Serenity Tool: Embrace, Don't Idolize Big-Name Writers

Yesterday, I wrote about Dan Baum's impressive archive of queries, available for any of us mere mortals to review and dissect. But I wanted to add something:

Baum makes a number of comments I disagree with. (And I'm not the only one to have that response.)

For instance, he states that when he calls people for queries, he tells them he's writing the story for X Magazine (Wired, The New Yorker, etc.).

"I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am," he told Linda Formichelli at The Renegade Writer. "My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business."

He also says he doesn't reslant and repitch stories:

Well, you have to write a proposal for the sensibilities of a particular magazine, so when people tell me “I have an idea for a story,” my first question is “You have an idea for a story for what magazine?” Because you can’t say, “I have an idea for a story, and if I can’t sell it Playboy I’m going to sell it to Rolling Stone, and if I can’t sell it to Rolling Stone I’m going to sell it to Harper’s,” because it just doesn’t work that way.

When Formichelli asked if that was specific to his particular realm of the freelance world, Baum conceded it might be.

"I want to keep saying this that this is just my experience," he added. "Family Circle and Woman’s Day might be similar enough. In the small number of magazines that I wrote for, you just couldn’t do it. I mean, if you were writing a proposal for Wired, there’s just nobody else you could sell it to. I tried, I’ve tried, I really have. I really have tried and it just never worked for me."

That's exactly it. I want to encourage all freelancers out there to embrace Baum but not idolize him. He's just one writer, and he and his wife live entirely off his earnings as a freelancer. (Best I can tell, Baum and his wife essentially co-write or at least co-report or co-research his work, but it's published under his name.) He, like you, is just trying to make a living.

This is one of the things I love about the freelance world. We're all just learning. We're all just finding what works for us and doing that over and over again to good effect. If we're in serenity, we're letting go of the stuff that doesn't work, which can be very hard. What Baum says is interesting, but it's not gospel.

For instance, I would never tell sources that I'm writing a story for a publication for which I didn't have an assignment. I tell them, instead, that I'm writing up a proposal for my editor at so-and-so magazine. It's important to me to be upfront with my sources in a way that makes me comfortable. Baum, obviously, is comfortable with how he does it. It's not my style.

Likewise, I try to reslant and repitch my work all the time. That's how most of us make a living as freelancers. Baum is right: A New Yorker story is nothing like a Wired story. But there's a difference between an idea and a story:

The story I pitch to Yoga Journal is nothing like a story I'd pitch to Reader's Digest. But the root idea might share a kernel. They're different pieces, though. And that has worked for me.

So my encouragement for the day: Find what works for you: Don't just emulate what works for someone else.

Photo by skye.gazer.

Writing the Dream Query for the Dream Job

Recently, the fabulous Renegade Writer Blog posted a q&a with former New Yorker writer Dan Baum, and he shares both an interesting approach to freelancing and a whole treasure-trove of detailed queries. Some of those landed assignments at The New Yorker.

I point this out because it's interesting to see the amount of detail and the work he's put into his queries. One query I read, which landed him an assignment writing about the "jake leg" for The New Yorker, was so compelling I couldn't stop reading. No surprise it landed the assignment. It taught me a couple things about long-form narrative non-fiction pitches:

• Write like you've got the assignment. Duh, right? But I know I've queried the New Yorker with far less narrative pitches, and I can see why his pitch sold and mine didn't. It's a case of show-don't-tell.
• Details, details. The pitch is like a short article--fully researched, sourced and well-crafted.
• Open access. All good queries should do tell the editor about access, but his do a good job of showing the editor that he's thought out how much background he'll need and where he'll need to go to get it. It makes the job easier on the editor and builds trust.

He also has a great quote about how he pursues his sources for his queries. It fits with the persistence theme, but also gives a window into another freelancer's world (emphasis mine):

[To make it,] I think it takes relentlessness. When I’m starting to work on a story, I’ll start reading about something, and I’ll just follow every link, and as I’m doing it I’ll make a list in a Word document of the people that I need to find.

