Speaker 1: Hello YouTubers, it's Troy here again. I want to talk today about pitching stories to editors. It's something that freelancers have to do. As a matter of fact, most of the active freelancers I know would pitch about between 400 and 600 times a year. So it's something you have to get good at. You're spending a lot of time doing it and it's your bread and butter basically. So if you know how to pitch properly and well, then you get good outcomes. So I wanted to talk a little bit about it today. So but the first thing I want to say is you do have to get used to rejection. And that can be hard for some people because you've spent so much time getting this story, interviewing the right people, getting the information you need to actually do the story that you're invested in the story. And it's really hard when you're trying to pitch to an editor who is not as invested in the story or has to be convinced to be invested in the story. So that can be difficult to accept when you do get a lot of rejections or maybe not even contacted back. But I will say that if you do struggle with that, it's a really steep learning curve. But editors will reject stories for a variety of reasons and none of the reasons are a reflection on you as a person or you as a writer. So it can be stuff like that doesn't suit their publication, they've written about this topic previously, or they don't have the budget. There can be any number of reasons why they pass on one of your stories. But the trick is to take your lumps and move on and always keep pitching to that same publication as well with different story ideas. So a rejection is not something that you should take to heart. And the good thing about the medium we work in is that there's literally hundreds of avenues for you to get your story to get out. So you've got periodicals, you've got magazines, you've got online publications, you've got trade publications. And if worse comes to worse, you've even got platforms that you can put your story out yourself like Medium. So you might not get a lot of money or if any money at all, but if you really believe in your story and you think it's got an audience, then a platform like Medium could be the avenue you want to pursue, provided you've given other opportunities first. I wouldn't go to Medium first, but it's there. So just when you're pitching, just think, oh, I've really liked the story and I will find a place for it. So how do you pitch? Most editors have very little time. They're very time constrained. They've got a lot of work and not only that, they get dozens of pitches a week. So you don't want to send them reams and reams of explanation of why they should be running your story. You want to send five lines. I sent five lines to an editor and he and she could judge solely on the merit of those five lines. So they're important five lines. So you've got to hit them hard. You got to have the grab. Like, why should this editor invest time and money into this story? Not only that, but why would the readers want to invest time in the story? And that's the important thing. The story you want to pitch is not to the editor, it's to the editor's readers, because the editor is thinking about what the readers would be interested in. And this leads to my second point, is that make sure you consider the reader in your pitch. Have a look at the publication. What's their voice like? Who are they appealing to? Who is their market? What sections do they have? Because I'll find, especially the larger publications, I will mention in my pitch, I think this story would be good for this section or this section. Not only that, but each of those sections could have a different editor that you have to pitch to. So do your research. Look at who the section editor is and send it directly to them, because it might never get to them. Or it could go to the wrong section. So always keep that in mind. Read the publication that you're pitching to. Think about the readers that the editor is thinking about. So that's probably the second point. The third point is how often should you pitch? I don't think that you can make a sufficient income from this industry if you're pitching one story to one publication, then wait two weeks for a response or a month. It's just not feasible. So I'll have certain tiers. So I'll pitch to the biggest publications with the best reputation, the best pay first, and then slowly move down the scale. But I'll send out multiple pitches at once. I might pitch one story to six or seven publications. And then a couple of weeks later, if I'm still invested in the story, I'll pitch to a few more publications down the chain. And I usually have about three or four stories going at once. So I'll keep busy, always looking for stories. You always got to look for stories. And then add that to the rotation and just keep pitching as I go. So I'll send out a lot of emails. And you can see why you get up to 300 or 600 pitches a year, because it's just an ongoing process. And this comes to another point. I have a spreadsheet where I lay out about 120 publications that I regularly pitch to. There's a few others that I'll pitch to, but it's about 120. They're all different topics. So there's science, there's adventure, there's travel, there's current events. There's a lot of publications, a niche. So when I find a story, I'll go, these five publications might be interested in this. So I'll keep this database of about 120 publications broken down into niches. Then it'll have a little bit of information about them, the sections that they run, who the section editors are. And I'll follow those section editors on Facebook and Twitter, mainly Twitter, just to see the sort of stuff that they're posting, that they're retweeting, the stuff in their own magazine that they're promoting, because that's the stories they're interested in. So it's always good to get a feel of what an editor's like, and that'll help you in your, not only a pitching process, but subsequent conversations with that editor. And that document will have the contributor's email or a link to the page to contribute. It'll also have, so as I said, have all the editors. They'll also have a bit of information about pay rates. And because that's important. Not only that, I'll go back and review that document every three months, because unfortunately that's the industry we work in. A lot of publications will stop accepting contributions, or they might stop printing altogether. They might change hands. They might get new editors. So I'll go back and I'll have a look at the information I've got and make sure it still matches up. And now the only reason I do that, it might take a day or two to go through the 120. The reason why I do that is because that document makes my life so much easier in other areas of what I do. So when you're pitching so often, you've got to make it as easy as possible. And so that's what I do. I have this database and it probably cuts my workload down in half when I'm pitching a story. And I can concentrate more on getting my stories. So how often would I pitch? See, that's difficult because once you pitch a story, you've got publications that are weekly, monthly, three-monthly. And so when will I get back to you? That can be different. That's different depending on the publication. See, some publications will have a news meeting to discuss pitches once a week. Some will have it once a month. So it can take quite some time to get back to you, which again is why you should pitch to more than one place or have continually rolling pitches, because you can't wait that long for someone to get back to you on a story. You have to continually pitch. When I do come up against a double-up, like two publications interested in a story, usually they're interested in different elements and different parts or different narratives. So I'm able to develop two stories from the one idea. I know that's not really done a lot because a lot of the publications like to be exclusive on these sorts of things, but it's a reality of trying to be a freelancer full-time. You've got to keep the wheels in motion all the time. So yeah, that's basically it. Sorry if it's been so long since the last video. As you can see, I've moved house and I wanted to do this one right because it's such an important part of being a successful freelancer. So yeah, please like and subscribe. And if anyone has any comments about pitching, make them below and I'll try and talk about them in a subsequent video. But like I said, it's not definitive. It's what I do in my freelancing career. So thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Bye.