Dan Janal – Mary Rose, let me ask you a follow-up question on that very last point. Are you sending the same pitch letter for the same story seven times, or are you sending seven different pitches each time, or are you just giving the idea of I want to be a freelance writer for you?
Mary Rose Remington – If this is all about how to land a column, what I’m saying on number six is, after you have sent that column query with your samples and whatnot, you’re calling, you’re emailing, you’re writing, you’re snail mailing again. You’re following up with that. Let’s say you sent out to ten different editors. With those ten different editors, you are following up, you are hounding them to see number one, have you read it. With each different editor, you have contacted them 7-13 times. It may take you 13 times before you even get a return phone call. Is that clear?
Dan Janal – Yes. Thank you for clarifying that. How do you find out who the editor is?
Mary Rose Remington – Oh, let’s go there—finding out editor contact information. There are actually three or four ways. I like to start with the easiest, fastest way. If the publication has a website, go there first online. Let’s just say you type in Google, “Better Homes and Gardens,” if you want to write for them. They’ll have a website. They’ll generally have something like “Contact Us” or “If you want to write for us,” or “Writer’s Guidelines,” and you can download those and those will be the directions that you get the fastest, and it’s nice to just sort of get started and get collecting that.
Another way is you can look at the publication itself. Let’s say you subscribe to Better Homes and Gardens and it comes at your door. You open it up and usually two to three pages in is that masthead with the editors and there will be a top editor and say like a middle editor, especially for the big ones and then lower on the rank. I generally shoot for the middle. If you can imagine a typical New York editor who’s the top banana, they’re probably not going to have time look at your work, but somewhere in the middle. And I even use my intuition. I say, “Oh, I like that person’s name or they sound nice,” or whatever.
A third way to find the editor contact information is the Writer’s Market, and there are three versions of the Writer’s Market, which by the way, comes out in August. If you would like to purchase the book version—some of us are kind of old fashioned and we like a big old fat book on our lap or to take to the cabin—wait a month, because by the time these books come out, too, they’re already a year outdated. I’ll get to another version that might be better. It’s just called the Writer’s Market. It’s a great big fat book and it comes out in August. It will list the editors, the publications and how much they pay. They’ll usually give you some inside tips for how to break in. They have it in a CD version, they have it in a book version, and they also have a wonderful online, which I guess I would recommend because, first of all, it’s only like $3.99 to subscribe and it’s updated daily. Where you can find that is www.WritersMarket.com. It’s got a nice search engine. Let’s say you want to say I’m searching for all the publications that pay $1,500 or more, you’ll get all of those. You can search by region, you can search by subject (parenting, motivational, travel).
Then I have another little inside tip. I belong to the National Writer’s Union. If you join—it’s NWU.org—they have a section in there called “Media Rates.” It’s sort of where we’re all doing our kiss and tell about how much we got paid for certain articles with certain publications and whether or not the editor is willing to negotiate contract terms. That’s sort of a little inside tip, too.
Those are the ways that you find the editor contact information.
Dan Janal – Those are great ideas. I want to go back again to that whole idea of following up with reporters and editors rather. What do you say to them? What do you not say? How do you make sure you don’t tick them off?