I start calling them immediately, and talking to them and taking notes on my computer. The expression I use with Margaret is “I had a red dog day today,” which means I had my nose down on the ground and I was going after everything today. Just hoovering in enormous amounts of information. And when I start a proposal, I try to have a series of red dog days where I am just relentless, going after everybody, and as soon as I encounter somebody’s name I pick up the phone and I call. When I finish the interview I say, Who else should I talk to? Then I call those people.

I don’t put it off — I don’t say these are people I’m going to call later — I do it right then. Man, there are times when in one day I can get enough information to write a proposal that will get me a $12,000 magazine assignment.

If you're a freelancer interested in long-form narrative, check out his archive and try an exercise:

• Take one of the queries
• Take a story you've written that you thought had narrative potential
• Start playing with your notes and research and practice making a narrative query from those notes and that research.

See how it works. Is there more research you need to do? What's missing? Do you know how to find the missing piece, or do you need to talk to someone about it?

It's fun. Try it and tell me how it works, and I'll do the same.

30-Day Persistence Challenge: Finding the fun in querying

As I mentioned last week, you'll only be able to access your persistence if you find your motivation. One of those forms of motivation, and my favorite, is joy. Fun! Play!

I know: What does this have to do with querying, that cringe-worthy and long trudge toward more work?

Here's how I explained it to a prospective coaching client this week:

Every story idea is a puzzle piece. Your job as a freelancer and marketer is to find the puzzle into which it fits. The puzzle? That's the right publication and the right editor.

The point is to find the right fit--not to shove something someone hates down their throats.

So often, as freelancers, we assume that, since we hate PR people calling and emailing with unwanted press releases, that editors do the same. But it's my considered belief that it's not the same. We aren't used car salesmen trying to foist a lemon on an unsuspecting public. Do you think your story ideas are lemons? I don't.

Think of it another way: What if you were trying to sell a car that didn't work too well but weren't lying and telling an young working class guy for whom a car was essential to make money that the car works just fine. What if, instead, you market it to amateur mechanics as a fixer with great potential return on investment.

It's the same car, but a different approach.

Once you find the right approach, you can have fun trying to find just the right amateur mechanic for your well-loved and well-used car. You can have confidence in what you're selling. You can enjoy the process of getting involved in amateur mechanics communities, and enjoying the personalities of people who love taking a junker and making it mint again.

That's what we do with our queries. We don't try to sell a story on, say, the dangers of health savings accounts to a publication that writes about petcare. That's crazy. And we don't even try to sell it to a publication that writes often about market solutions to the healthcare crisis. We send it to a consumer publication that may not have covered it. Or a publication that has written enthusiastically in the past about universal coverage. That's the right puzzle for your puzzle piece.

Now you're closer to a sale, you're sharing your skills and great ideas with a receptive audience, and, not for nothing, you're helping an editor create great content for his readers.

So take those puzzle pieces and look at them another way: They aren't lemons, to mix my metaphors. Any act of offering a story isn't an act of bamboozling. It's a gift. And it can be fun.

What, if anything, do you do to find joy in your pitching?

Photo by Liza31337.

30-Day Persistence Challenge: Faith for the job hunt

"Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters."

[Isaac Bashevis Singer]

Every query is an act of faith: In yourself, in this wobbly industry, in the economy.

It says, "I believe there is enough work out there that an editor will see this query and will choose it, out of the scores she receives every day. She will read it and she will even assign it, for a decent rate."

You can be forgiven in this market for doubting that scenario. And if you have any tendencies toward self-criticism--if, indeed, your inner critic doesn't just come out on the page but asserts itself, red pencil in hand, in every part of your life--you can be forgiven for wondering whether your query is good enough to rise to the top despite what's happening in the market.

This is why, no matter your religious affiliation or none, faith is a key component of persistence. I always think of those pioneers trudging across the open plains to the promise of ocean, to water. Forget for a moment whatever your political beliefs are about whether that was a moral act--to take over other people's land. Just think of that journey: It's an act of faith. They trusted that they would get there, and if it got really hard, they would find some way through it.

Right now, we all need to have a little more pioneer spirit and a lot more faith to stay self-employed. When interviewing people for my Black Enterprise story on persistence, one of the themes that repeatedly came up was faith. Though I only quote Patti Webster talking about faith, I'd guess five out of the seven people I interviewed for that story said faith was part of their willingness to keep doing the work despite complete lack of evidence that they were getting somewhere.

