I interviewed Jacquie about the similarities between pitching producers and editors, how to market from the heart instead of the mind, and how to avoid what Jacquie calls “energetic tackiness” in your pitches.

Renegade Writer: I know that you’re a producer and that as a producer you get pitches, much like a magazine editor gets pitches from a writer. What’s the top mistake you see people make when they’re pitching ideas?

Jacquie Jordan: They pitch what they think is interesting and don’t necessarily take into consideration what the outlet is looking for. When we’re working with guestperts, they’re really myopic. They know what they know, but they don’t know how to translate it to the medium that they’re speaking to.

That’s a really good point. How do you put yourself in the mindset of the producer, editor, reader — whoever you’re pitching?

You first have to watch the show. And so many people don’t. As a TV producer, people would call all the time and not have watched the show. And you would think, ‘You wouldn’t waste your breath on this call if you had even seen the show once.’

I spent a lot of time with a guestpert who said, ‘I don’t watch TV; I’m too busy to watch it.’ You can’t get into to a medium if you don’t participate in it as an audience or a viewer. Period. It’s Pitching 101: Know who your audience is.

That makes sense with magazines too. You don’t even have to buy the magazine, you can just go online. A lot of magazines have their archives online now.

Oh, totally. You want to know who you’re speaking to, and you want to have confidence that you’re actually giving them something of value to their readers and advertisers.

I see a lot of people pitch something that’s super interesting to them, but there’s not really an audience for it. For example, a lot of magazine writers come to me who want to write about grandparenting, but there are just not very many magazines out there that target grandparents. Do you get the same thing?

Yes. That’s exactly it. One of my favorite examples is that we had a woman who ran workshops in Los Angeles to teach girls who are about to have their menstrual cycles. She did it in a really lovely way, explaining to them what was going to happen to them — all with the idea that we’re out of touch as a society with that part of ourselves, and that teenagers are relying on magazines or mass media to show them what’s happening.

So our company got her a good booking on Playboy Radio — and she was so offended. ‘How could you? I am the keeper of the sacred sentiment and you’re booking me on Playboy Radio, which exploits women.’

My point to her was, first off, do you want to get your message out to many people or do you want to preach to the choir — because people who already follow you already know your story. Playboy Radio has a huge military base following, they’re heard all over the country, and so you could actually introduce a concept to them that they’ve never heard of — but you have to speak their language.

She asked ‘Well, how do I do that?’ I said, ‘Well, the subject you’re booked on is Why Your Sex Life Dries Up After Marriage.’ She said ‘That isn’t even my age group,’ and I replied, ‘This is how you speak it: You go on the show and say that people run into trouble in their marriage when their sex life dries up. But what you don’t realize, especially on the woman’s side of it, is that this already began while they were young teenagers, because they’ve learned to identify themselves and their sexuality through what they see in magazines and images of celebrities, and not to have any connection with themselves or their bodies. Then you bring it back to your topic that way.’

Many people are so passionate about what they speak about, but they miss the key element of who they are speaking to.

That’s also an interesting concept of slanting your idea to get it across to different audiences that you might not have thought of.

I am all about that. I’m like, ‘How many different ways can we slice the pie to communicate this?’ You’re going to have your friendly audiences. All those, of course, are invaluable outlets, but they expect to hear what you have to say. So how do you blow it out and reach a larger audience that has never been exposed to you in the past?

On another topic, what’s the difference between a mind sale and a heart sale?

A mind sale is very outcome-oriented. A heart sale is approached as an offering and the outcome isn’t the end result. It’s just in the act of the offering.

And it sounds like it’s win-win. ‘I’m going to get money out of this but I am also offering you a valuable service.’ Not just, ‘I need the money — I’ve got to pay my rent.’

Exactly. And it’s even more challenging in an economic time period like this. It’s very easy to offer it from a heartfelt space when the world is overflowing with dollars and there’s a lot of abundance, but it’s not as easy when we’re in a tighter climate.

How can you get into that mindset of doing a heart sale, especially if you’re a writer and you’re trying to get your articles out there?

