5 tips for pitching your article to magazines
Lyn Hughes gives her top 5 tips to getting your article pitch noticed by magazines
Having an idea for a masterpiece of a travel article is only the first step. Now you need to get it noticed by busy, stressed, harried editors up against hard deadlines – and who receive dozens, if not hundreds, of article pitches each day. So how do you do it? Here, Wanderlust editor-in-chief Lyn Hughes shows how to get your pitch noticed and possibly published.
- Give the editor a reason to run your piece. Look ahead to the next year. What are the events and anniversaries that you may be able to build a pitch around? Are new flight, ferry or rail routes going to make somewhere more easily accessible? Are there any new national parks or long distance trails opening?
- Keep your pitch brief and to the point. You should be able to sum up the subject in a sentence or two. Perhaps give two or three different possible treatments for the destination or theme. Your email or letter shouldn’t be longer than a couple of paragraphs in total.
- Why you? If the editor has received a dozen proposals on the same idea, why should they choose your idea? Is there something you can bring to it that the other writers won’t?
- Don’t just think about proposing ideas for main features. All magazines have regular departments of smaller features and tit-bits. You may find it much easier to get something published there.
- If sending by email, give a lot of thought to the subject line. At Wanderlust we get a couple of dozen proposals a day... and that’s on top of the hundreds of other emails we get. Which email would you be more tempted to open and read: “Wanderlust Proposal” or “Beyond Mandalay – off the beaten track Burma”? It also means that, even if we can’t open it straightaway, we’re more likely to go back to it later on.
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