always my most profitable stories, but they’re always the easiest sell, and get the most reader response.
(Quick tip: If you’re having a lean week or month, pitch some good-news stories. They sell more quickly if you present them in the right way.)
The “good news” or “unique project” stories have been my ticket into publications such as The New York Times (which we’ll talk about tomorrow), GlobalPost, Ms., The Christian Science Monitor, Ensia, GOOD, Marie Claire, Glamour, and many other publications.
The best part? As long as the project is ongoing, these stories remain evergreen and can be updated every couple of years and resold to an entirely different set of publications.
So, lessons learned
1. Solutions-based stories are in vogue at the moment and are always easy sells IF you can get the pitch right.
2. Newer writers always ask how they can be published in the likes of The New York Times without any credits. This is how. Find stories that haven’t already been published in any major national or international media. It takes some work, but once you start seeing those stories, you’ll notice that they’re everywhere.
3. Your pitch matters. I’ve tried selling the same stories with different pitches and how I present them and write them makes a world of difference. If your pitches suck, no matter how good your story or your writing, you don’t get the assignment. Learn the art of successful pitching and you’ve basically set yourself up for a profitable freelancing career.
I’ve been saving the best for last. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about The New York Times. For those of you who’ve been wanting to hear the story behind that credit, stay tuned. You won’t want to miss this.
(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.)