I tell my people we’re worth more than our one idea. When we think we have one idea and that’s it, we’re in a problem place. And we can’t operate in this industry when people put their life and their money on one idea.

I don’t operate that way. I feel I am abundant with ideas. For magazine writers, it’s a balance of knowing what stimulates you and what your goal is, but also knowing that it’s beyond just one idea and keeping your flow of ideas out there.

That definitely helps because if you put too much stock in one idea, then you’re definitely going to be pitching from that space of desperation.

Yes. Exactly. And I think that a heart sale is understanding that the person who’s receiving is as important as you are in the pitch.

You want to allow that person to figure out how it works for them. If you’ve got all the answers, then there is no room for them to participate. I see this a lot in TV production: Of course you want to come to the table with the best presentation, but you also have to leave breathing room for the executives to wrap their brain around it and see how it would fit their network.

It’s another way of saying ‘Don’t be a diva.’ Because your stuff is going to get changed. Whoever is buying it from you is going to have their own ideas, and writers are notorious for getting upset when something of theirs is changed from the way they envisioned it.

I really love where you talked in your book about energetic tackiness and I was wondering if you could explain what that is and how a freelance writer can avoid it.

When I’m feeling disturbed or desperate for whatever reason, I will not engage in selling until I’m in a place where I’m really grounded and in my confidence and my radiance. It’s the same idea that someone going to a job interview who desperately needs the job, and wants it with their whole life, will never get it — versus the person who goes in, shows up, and lets go of results. Or if you buy a car, you can taste when the salesperson really needs to sell the car…that energetic tackiness makes you just want to run. It’s that feeling that you want to go take a shower after you met the person.

In my book I talk about a woman who called and was real high powered, real fast talking, and bombarded me with the names of her associates like Oprah and Barbara Walters. You feel like you just got machine-gunned down…that’s energetic tackiness.

So say you’re a new writer and you do feel a little bit desperate because you want to pay your bills. How do you get out of that energetic tackiness mindset when you really are desperate?

You have to put away the need for the money and really focus on the value of the work. If you believe it’s really good and needs to be out there, then you’re in a good place. That’s how you get around it.

I also liked where you talked about people who fear exposure. I think writers do, too. They have these great ideas and they’re afraid to pitch them, because what happens when people are reading their stuff? They open themselves up to criticism.

That is so common, and nobody talks about it. The most professional people in the world, you put them on TV and they have meltdowns after because all of a sudden, they realize they’re not in control of how they’re going to be perceived. That’s where you really have to dig in deep and trust the value of your work. [lf]

We freelancers have so much freedom—after all, it’s right there in our job title. As long as we do good work and meet our deadlines, we’re free to take a two-hour nap in the middle of the day or work late into the night and sleep in the next morning.

That freedom is one of the things we love most about our jobs, but it can—if we let it—prevent us from reaching our goals. Because we aren’t in a newsroom working closely with an editor, we may not know very much about the editors we’re pitching or about exactly what they need.

Our minds are just like nature: they abhor a vacuum, so we fill up that emptiness with all sorts of ideas about how editors are going to react to our queries and letters of introduction (LOIs). For example, we may imagine that those editors are completely swamped with amazing story ideas and have a reliable stable of fantastic writers.

But the very real possibility that those editors may need a writer just this minute—and that we would be helping them out by sending an LOI—may never have crossed our minds.

I am here to tell you that there are editors out there who would be happy, even relieved, to get your pitch.

My Story

As a writer who specializes in writing for trade publications, my main marketing tool is an LOI, and I send out several LOIs every week in what is now a completely painless process.

Sending my first LOI was not at all painless, though – because I was afraid.

I had convinced myself that I was — simply by sending editors an LOI — going to irritate them and cause them to add my name to a Blacklist of Annoying People that they circulated among every other editor. Believing this totally untrue idea was my choice, and that choice helped me avoid a lot of fear, but it also 100% guaranteed I would never get an assignment.

