(www.inkthinkerblog.com) — It’s Time to Publish, with Cathy Alter, author of Up for Renewal, and Tim Wendel, author of The New Face of Baseball. I got back late from lunch and missed the first five minutes of the session — sorry! But ANYWAY…
Cathy got started by writing for free for Dave Egger’s first magazine and says it was the best investment she ever made in her career because he went on to become Dave Eggers.
She and Tim both recommend checking out Gawker to see who’s were and who’s changing publishing houses. Tim also recommends that when someone moves to a new house, that is the time to query them because they likely didn’t bring their whole list with them and they’re looking for new blood.
“I’m often afraid of querying editors, but they need you, they need writers to fill their pages with stuff, and they’re looking for new writers,” says Cathy. Answer these questions: Why you? Why now? Why should an editor care?
Don’t undersell your experience, says Tim. “Be passionate about what you’re into. Even if your credentials are, I don’t know, I love rowing or I’ve read every mystery by Raymond Chandler,” he says. “Your writing is going to be on display in that query/cover letter. What they’re looking for is, in a sense, an opportunity to give you a chance.”
The next step is a story meeting where they have two or three minutes to sell your idea to the masses. Get to the point, Tim says.
Cathy says, “You can’t write that cover letter until you boil it down to the essence, and you can’t write the article until you do that, either.” The examples she provided in her packet (I will try to get an electronic copy!), she says, are really HER and are really infused with her personality and energy and what they’re going to get. One of Cathy’s biggest mistakes, “and thank goodness I’m still writing for her,” she says, was misspelling an editor’s name in the query. “You want to show them that you can turn in a clean please, that you can respond to deadlines, that you’re responsible.”
Unless an editor says, “Do you have any clips to show me?” Cathy does not include clips. And Tim recommends that one have a website or online portfolio to avoid having to send hard-copy clips. “What you’re trying to do is not give an editor an excuse to turn you down, and anytime an editor is dealing with a new writer, and I’ve had a couple of them tell me this, they feel like they’re getting out on thin ice. They want to believe, but they don’t want to fall through the ice.” That’s where clips come in, to push editors over the edge. And if you can’t get it linked, put it in a priority mail envelope so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle on their desk, Tim says.
Regarding e-mail subject lines, Tim often uses “From Tim Wendel,” and Cathy might say if she got a referral, “Tim Wendel sent me…” or for a cold e-mail, “Here’s the Pitch.”
“I wouldn’t put an attachment with it,” Tim says, because that tends to scare them off. If he’s pitching someplace for the first time, after his few lines about them, he may say, “I recently wrote on XYZ for ABC and I’d be happy to send you the link.” He says, “The goal is to start a conversation, to get them a little intrigued.”
“A lot of writing is just dull administration,” Cathy says. “Paperwork, updating your website, that kind of stuff.” This was prompted when Tim said that sometimes he will often adjust his homepage based on who he’s send his pitches to that week. Author’s Guild is where Tim has his site.
When making simultaneous submissions, Tim recommends mentioning it in the first contact. Cathy waits until and editor says no before pitching it to another publication, but if she doesn’t hear anything back, she asks, “Are you interested, because I’d like to send it elsewhere.” Checking in with Cathy’s method, Tim says, is a good reason to get back in touch with an editor, a good excuse to follow up.
Tim believes that when sending clips, it’s less professional to send a Word doc than a finished product, and he will even target markets that he knows will have links up for a long time. The other thing you can do, Tim says, is to request the final PDF after signing off on the proof or going to press. They writing maybe hasn’t changed that much from what was in the Word document, but showing a finished product looks much better. “It’s your calling card,” Cathy says. If you have Xeroxed copies or hard copies, Tim says, that can be your follow-up.
Tim describes the editor’s decision process of comprising three piles: publish, maybe, and no. Most writers are in the Maybe pile, and the goal is to get into the Publish pile.
The difference between querying fiction and nonfiction is that when you’re querying fiction, you may very well have the whole thing finished, but you don’t necessarily want to tell them that because the editor wants to feel like he or she has a hand in developing the piece. You might send the whole short story, but not the whole novel, for instance.
Holy crap. Tim sold his first novel to Ballentine/Random House without an agent. “I would really get to know who are the top editors doing that kind of stuff,” Tim says. It’s not that hard to, and he says he’s targeted agents and editors in his area with a note that basically says, “I really loved your work on that book, and I’m working on something kinda similar.” They’re getting hammered all day, he says, and then this letter comes in over the transom talking about how great they are.
The summer writing conferences are great, he says, both because of the opportunities to meet big people and also because of the opportunity to do it in a tranquil setting. Usually the people who will be there are to work on the material, but often there are editors and agents there, and Tim says he will even go to a conference just to meet someone.
An audience member asked whether it’s possible for an editor to take an idea you submitted and assign it to staff. Cathy says she knows of it happening to others but said it hadn’t happened to her. “It’s hard to prove,” she says. “I could have a really fun idea and you could have the same one.” She shared an experience of having a great idea about pitching an article on rooftop lawns and then like a week later it was the cover story in New York Magazine totally by coincidence. “I know no one overheard me say that,” she says. “It wouldn’t stop me from pitching.”
Tim says he has had that experience with Men’s Journal and when he gently called the editor out on it by phone, he actually got an assignment out of it. “If the idea is that good, the concern should be that somebody would steal it. The approach should be, ‘I have a great idea — who the heck should I place it with?'” he says.
Cathy shared an example of having an acquaintance who pitched an article for the Washingtonian Home Edition and then a similar article appeared but the writer had thought the editor wasn’t interested. So the writer sent the editor a snarky e-mail saying, “I’m SO glad you could use my idea.” Cathy had lunch with the editor shortly thereafter, and the editor was horrified. “I can’t believe she would think we would do that,” the editor said.
“More and more there’s a difference between people who really know what they’re doing and people who are just messing around, and if you can get into that camp of being considered a pro, then I think you’re going to be okay,” Tim says. Doing GOOD work and meeting deadlines is key. “No surprises,” he says, is the really important thing. “You might as well make sure it’s bulletproof. Make it the best, best, best you can write,” he says of queries and proposals and samples.
Cathy says she only thing she would write fully before pitching is a personal essay. Everything else she queries or gets the assignment and then writes. She gets a lot of assignments from editors who she’s worked with before and who have carried her along from publication to publication. “And that’s because they trust you,” Tim says. Cathy says, “The women’s magazines read all the women’s magazines, and an editor will call me and say, ‘We love what you did for Self‘” and give her an assignment.
“Once you’ve written a couple of pieces for somebody, get to know the other writers who work for them and compare notes on what everybody’s getting paid,” Tim suggests. “You can kinda get your own union going.”
In regard to making a living as a writer, Cathy says that it’s about timing and perseverance as much as craft. And writing is like anything else in that the more you write, the better you get.
Contents Copyright © 2006-2014 Kristen King
Follow Kristen