And if you’ve been holding off due to the price, you’ll love this: For this session only, I’m letting students pay what they want for the Basic version of the e-course with no e-mail support (*well, kinda: minimum $30). The Basic version normally costs $120, so you can get as much as a 75% discount. I’m really excited about this experiment and hope you are too!

When you click the Buy Now button, you’ll be able to fill in any price you want, but I ask that you pay a minimum of $30.

And of course, as always I’m offering the Premium version of the e-course with eight weeks of e-mail support where I’ll answer your questions and critique your assignments.

Not sure my course is right for you? Here’s what a couple of recent students had to say:

“I had been freelancing for two years, and was desperate to grow my business beyond regional markets. I signed up for Linda’s Write for Magazines e-course, and within months landed an assignment in one of my dream magazines: a national health/fitness publication!

Well, I am happy to say that my first PAID article hit the newsstands yesterday. It’s a 9/11 10th Anniversary story in Flight Journal‘s October issue. My mom found it at the local Barnes and Noble.”
—Shannon Salinsky

If you’re interested, please check out the Write for Magazines page to see more testimonials, download the FAQ, and sign up.

If you want e-mail support, don’t wait — I have only 10 spaces in the Premium version, and they go fast. And if you want the Basic version — pay what you want and I’ll see you on the 27th!

I look forward to helping you make 2012 your best freelancing year ever! [lf]

My client’s editor had supplied her with one of the resources she wanted the writer to include, so my client put that one first in the list.

The bad news was, that product didn’t really fit in with the others; it was weak, but the writer included it because the editor insisted.

I suggested my client re-order the items in the list so that she’d lead off the article on a strong note, and she asked me how I normally order my list articles. A great question! I thought about it, and realized that I do have a few rules of thumb I use to create a strong list article or query.

Judge Them

When I write a list article (or a pitch for one), typically there are a few really strong items and few weaker ones. I can tell one from the other by instinct at this point, but you may want to ask a friend to read over your article and let you know which items made her say, “Wow! I never knew that.” Those are the strong ones.

The weaker ones are the points that your reader may have heard before, that you didn’t manage to get good quotes for, or that simply don’t have that “wow” factor.

Bracket Them

I make it a point to start off and end my article or query with the stronger items. That way, the article gets off to a good start, and goes out on a high note. People tend to remember the first things and the last things they read, so you want those points to be awesome.

Mix Them Up

After deciding on strong items to start and end the list with, in between those I alternate stronger and weaker points. So the order would be strong-weak-strong-weak-strong. That way even if a reader has already heard one of your tips or is not interested in a point, the article is saved, in her eyes, in the very next paragraph. This keeps interest high.

You definitely don’t want to lead with three strong points and then end with three weak ones — what a letdown! — or have several weaker items in a row. You risk losing the editor’s — and the reader’s — interest.

Put It in Second

I got this tip from a writer friend of mine: If the editor suggests you include something in your list, put it second. If you put it first, it looks like you didn’t do your job because the editor came up with the best item in the article. If you put it last, it looks like you’re dissing your editor’s suggestion and only grudgingly including it in your article.

Picky points, to be sure, but writing a successful article is all about the details. You need to understand rhythm and flow, and use subtle tricks to get the reader interested and keep him reading until the end.

How about you — do you ever think about how to order the items in your list article or article pitch? What rules have you come up with? [lf]

The writer’s original query is below — then my general comments and, finally, the revised version taking my comments into consideration.

What do you think of the original and revised queries? Is there anything you would have done differently? Do you agree with my critique? Post your insights in the Comments below! [lf]

The Yoga (Every) Body: Debunking the skinny yogi myth once and for all

Enough is enough. Call them heavy, curvy, chunky or obese – overweight people have been told to hate their bodies for too long, and it’s not getting anybody any thinner – or fitter! We’ve seen one exercise fad after another ostensibly designed to help people lose weight, yet yoga has rested steadily in the background for literally thousands of years. Meanwhile, the last thirty or so have seen it relegated to the realm of fitness for the already-fit. The truth is that yoga is as varied as it is ancient, and is not just about gravity-defying postures accessible only to the double-jointed size 6.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly a third of Americans are obese. Obviously, losing weight requires that perfect union of better nutrition and more exercise. But for people who are obese, exercise is daunting indeed. Firstly, any exercise is far more difficult when we’re significantly over our ideal weight. That is to say, it hurts. Our joints hurt, our bones hurt, and our egos hurt worst of all. Secondly, investing time and energy in exercise is a lot easier when we don’t hate the beneficiary of our labors – namely, our bodies. This article will directly target three reasons yoga is ideal for people struggling with their weight, bearing these limitations strongly in mind throughout.