As a result of all that fear, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to send my first LOI, but I finally did send it. You know what the editor’s response was? Here it is, copied and pasted directly from his e-mail, which arrived 26 minutes after I sent the LOI:

Elizabeth:

I’ll pass your email to the chief editor. He handles all paid freelance assignments. We don’t use a great deal, due to budget constraints, but he would like to see this for possibilities.

Thanks for thinking of us.

He had actually read the LOI and he’d found it at least valuable enough to respond with a “thanks for thinking of us.” It took me a while to figure out why he would thank me, but at the moment I received his response, I was just thrilled to realize that my name wasn’t going on that Blacklist of Annoying People after all!

Then I got to thinking about why he thanked me. I realized that sending an editor an LOI can actually help him out.

Why Editors Don’t Hate Getting Your Pitches

Reading an LOI doesn’t take much time, and I make the process even easier for the editors I contact. In the subject line of my LOI e-mail, I write, “Freelance writer introducing herself.” If I have specific expertise or work experience in the industry the editor’s publication covers, I write, “Freelance writer with X experience introducing herself.”

Then, the editors who don’t use freelancers have spent all of four seconds reading that subject line and deleting my e-mail. I’m sure there are people out there who think that my taking four seconds of their time immediately gets my name on that Blacklist of Annoying People, but I’m also sure that those people are few in number and that they wouldn’t make very good clients anyway. (By the way, there is no such list.)

I mean it about the four seconds, too. I timed myself with a stopwatch reading the subject line of my LOI. To be conservative, I read slowly, and I rounded up slightly from what the stopwatch said, and it still came out to only four seconds.

The editors who do use freelancers are probably going to open the e-mail and read it, which—yep, I timed it—will take fifty-one seconds.

From there, they may respond with a request for clips, respond and ask me to call about a possible assignment, or respond with an assignment.

Some editors don’t respond at all. Maybe they’ll come back to the LOI later when they have more time. Maybe they’ll completely forget about it. Maybe they don’t need any new writers at the moment, or maybe they prefer to use writers with a different background or more experience or whatever. Who knows.

So far, though, I’ve still only taken up about two minutes of their time, max, and that assumes they did write back to me and request clips.

So the annoyance factor for the editors is extremely low, and the payoff for them can be worth far more than the minute (or two) of time I’ve taken up.

Or: Maybe the editor has just come back from maternity leave and needs someone to take an assignment she hasn’t found anyone else to do. My LOI has come at the perfect time. She can give me the assignment, which of course is a victory for me, and her stress level has just dropped, which of course is a victory for her, too.

Maybe the editor’s regular freelancer is moving to Germany, and he is therefore in search of a new one. My LOI has helped him out: I’ve shown up in his inbox, and he doesn’t have to go looking for anyone.

Instead of taking up these editors’ time, I’ve actually saved them a great deal of time, and as long as I do a great job on the assignments, I’ve saved them the stress of finding a qualified, competent writer to add to their pool of freelancers.

Lest you think I’m making up these situations, consider this: I have gotten assignments from editors who were dealing with exactly these circumstances.

Sometimes editors respond with, “Thank you, but we already have enough writers. I’ll keep you in mind for future assignments.” I’m free to make up all sorts of ideas about what these editors are really going to do. Or, I can choose to be grateful that at least they took the time to read my LOI (and possibly my clips, if they asked for them).

At some point in the future, those editors may need a writer and may come to me with an assignment. Again, I’ve saved them the time of trying to find somebody else.

In the end, the most I’ve asked of the editors I contact is to spend less than one minute reading my LOI, which, when you think about it, isn’t really much time at all. If the editors need someone to take on an assignment, I’ve saved them time, and I get an assignment. The editors win, and so do I. Not bad for a one-minute investment.

Elizabeth Whalen is a freelance writer and editor based in Berkeley, CA who serves clients all over the country. In addition to writing and editing, she loves skiing, ice skating, practicing yoga, watching movies, and enjoying everything the sometimes strange but mostly wonderful Bay Area has to offer.