“I just knew that God had positioned me in this place and that if I just kept at it I would get a break," Patti told me.

She did. After living in her mom's home for two years, she finally landed a big-name client, and then some of her public relations clients who had stayed with the big agency when she struck out on her own came back on board.

Apply this to your life:

Does it feel right?

You don't have to believe in God per se to benefit from faith. Ever since I spoke to Patti, I've been thinking of one thing she said to me: That she felt she was exactly where she was supposed to be. I feel the same way. My seven years in newspapers prepared me for the hard, thankless work of freelancing, and the benefits are far greater than the stresses. For me.

So when you start feeling beleaguered by doubt, ask yourself if you really believe you're where you're supposed to be. Do you believe if you keep working, you'll get the break you need? If so, send just one more query. Make one more follow-up call.

Act as if

If you believe as I do that this is where you're supposed to be, act like it. A friend likes to counsel me, when I feel doubt about my relationship, to ask myself if I want to be in in it today. If I do (and I do), then I have to act like it. That means I have to show up for it, be kind, be honest and let her in at least a little bit.

The same goes for freelancing. If you want to be a freelancer today, act like you want it: Do the work it takes to stay a freelancer. I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating. You don't have to believe your query is the best, you just have to send it. You don't have to believe that you're so special that you should survive when lots of business are going under, you just have to act like you do. Today.

Make it a mantra

Almost every morning I say or write, "I accept that if I keep querying I will get an assignment." A great freelancer I know says that the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful freelancer is persistence. Marketing is a volume business, and each query you send gets you closer to a yes. But you have to trust.

Risk it

And then you have to take the plunge. It's called faith for a reason: You believe despite evidence to the contrary. What I've learned recently is that you get faith not from building up this spiritual reserve or this great sense of self-esteem--then acting--but by taking the plunge, risking rejection and then making progress. Faith isn't generated by your mind. It's generated by actions.

So what are you going to do to build faith in yourself and your business today? What risk are you willing to take?

Even the smallest risk counts: Clean your desk. Organize your files (clear away space for all those new assignments you'll get). Email to follow up on a query. Send another query. Work on a query. Take an action.

And then give yourself credit.

Photo by i:tzhaar.

30-Day Persistence Challenge: Motivating Yourself to Move Forward

On my way back from the Association of Health Care Journalists Conference this past weekend, I picked up a copy of Scientific American Mind, and, specifically, an article about how irrational behavior is hardwired into us. In a Q&A, professor Peter A. Ubel, author of Free Market Madness, made the following observation:

One reason we humans do not always behave rationally is that we have limited willpower. We understand that junk food is bad. But we cannot follow through on our rational desires. We plan to run for 30 minutes, but after 10, we get off the treadmill and convince ourselves we are a bit stiff today. We try to cut down on empty calories and then grab a handful of M&Ms from a candy bowl, almost unaware of our actions. No single M&M caused anyone to have diabetes. No one experienced a heart attack because he was 20 minutes short of his exercise goal. And yet our lives, or waistlines even, are the result of thousands of such decisions and behaviors.

Anyone who's ever dieted knows what he's talking about. Not that the desire is bad, or that a single outcome is bad. It's just the chasm between intention and action on a regular basis that undermines persistence. To develop persistence, and get the rewards from being persistent, you have to do the things you plan to do even if you don't feel like doing them. Something has to motivate you.

But where do you get the motivation? Here's what Ubel told Scientific American Mind:

To improve ourselves, we have to act as if each M&M matters, as if each decision has important consequences. To do this, it helps to make rules and follow them. Commit yourselves to no candy, no desserts, and you will become more mindful of M&M bowls. Run outside, rather than inside on a treadmill, and you will be forced to finish your running loop. Tell a friend you will walk with her for 30 minutes this afternoon, and you will be forced to show up. Do you want to save money? Have some money automatically deposited into a savings account that you cannot access easily through ATMs, debit cards or checkbooks. Sometimes the best way to behave better when you are weak is to impost martial law on yourself when you feel strong.

