You know what happens when work starts drying up, the economy goes into freefall, and jobs become scarce? Yep, writers like us start taking low pay and crapping assignments from clients, bad advice from fellow freelancers, and a lot of loathing from our own selves because it’s easy to believe that we are, and continue to remain, good enough, worthy enough, and talented enough not to.
As always, I am here to remind you that you don’t have to.
When you take advice from people who have not experienced what you desire to achieve (people who dish out freelancing advice but have never written for any major publications, for instance, and don’t make a living with it), you’re the one who loses. I do not question the intent—writers are some of the most generous people in any industry I’ve known—but newbies teaching newbies is a real problem in our community.
Someone give you regurgitated advice they’ve heard elsewhere that they haven’t successfully implemented themselves is detrimental for your career and your business because it means you’re wasting your time on strategies that you think are going to work but probably won’t or the givers of the advice would have been successful with them already.
This year, I urge you to start listening to the right people—successful freelancers whose bylines you can actually check, your editors (yes, they have a lot to teach you), and businesspeople in trades other than writing (if you want to learn how to treat your business like a business, speak to entrepreneurs.)
Before you sign up for anything—a class, a newsletter, a blog—think about your goals. If your goal is to be published in The New York Times, read advice from people who’ve been published in the paper or have helped others get published in the paper. If you want to write long investigative stories, learn from people who’ve written long investigative stories and actually make an income doing so.
This week, I’m going to send you detailed case studies of five different pitching strategies that helped me break into top publications like TIME and The New York Times, win international awards, and become a contributing editor at ELLE magazine. I’ll share with you what I did, how I did it, and the lessons I learned along the way. (If you’d like to see some of the pitches that landed me in these publications, you can download them for free here.)
There’s no catch. These case studies are yours to reads, to learn from, and to reference any time you want. I’ve been giving them out for free on my website for years. Note, too, that these are old case studies that show how I broke into these publications early on in my career. I’ll have more recent examples and strategies to share in future posts.
In my next post I’ll tell you how I got so fed up of being rejected by TIME magazine that I landed up in their offices.
But that’s a story for tomorrow.
Until then, keep pitching.
(Want to read the whole series? Here’s Part 1. And Part 2. Part 3 lives here. Click here for Part 4. And the final one, Part 5.)