You do the happy dance, thank the client, and move on. End of story. Right?

Wait! Don’t let this opportunity slip by. You can turn a compliment from a client into a marketing tool that will help you get more work.

Let me preface this by saying I’m not talking about testimonials; those you typically ask for, and you ask for them because you plan to use them in a particular way. I’m talking about the unexpected compliment from an editor or client who is happy with your work. Compliments make you smile, but they typically don’t help you get more assignments — unless you know how to make them work for you.

Here’s how:

1. Add it to your website.

Ask the client if she’ll give you her permission to post her comment on your website as a testimonial. She may agree and even let you use her name — but even if she wants to remain anonymous, that’s better than nothing. You can still mention the magazine or company the client works for.

You can compile compliments on a testimonials page, or scatter them throughout your site. Hiring a new-to-you writer is a risk — who’s to say you won’t flake out at deadline time or turn in horrible copy? — but seeing these testimonials helps prospective clients feel more at ease hiring you because you’ve gotten a stamp of approval from another client.

2. Ask for a referral.

After you thank the editor or client, ask if he’ll introduce you to other people who may be in the market for a writer. For example, you can write to an editor, “Thanks so much for the compliment! I love writing for you and am glad you like my work. I’ve actually been thinking of pitching some of the editors at other magazines in your group — would you consider introducing me to them via e-mail?”

I’ve done this with great success; for example, after I responded to a compliment asking for a referral, my editor at a custom publishing company referred me to a colleague in the marketing department — and that editor hired me to write all the articles for a mock-up magazine they were creating as part of a proposal for a prospective client.

3. Add it to your pitches and letters of introduction.

Sometimes you can add a compliment to the credentials paragraph of a query letter or to a letter of introduction (LOI) — if it’s relevant. For example, if your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is that you’re a good researcher, you can mention that an editor at X magazine recently complimented you on the research you did for a feature about homeschooling. If your USP is that you’re fast, be sure to include the fact that your client at Humongo Bank told you that you were the fastest writer she’s ever worked with.

4. Keep a list of compliments.

Whenever I get a compliment from an editor or client, I add it to a list that I send off to prospects as part of my Information Kit that includes my fee schedule and samples. I don’t use the complimenters’ names – I just write something like this:

“Thanks so much for turning around that rush article so quickly. It turned out great and the editor-in-chief was so pleased. You make my job easy.”
—Senior Editor at Noodle Manufacturers’ Fortnightly Magazine

I do this as part of my marketing for my corporate writing services, but it would probably work just as well if you included it with your e-mailed clips to a magazine or website editor.

5. File it away.

Whatever you do with the compliments you receive via e-mail, be sure to file them in a special folder you can turn to whenever you need a boost. I call mine “Nice Stuff” and it’s got close to 200 e-mails from editors, clients, students, mentees, Renegade Writer readers, and more. Love it!

How does this help you get more work? Well, think about how many more queries, letters of intro, prospecting e-mails, and cold calls you do when you’re feeling confident and on top of your game versus when you’re feeling underconfident and desperate.

What do you do when you get an unexpected compliment from an editor or client? Post your tips in the Comments below! [lf]

Whether you’re a new writer who’s staring at her first feature in a newsstand publication or a jaded professional who’s finally hit a career high with a 2,500-word feature in Esquire, beyond sending the clip with new story pitches there’s the question of “What else can I do with this shiny piece of paper I hold in my hands?”

I’ve given the question a lot of thought while wearing my jet-powered marketing/self-promotion hat; here are some of my ideas about how writers can work their clips more effectively.

1. Send a link to the published story to editors who rejected your idea.

Before you jab your burning torches and sharpened pitchforks at me, hear me out. You have to be thoughtful about this. If you’re sending the link to editors just to rub it in their faces — “Nah, nah, look what the NYT bought, you dumb-ass idiots — next time, be on the ball, okay?” — that’s not so cool and these editors will be thrilled they avoided working with such a reject rejected your idea … thrilled!