How does this sound to you? Do you like the idea of "imposing martial law," as Ubel puts it?

Unlikely. But Ubel does have a point. Structure is the key to persistence. If I tell myself (as I have) that I don't eat sugar, a red flag waves frantically when someone puts a baby tart in front of me, as they did several times at the conference last week. But for me, that's as far as structure goes: It just creates the red flag. How I cope from there is another matter.

Ubel hints at ways to make persistence work, though. This week, I'll lay out three ways to firm up your boundaries--with yourself--and keep on your persistence goals. Today, we'll start with...

Experience
I know I don't eat sugar. I have the experience of not eating it for five years now.* And I have the experience of not dying--of embarrassment or cravings--from any single instance of passing the dessert back to the waiter. I also have the experience of ease that comes with not eating it. It's not hard for me usually. People say they can't do it. But I think what they mean is they don't want to, that there's always an escape plan, an exception to their rule about dessert, etc. What Ubel is talking about is a hard-and-fast rule. A "no matter what" rule.

Action: Take a look at your rules around your persistence topics (querying, decluttering, invoicing, etc.). Is your rule;

• "I will do three queries this week no matter what?"
• "I'll do three as long as I'm not too busy with paying work."
• "I'll send three queries, but only if I don't feel too panicked at the time about it."

Don't judge. Just become aware of what your rules are for yourself. Then, at another time, look at them again and ask yourself a few more questions:

• Do they work for you?
• Are you getting the results you want or need, or are they feeding into bad habits that sap your energy and your serenity?

Once you've done that, you can take a leap of faith: Try doing the thing you know you should do everyday--even when you don't want to. How does it feel? Is it unbearable? Do you feel better or worse afterward? But a warning: Just like no single handful of M&M is going to undermine your diet, no single act of querying is going to quash your disdain for it. You have to do it over and over again, sometimes for months or years, before you start to have the experience of it being okay to feel uncomfortable and do it anyway.

and you find a few personal rules that don't work for you, you can apply tools we'll talk about tomorrow and Friday.

Photo by Phunkstarr.

*Please no attagirls. If I could eat it like a lady, I wouldn't have to eschew it entirely.

30-Day Persistence Challenge: Starting Now!

First, I apologize for both starting the challenge late and for not keeping up with posting. This is part of why I need this challenge: To create systems that allow me to do the things I love every day, like this blog.

You guys chose persistence for the next challenge, and I'm excited about it.

First, I think it's important to define persistence. What I mean when I say persistence is this: Persistence is the act of doing the thankless unpaid work that makes all the high-reward, income-generating work possible.

That includes:

• Regular querying
• Setting and following a business plan
• Meeting with fellow writers
• Invoicing and collections
• Setting time to write and sticking to it; and
• Organizing

So in this challenge, those are the topics we'll be tackling. But before we get underway, I need your help: What do you want to read most about and what's your biggest persistence challenge? Do you have a great story of how persistence paid off for you (we all have one, big or small)?

I want to hear about it. Email me at heather @ HeatherBoerner.com, DM me on Twitter or comment below. I want to hear what you have to say and I want to make this challenge as useful to you as possible.

Photo by Redvers'.

30-Day Marketing Challenge: What's stopping you?

I read this week about a writer I really respect who's stopped querying story ideas because the market is so unreliable right now. She has a point. You don't know who's taking queries and who's not these days. Ducking and weaving and putting that much effort into a query when you see markets drying up can get... exhausting. Really exhausting.

As a result, I've noticed a little slide in my querying: I'm sticking to markets that I know still have money--but they don't pay very well.

Then I look at my income goals and my projections and my throat tightens up a little bit. Serenity it's not.

So before we end this marketing challenge, I want to issue a specific challenge: Send the big queries to the higher paying markets anyway. No matter what. Let them tell you that they aren't taking queries, or that they're sticking to their regular stable of writers. Don't make the decision for them by not sending the query.

I want to share both my self-limiting underlying belief and a means to cope with it today.