There’s No Place Like Om

One of the biggest benefits to yoga is that it can almost always be practiced in the comfort – and emotional safety – of one’s own home. Trying to summon the motivation to work out is a challenge for anyone, but it is exceptionally difficult when exercise hasn’t been a part of our lives for a long time, or indeed has never been a part of our lives. Eliminating any obstacles – the need for expensive equipment, a drive to the gym, or perhaps most importantly, the threat of embarrassment from exercising in a public arena – is key to making sure we actually do it. In her book, Big Yoga: A Simple Guide for Bigger Bodies , Meera Patricia Kerr writes, “I stopped going to the gym years ago because I felt so out of place.” Big Yoga does call for equipment for many of its asanas, or poses, but most often that equipment consists of a wall, a chair, or a necktie!

Modify This.

Within yoga there are so many practices, and each of these bring different modifications to the fore. There is really no limit to how far a posture can be modified, and this is one reason students should consider attending a few classes. Yoga instructors are trained to work with their students’ bodies, to help them work toward the same end result as those achieved through asanas that may remain out of reach at first. For practitioner Janet Zinn, a psychotherapist from New York who lost 60 pounds in part by practicing yoga, this is no small feature: “I believe that being able to modify enables people to affirm themselves…[Yoga] is an amazing way to respect and listen to our bodies.” I’ll draw from Kerr’s Big Yoga, as well as insights from yoga instructor Anna Guest-Jelley, founder of Curvy Yoga in South Carolina, to highlight why these modifications are a great place to start, and can even offer some how-to’s on a few modifications as a sidebar.

Within the Body…and Beyond

Dr. Moshe Lewis, MD, MPH, Pain Rehabilitation Expert and Chief of the Department of Physical Medicine at St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco, has worked with a lot of patients in a lot of pain. The way he sees it, “The psychological components of weight management are honestly the largest hurdles to encounter and overcome.” Yoga tackles this issue gently, but directly. Every part of yoga is about identifying with one’s body, being present and aware, “breathing into” one’s various appendages and organs. “It’s about accepting who you are,” says psychotherapist and yoga instructor Lauren Rose, “and this is where the physical crosses over into the emotional.” While all exercise can and should be mentally and emotionally rewarding, yoga’s specific emphasis on presence and quieting the mind (and all its nagging negative comments) make it an ideal practice for people who may need a little extra TLC as part of their workout routine.

To date, the majority of my work has been academic in nature, and I’d be happy to send along some clips upon your request. I’ve been practicing yoga for eight years, and believe strongly in its ability to heal. It’s time to be done with this destructive myth, and my sources are just as excited as I am to help see it off. I’ve also got a couple of sources with some great action pics of plus-size yoga practitioners if you’d be interested. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

MY COMMENTS

* I really like this query! It is a great idea, and now you just need to find the right home for it.

* You got some good interviews.

* Your paragraphs are very long…I’d work on chunking them down a bit to make the query more readable.

* You’ve buried your lede. It sounds like the real meat of your lede is in the second paragraph. I would start with that and then have a second paragraph that has elements from this original first graph.

* I like your title, but your subtitle seems a little off-point…it seems like you’re saying there are already a lot of heavy yogis, but your pitch is all about trying to get more overweight people to try yoga. I would just remove the subtitle.

* I moved your stat to the end to bolster your argument about why the article is important. I think the lede is stronger without it.

* I would tighten up the writing a bit. For example, you don’t need to say, “bearing these limitations strongly in mind throughout.” That’s assumed.

* I would change “obese” to “overweight” so as not to narrow down your audience too much.

* The section on Within the Body — and Beyond is a little confusing…is this section about physical pain or mental pain? I changed it up a bit to get rid of the confusion.

* Ask for the sale at the end! This would make sure the editor knows this is a pitch, not a full article and not a press release.