Tone is everything. If your motive is to get more work with the editors who rejected your idea, send them a new idea, then say something like, “Remember the story I pitched to you last summer about the snake hunters in Florida’s Everglades? X Magazine finally bought it and it ran last month. Here’s a link; I thought you’d like to see how it turned out.” This can be especially effective if the editor liked the idea, but it was nixed at a story meeting.

Even if he didn’t seem to love your idea, send him the link anyway. Your clip shows persistence — you believed in your idea and you continued to market it — and it gives him a little glimpse of how you turned your initial idea into a full-fledged story. It also shows you can toot your horn professionally with no hard feelings. Everyone wins.

2. Send the link to editors you work with regularly.

I aim to develop collegial relationships with my editors, so I occasionally do this with clips I’m exceptionally proud of. When I wrote a piece about British cookbooks for The Atlantic‘s food blog, I sent the link to a couple food editors I worked with; one had no idea I was such an Anglophile and she assigned me a piece about British food, and another editor added the clip to my resume package, which eventually landed me a lucrative short-term writing project.

I know two other writers who send out quarterly e-mails to editors that include links to recent clips. This is a brilliant idea, one that an established freelancer can steal for her marketing arsenal.

3. Tweet ‘em/Facebook ‘em. And ask your friends to retweet/repost.

I know a lot of writers are iffy about Twitter and wonder who the heck would be interested in their 140-character blurps about their morning coffee. Forget tweeting the cuppa Joe — tweet links to your clips and add relevant #hashtags to get other people to notice your story and retweet. Same thing with Facebook; post a link, write a little about why you’re happy with the story, and see what happens. The key is to get as many eyeballs reading your article — and with luck, some of those eyeballs will belong to people who hire awesome writers.

4. Alert the media!

A friend of mine wrote a thinky-piece for Reason that producers at NPR happened to read, and the next thing she knew, she was on a public television news program (or the radio, I forget) to talk about her research. She wasn’t paid for the NPR appearance, but it was certainly something worth crowing about in her credentials.And less impressive, but last year when I blogged about Sarah Ferguson and her latest scandal involving the British royal family, I got calls from the British media, including the BBC, to talk via satellite about Americans’ perception of Ferguson.

OK, great, you’re thinking — these media outlets came to you guys. But there’s no law that says you can’t reach out to the media. If you’ve written a story that’s controversial, timely, and/or challenges commonly held beliefs, start by calling the story desks of local news stations.

Here’s an example: you just wrote a feature for Parents about a grade-schooler who was bullied and successfully sued her school system. The week your story comes out, you notice a story about one school system’s flawed anti-bullying stance. Call your local news station and tell them who you are and what you’ve written and offer to speak to them on air if they’re doing a story on this. Even if they weren’t planning on covering the story, knowing that there’s an expert (that’s YOU) they can call upon may make them think, “Hmm, maybe we SHOULD do a story on this.”

5. And of course, add links to the clip on your website, blog about it (if you have a blog), and make copies to send to editors who want to see hard copies.

Because if I don’t mention all this, some Sherlock will point it out.

Any other ideas about how to work a clip? Add your comments below. [db]

I think you can do it, and I’m going to tell you how.

Make a Resolution

Resolve in 2012 to STOP pitching the content mills and anything that pays well under your hourly rate (more on setting your hourly rate in a second), or, worse, that pays in “exposure.” You can’t pay the bills with exposure.

You can’t make a living writing for $15 per article. Well, maybe you can for a while, but it’s likely you’ll burn out pretty soon churning out dozens of articles per month to make ends meet.

It’s scary to leave that comfy world where you know another assignment is always waiting, but you can use the time you’d spend writing for cheap to pitch markets that will pay you a living wage.

So what should you charge? Erik Sherman at WriterBiz has a great free e-book called Planning a Writing Business, which you can download here, that gives lots of detail on how to set your hourly rate. If you get an assignment that offers a per-word rate or a flat fee, you’ll need to estimate how much time it will take you to complete and calculate whether it will fall within an acceptable per-hour rate for you.

