Lone Gunman

Arti­cle and book pitches — both suc­cess­ful and unsuc­cess­ful — can give you a small insight into an editor’s selec­tion process and the sales-side of a writer’s mind, as well as help you learn to write more effec­tively. As such I’ve started to col­lect sites fea­tur­ing pro­pos­als and pitches.

A recent addi­tion to this list is the pitch data­base from The Open Note­book; a col­lec­tion of writer-submitted pitches for sci­ence arti­cles that have been accepted for pub­lish­ing in many of my favourite places, such as Ars Tech­nica, Atlantic, Lapham’s Quar­terly, This Amer­i­can Life and Wired.

Of par­tic­u­lar note is a pitch from David Dobbs, writer of the Neu­ron Cul­ture blog. Pitch­ing Atlantic edi­tor Don Peck, Dobbs wrote an exten­sive pitch for The Orchid Chil­dren that led to the pub­li­ca­tion of a fan­tas­tic arti­cle, The Sci­ence of Suc­cess. Those who fol­low Dobbs’ blog will know that this in turn led to a book deal for The Orchid and the Dan­de­lion, Dobbs’ forth­com­ing book.

As a way to increase the qual­ity of the many sub­mis­sions they receive, This Amer­i­can Life staff offer some excel­lent tips on writ­ing pitches. They go fur­ther, pre­sent­ing four pitches that made it on air, describ­ing why they succeeded:

• Each of these sto­ries is a story in the most tra­di­tional sense: there are char­ac­ters in some sit­u­a­tion, and a conflict.
• These pitch­ers are clear about who the char­ac­ters are and what the con­flict is.
• Each of these sto­ries raises some big­ger ques­tion or issue, some uni­ver­sal thing to think about.
• Finally, they’re brief.

On that last one (brevity), they offer fur­ther advice. This time I find the advice goes much fur­ther than just radio or TV pitches, but pitches of any type:

Select a short, self-contained sec­tion that might make a nice […] story and send us a cou­ple para­graphs describ­ing that sec­tion. […] Assume any­thing over 12 pages will not be read. If you have a hard time choos­ing an excerpt, then spend a page or two explain­ing what your book or doc­u­men­tary is about, and telling us a few of your favorite moments. If you have some ongo­ing project on your web­site or blog that you think might be inter­est­ing on the show, don’t just send us a link to your archives — paste a few choice excerpts into your pitch. Help us love you! Help us find your best, most radio-friendly material!

I could/should have included this in my pre­vi­ous post on Baum, but I believe these merit sep­a­rate mention:

• Suc­cess­ful assign­ment pro­pos­als for pub­li­ca­tions such as Play­boy, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
• Unsuc­cess­ful assign­ment pro­pos­als for Gourmet, The New Yorker, and more.

As Jason points out, New Yorker edi­tor John Ben­net called Baum’s pro­posal for a story about a Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cial (pdf) “the best pro­posal he’d ever read”. Some facts from that story:

One Mex­i­can in ten lives in the United States, about half ille­gally. The wages they send home are Mexico’s third-biggest source of income after tourism and oil. In the demo­graphic under­tow of that tidal wave are 90 Mex­i­can microre­gions that have been drained of men. Migra­tion to the U.S. is as cen­tral to Mexico’s cul­ture as it is to its economy.

Update: Dan Baum now offers a proposal-writing ser­vice and as such his col­lec­tion of pro­pos­als have been removed. A real loss. Luck­ily for us, the pro­posal above (for a story about a Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cial) is still available.