* I’ve made small changes to sentence structure and word choice throughout.

THE REVISED QUERY

The Yoga (Every) Body

Losing weight requires that perfect union of better nutrition and more exercise. But for people who are overweight, exercise is daunting.

First, any exercise is far more difficult when we’re significantly over our ideal weight. That is to say, it hurts. Our joints hurt, our bones hurt, and our egos hurt worst of all. Second, investing time and energy in exercise is a lot easier when we don’t hate the beneficiary of our labors – namely, our bodies.

We’ve seen one exercise fad after another ostensibly designed to help people lose weight, yet yoga has rested steadily in the background for literally thousands of years. Yoga is as varied as it is ancient, and is not just about gravity-defying postures accessible only to the double-jointed size 6.

My article, “The Yoga (Every) Body,” will directly target three reasons yoga is ideal for people struggling with their weight. For example:

There’s No Place Like Om

One of the biggest benefits to yoga is that it can almost always be practiced in the comfort – and emotional safety – of one’s own home. Trying to summon the motivation to work out is a challenge for anyone, but it is exceptionally difficult when exercise hasn’t been a part of our lives for a long time, or indeed has never been a part of our lives.

Eliminating any obstacles – the need for expensive equipment, a drive to the gym, or perhaps most importantly, the threat of embarrassment from exercising in a public arena – is key to making sure we actually do it.

In her book, Big Yoga: A Simple Guide for Bigger Bodies, Meera Patricia Kerr writes, “I stopped going to the gym years ago because I felt so out of place.” Big Yoga does call for equipment for many of its asanas, or poses, but most often that equipment consists of a wall, a chair, or a necktie!

Modify This

Within yoga there are so many practices, and each of these offers different modifications to help practitioners who can’t safely or comfortably perform the various asanas. There is really no limit to how far a posture can be modified, and this is one reason students should consider attending a few classes even if they plan to practice mostly at home. Yoga instructors are trained to work with their students’ bodies, to help them work toward the same end result as those achieved through asanas that may remain out of reach at first.

For practitioner Janet Zinn, a psychotherapist from New York who lost 60 pounds in part by practicing yoga, this is no small feature: “I believe that being able to modify enables people to affirm themselves…[Yoga] is an amazing way to respect and listen to our bodies.”

I’ll draw from Kerr’s Big Yoga, as well as insights from yoga instructor Anna Guest-Jelley, founder of Curvy Yoga in South Carolina, to highlight why these modifications are a great place to start for people who are overweight [just keeping your theme front of mind!], and can even offer how-to’s on a few modifications as a sidebar.

Within the Body…and Beyond

Dr. Moshe Lewis, MD, MPH, Pain Rehabilitation Expert and Chief of the Department of Physical Medicine at St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco, says, “The psychological components of weight management are honestly the largest hurdles to encounter and overcome.” For example, heavy women tend to beat themselves up when their bodies don’t perform exercises the way they’d like them to. [I added this to give an example of what your source is talking about. —Linda]

Yoga tackles this issue gently, but directly. Every part of yoga is about identifying with one’s body, being present and aware, “breathing into” one’s various appendages and organs.

“It’s about accepting who you are,” says psychotherapist and yoga instructor Lauren Rose, “and this is where the physical crosses over into the emotional.” While all exercise can and should be mentally and emotionally rewarding, yoga’s specific emphasis on presence and quieting the mind (and all its nagging negative comments) make it an ideal practice for people who may need a little extra TLC as part of their workout routine.

To date, the majority of my work has been academic in nature, and I’d be happy to send along some clips upon your request. I’ve been practicing yoga for eight years, and believe strongly in its ability to heal.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly a third of Americans are obese. It’s time to be done with the destructive myth that yoga is only for the skinny, and my sources are just as excited as I am to help see it off. I’ve also got a couple of sources with some great action photos of plus-size yoga practitioners if you’d be interested.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please let me know if you’d like me to write up this article for [Magazine].

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]

Jennifer is looking for romantic suspense, contemporary, paranormal, historical, and erotic romance — full-length (around 60-80K) plus shorts and novellas.

If you have a manuscript you’d like to pitch, you can send your pitch letter (no attachments, please) to jennifer@jenniferlawler.com.

Good luck! [lf]