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.Editors find these helpful in determining whether your work would fit their plans for an upcoming issue.Perlstein (1993, personal communication), a freelance writer and author in Minneapolis, sold his first freelance article to The New York Times.Now he writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines.He recommends human­interest features as a type of article that may increase your chances for success: When pitching human interest pieces, writers have to tailor their queries to particular markets; editors scan through query letters very quickly, and unless a human interest piece pegs their niche exactly they'll drop a preprinted rejection slip in the SASE [self­addressed, stamped envelope] and be done with it.When I'm on a hot streak I get maybe one hit in 20 or 30 queries, many of them human interest pieces.San Diego freelancer Rathbone (1998, personal communication) pitches his ideas to editors this way: First, get the publication's proper name, address, and writer's guidelines.Usually the weary receptionist will recite these over the phone.Next, grab as many back issues as you can find at local thrift shops or a condominium's magazine­swap­pile.Your story must fit into a magazine's specific area, or the editor won't take it.Next, write a query letter with a grabbing first graph, followed by a short description of the story, as well as the reason why you are the best person to write it.Rules? Make sure it all fits on one page.If you can't sum it up in one page, you haven't found a decent angle for the story.If they haven't followed up in a month, send a follow­up letter.After 45 days, I'll give them a phone call.Don'ts? Don't call the publication unless it's to get their address and current editor's name.Editors don't like being bugged over the phone.And for crying out loud, don't spell anything wrong, either! Editors don't want to work and if they see any misspellings, they know they're in for some serious revisions on the manuscript.Another veteran freelance feature writer, Steele, writes about medicine, computers, chemicals, and drugs.Steele, from Ithaca, NewPage 490York, advocates being prepared when entering the query process.This is especially true of ''cold" queries: My basic rule in querying is to do a lot of homework beforehand.When an editor who knows you calls up and gives you an assignment, it's usually just an idea the editor had: How are lawn­care pesticides affecting the squirrels, or whatever.And you can approach an editor with whom you work regularly with something like that.But when you're querying cold, you have to have the work about half finished; do enough research so that you can show the editor there really is a story there and you know more about it than any other writer they might hire to cover it.'According to a study published in the New England Journal of Veterinary Medicine, squirrels in the northeast have experienced severe depression after eating nuts sprayed with weed killer, and have been known to carry off small children.I plan to travel to Wallingford, Connecticut and interview Mrs.Ida Klumph, the distraught mother who, after innocently killing a few weeds.' The last paragraph of a query letter is always a brief resume listing publications in which I've been published.At the beginning I made up stuff, or at least exaggerated its importance.(1993, personal communication) Although most articles need proposals or queries to precede them, some articles do not.Publication editors work in different ways.You just have to know the market.This is how Grossman (1998, personal communication) described the process in the United Kingdom: I don't query publications, except very rarely.The first article I ever got paid for writing was a query, to the Women's Page editor of The Guardian newspaper.It was a piece about the 20th anniversary of the Irish Family Planning Association, an organization which had been illegal for the first 10 years of its existence, and which was celebrating its 20th birthday by being prosecuted for selling condoms at a Dublin record store.She asked to see clippings, so I sent her a piece from an American humanist magazine on a related subject (church and state in Ireland), and told her I would write the piece on spec.I did, and she bought it.Because she answers letters, the once or twice since I've had ideas to suggest, I've written to her.But editors in London really work on the telephone, so mostly I phone them.I try to avoid days when I know specific editors are trying to put their pages to bed.Everything in London is personal contacts, anyway, and now that I've been around for a few yearsPage 491sometimes people call me and offer me work through recommendations.Also, in the computer world, all the editors and freelancers use the same conferencing system, called CIX;many of the magazines have conferences on there, too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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