The belief: Take my toys and go.
When I was in high school, I was always in classes with teachers that had my straight-A sister the year before. My mother was a teacher in the school district, and my father used to work in the district office, and ocassionally took us to the giant room where wall-size computers calculated our standardized tests. You could say I felt a lot of pressure to perform.

How did I cope? I didn't try. I got Cs and Bs, and convinced myself that I was too cool for this class, or that I didn't care about the subject matter. I was sure that when I loved it, I would try.

The truth was that I was so hyper-competitive that if I didn't think I would be the best--beat my sister, get the best score in the class--I wouldn't try. I'd take my toys and go home.

Now it's 20 years later and I find myself struggling with marketing. It's not that I think my ideas are poor. But are they good enough? It's not that I question my ability to find markets. It's that I can't be guaranteed of a sale. My impulse is not to try.

A version of this is always one of the first complaints I hear from new freelancers. They can't stomach the idea of spending all this time on a query without a guarantee of a sale. So they don't try. I'm trying, but I'm sticking to what seems like a sure bet.

In this economy the pool of sure bets are getting smaller and smaller. And that approach no longer works.

A tool for coping: A daily decision.
This week, it's really been working for me to set aside that fear by asking myself every day:

Do I want to be in this business today?

If I do, then I need to act like I want to be in this business. And acting like I want to be in this business means acting like I want to stay in this business.

That means querying the scary markets, the unsure things: Sending the feature query instead of the front-of-the-book piece. Sending a cold pitch and calling new-to-me markets. It means taking risks with no promise of rewards.

It means not giving up without a fight.

So I urge you to fight: Whatever your resistance, whatever your fear, don't let it hold you back. Decide to be in the fight today.

Photo by lanulop.

30-Day Marketing Challenge: The Power of Persistence

This week, I've invited fellow writers to share their marketing tips and tricks, either as guest bloggers or by answering a few of my questions. Today, I'm kicking the week off with the best story of querying persistence I've ever heard, from a writer I greatly respect.

This is the story of how Damon Brown broke in to SPIN Magazine after four years of pitching every month. You read right--four years! Here's his story, and then some follow-up questions:

I pitched SPIN magazine, which was technically the first professional pitch I ever sent, in September 2000. I pitched them roughly once a month and received no response until about two years later -- a short, "Thanks, but it's not right for us" email. Of course, that was motivation to keep going!

I kept getting rejected, but the rejections became longer, more elaborate, until fall 2003, when I got a two-paragraph email rejection that was as detailed as an assignment letter! The editor explained why the story wouldn't quite work and expressed detailed regrets on not giving the green light. I was flabbergasted, as I never experienced anything like that before. And, sure enough, the following Spring I got my first assignment! I would go on to freelance for SPIN nearly every month for three years - and even through a major editor shift. The experience taught me that literary brilliance is great - which I'm still working on! - but persistence is king.

You said your experience taught you that "literary brilliance is great--which I'm still working on--but persistence is king." What do you mean by that?

For me, any success that I have all comes down to focus. Early in my career I would subscribe to 30-plus magazines, publications that I thought would appreciate my voice and would be a good fit for me as a freelance writer, and reading them week after week or month after month helped me craft queries and ideas best suited for the audiences. Every single publication has a clear audience and editorial voice - even the most general interest one. The key is to study it long enough to know them, and then pitch enough times so that it is very clear to the *editors* that you know them, too.

How did you choose which stories to pitch to SPIN? Did you reslant and resend them after you got radio silence or a rejection from SPIN?

I did a lot of reslanting and resending. The biggest challenge for me early on was remembering that it is about the publication, *not* the story I want to tell. It was important to find the angle that would best fit the publication. For instance, a new music focused magazine like SPIN would probably not be interested in a historical piece on a legendary rocker, just as much as the acid-tongued New York Post, for which I also write, would probably pass on a touching story about lost puppies. I had to be merciless -- if a story idea didn't fit the publication, I didn't pitch it. Now, I've occasionally been able to talk up a story and make it work when I've already built a relationship with an editor, but it is wasteful, and perhaps a little arrogant, to assume that an editor will take on your risky story right out the gate.

What kept you pitching those first two years when you got no response? How did you motivate yourself?