Do the Math

It’s math time: First, figure out how many queries, sales letters, and letters of introduction you made in 2011 and how many assignments you got from those. Then, calculate your success rate; for example, if you sent out 100 letters of introduction and got 5 assignments, your success rate for LOIs is 5%. You can do this calculation with sales letters, cold calls, queries, and other forms of marketing as well, and average them for your overall success rate.

You can use this number to roughly extrapolate how many of each type of marketing communication you need to send out each month in 2012 to hit your goal. If your goal is to have five assignments per month, and your overall success rate is 10% across the board, then you’ll need to reach out to 50 prospects per month, which comes out to just about 12 per week.

Keep in mind that the more you market and the better you get at it, the higher your success rate will probably become.

Also keep in mind that you need to be sure each assignment pays what you require to hit your hourly rate; those five assignments per month don’t count if they each pay $15. Restrict your marketing to high-paying magazines, websites, and corporate clients.

Refine Your Skills

You can hit your marketing numbers every week for a year and not have any success if your queries, LOIs, sales letters, and cold calls, well, stink. You’ll also guarantee failure if you don’t know the basics of running your own business, because freelancing is about much, much more than writing skills.

Make this the year you learn how to craft perfect pitches — and don’t be afraid to invest in yourself and your business. I teach an 8-week e-course on how to write a killer query letter, my co-author Diana Burrell teaches an idea generation class that’s landed students in The New York Times and Saveur, I can critique your queries before you send them out, and Carol Tice’s Freelance Writers Den offers free e-courses, tons of resources, free weekly webinars on topics like cold calling and query letters, and forum where you can ask questions and learn from the experts.

Also make it your new habit in 2012 to read as many books, e-books, blogs, and magazines about freelancing as you can — say, one per week (you can spend a whole week reading through some writing blogs or the online archives of writing magazines). The Renegade Writer will have a new edition coming out this year, and I also recommend The Well Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman, Secrets of a Freelance Writer by Bob Bly, The Productive Writer by Sage Cohen, Writer’s Market (which contains helpful articles), The Wealthy Freelancer by Ed Gandia, Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks by Kelly James-Enger, Writer’s Digest, The Writer Magazine, and my own e-book Get Unstuck! For Freelancers: A 6-Week Course to Boost Your Motivation, Organization, and Productivity—So You Can Do More Work in Less Time, Make More Money, and Enjoy the Freelance Lifestyle.

You’ll need to read up on business management, entrepreneurship, and marketing as well. I like to browse through the business section at the bookstore every once in awhile to see what’s new. In the past year I’ve read books on social media marketing, productivity, time management, networking, and more.

Starting on a shoestring? Many of these books and magazines are available at the library, and some magazines have at least some articles online. Blogs, of course, are free; I have more than 900 posts on freelance writing right here.

Blast It Out

Freelancing is a numbers game: The more you contact prospects, the higher your chances of success. You already did the numbers and figured out how much you need to send out to reach your goals, but you may be freaked out by the numbers you came up with. “What? I have to contact 20 people a week?”

This past year I interviewed Julie Knudson, a writer who sent out 300 LOIs to editors and landed more than a dozen regular clients and more than 80 requests for her clips. That’s the kind of overwhelming force that makes it nearly impossible not to reach your goals.

Keep Going

Sound like a lot of work? It is.

But take heart: If you study, market, and refine your skills in 2012, you’ll be among the few who have the persistence, ability, and motivation to succeed as a freelancer. Many aspiring writers drop out when they realize they’ll have to do more than pen a few pieces for “exposure” for Demand Studios, post occasionally on their personal blogs, or send out a few lazily-crafted queries every couple of months.

Freelancing is not a shortcut to riches for people with the ability to make prose sing. I estimate that just 15% of what I do is actually writing. The other 85% includes marketing, researching, doing administrative tasks, generating ideas, interviewing, and editing.

Do you have what it takes? How are you going to make 2012 your best freelancing year ever? Let us know in the Comments below! [lf]