It helped me to come up with a mission statement. When I first started, my goal was to examine subcultures respectfully and honestly, and to write about them for the masses so that the mainstream may find another level of respect for a discounted or seemingly second-rate culture. Video games are a $20 billion industry, but, especially when I first started a decade ago, were still considered a kid's medium. Sex, and specifically porn, was another multi-billion industry with real issues, real people and real business that was not being covered seriously. Finally, specific music genres, such as hip-hop, were lumped in with "ignorant" cultures, again despite being a multi-billion industry.

My motivation was and is when I see a subculture written about in an incomplete manner or, worse, in an ignorant or stereotypical light. I realize that I could have pitched that article and helped represent the subculture in a more complete light. Drives me nuts!

A more distant, but important motivation is setting and reaching firm financial goals. There is no formula that X number of queries equals Y number of assignments and totals Z amount of dollars, but there is a solid relationship between "sweat equity" and results. I like the freelancing lifestyle, and I know that I'd have to leave it if the bills weren't getting paid!

Did you have resistance to continuing to pitch them? If so, what kind of resistance and how did you deal with it?

Not really. I mean, this is really our job - pitch publications that we feel would welcome our voice and would be improved with our contributions. I knew I belonged in SPIN, and if anything the years of pitching proved to me that my feeling wasn't just about ego (otherwise, I would have quit much earlier!). For instance, I'd love to see my writing in The New Yorker, and have actually gotten some pleasant rejections from them, but I don't feel like I belong in The New Yorker. It is a bit of a stretch, and that's OK. On the other hand, for Playboy, SPIN and the other publications for which I currently write, I started pitching them aggressively when I knew my voice and my stories matched their need. There is a difference between ego and actual qualifications.

How much querying/marketing do you do today?

It actually varies quite a bit. If I'm in the middle of a book project, I can query as little as once or twice a week. I just finished off two big deadlines, so right now is a queryfest! I go in spurts, and can send as many as 5 queries in a day. Regardless of cycles, I always make it to major journalism conferences, such as the ASJA in April, and network with my colleagues over coffee or online through Twitter, Facebook or journalism websites. It is important to be open to new work before you need it.

What are the top marketing mistakes you've made--or seen other freelancers suffer from--and how do you overcome them?

Wishing for downtime during insanely busy periods - and getting downtime in spades as soon as the projects are wrapped up! I write primarily for magazines, so financially the work I do in February affects my budget in April or May. This creates the need to plan well in advance and to plant seeds early. It's OK to slow down the marketing, querying and networking while working on a big project, but it should never, ever grind to a halt. We should always be open to new work.

The second lesson I've learned is to be ahead of the curve -- particularly important in my focus areas of sex, tech and music. For instance, in summer 2007 Penguin released my Pocket Idiot's Guide to the iPhone, which was the first book on the popular device. The iPhone was announced six months earlier, and I knew the device was going to be insanely popular. I also suspected that people, and the media, would get burnt out on the iPhone very quickly.

In January 2007 my agent and I talked to Penguin and got the book deal in place, and I started pitching lots of iPhone stories. By June, when the iPhone was actually hitting stores, I actually started moving on to other technology topics. By the time my book came in August, I pitched one or two iPhone-related stories, but I knew my focus had to be on other, more cutting-edge topics. I was fortunate enough to be talking about new, refreshing tech topics while others were just pitching more iPhone stories. You have to know what's going to be big six months from now - particularly if you want to make it into long-leadtime magazines.

How do you keep yourself focused on marketing even when you're busy with assignments?

I get excited! My focus over the past six months has been my new book, Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture, but focusing on this one topic has made me restless about other ideas. I simply write them down as I get them and, when I get a spare moment, shoot off a query. Promoting the book has also served as an excellent excuse to revisit or touch base with old editors, letting them know about the book and perhaps pitching stories.

Damon Brown covers sex, music and technology with much aplomb, but he is first and foremost a pop culturist. A Northwestern grad, he is a feature writer for Playboy, SPIN, the New York Post, Inc., AARP The Magazine and Family Circle. Damon also writes several columns, including the weekly Inspector Gadget series for PlanetOut, the largest gay and lesbian website. His most recent book, Porn and Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture, was published in the fall.