Sign up for The Media Today, CJRâs daily newsletter.
Early in my freelancing career, I pitched a story to Psychology Today that was resoundingly declined. It felt as if the editor had tunneled through my Dell and socked me square in the nose. Years passed. Hurt turned into self-effacement. The rejection was so harsh, I would joke, I considered entering the priesthood.
Years later, as I noodled on a story about the worst freelance pitch rejections, I tracked down the offending emailâand felt like a stooge. My then-tender ego had construed a gentle rebuff (to a pitch on the psychology of retail hiring) as a career-ending insult.
ICYMI:Â NBC journalist’s harassment allegations revealed. Less than 24 hrs later, a disturbing tweet.
Hereâs the November 2007 email, from former senior editor Jay Dixit, in its entirety: âThanks for the query. We’re going to pass on this. I don’t think it has enough applicability and relevance to most readers and not enough narrative or drama for them to be interested in it if it doesn’t affect them.â
So, the response wasnât personal. I now realize it was almost remarkable. Here it was, that glorious escape from writerly purgatory, a prompt answer to a query.
Editor silence is the patient zero of every freelance annoyance, âall sort of all wrapped together in what you could file under respect for your writers,â says Jen A. Miller, the author of Running: A Love Story and a guru of sorts in the freelance community.
I havenât heard anything on my pitch. That check still hasnât arrived. I have no idea when Iâm getting corrections back. Some combination of these complaints run through my head daily. It affects every freelancer and can pop up anytime. Even Taffy Brodesser-Akner, one of the nationâs most successful freelance writers before she joined The New York Times this year, has been a victim. Name a high-profile publicationâESPN the Magazine, GQ, Texas Monthlyâand you likely encountered her byline in recent years.
âI think people who ignore the little people also ignore the big ones, or mistreat them in other strange ways: not reading drafts quickly, circulating stories before they even talk to the writer about the shape of the story (as if the story doesn’t contain our hearts and souls),â she says. âAll my editors now are ones who took my calls then.â
RELATED:Â The Washington Post’s secret weapon
Editor silence mixes the cold reality of business with the human desire to feel wanted. Any response from an editor proves weâre not tumbling through a chasm of loneliness punctuated with snack breaks. Somebody caresâand may pay us.
All my editors now are ones who took my calls then.
***
âTHE WAY I SEE IT, freelance writing is all about hope,â says Alexander Huls, who has written for Esquire and Pacific Standard. âHope that check will come in. Hope that your story idea is good. Hope that sources will agree to talk to you. I think a big reason why it can be a little demoralizing when you don’t hear back from an editor about a pitch is because that hopeâa freelancer’s life forceâgets pummeled a bit.â
So does the wallet. As journalist and author Jancee Dunn (How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids) notes, most of her pitches are time-sensitive. When an editor dallies, âthe idea is in danger of being picked up by another writer, especially in the Internet age.â
Film writer Noah Gittell feels this acutely; the topics he explores for publications such as The Economist and The Guardian require a quick reply: for example, an essay, tied to The Dark Towerâs disappointing box office performance, on how Matthew McConaughey needs another âMcConnaisance.â
âThe difficulty is there are so many film critics out there who are having somewhat similar takes on a movie,â he says. âIf you have an idea that you think is a really good idea that youâre excited about, you have to get a response quickly or else a) somebody else is going to write your article or b) the movie is going to maybe not do very well, or something is going to happen, and itâs going to be out of the news cycle.â When an editor doesnât respond, Gittell adds, âevery hour feels like itâs precious.â
For Alex Wong (The New Yorker, The Undefeated), who frequently writes longer pieces, silence puts him in an awkward position: Is an editor uninterested, or do they like the idea but cannot respond?
ICYMI:Â Prominent journalists accused of sexual misconduct
âThe silence makes it hard to distinguish the two,â he says. âAnd, in the meantime, it slows down the assembly line process of taking that pitch elsewhere, and holds back the potential of starting a story.â Or as Andrea King Collier, a 25-year-freelance veteran, puts it: âWhenever you let stories sit, you are letting money sit.â
Whenever you let stories sit, you are letting money sit.
***
LIKE MOST WRITERS, I know not to take this personally. But itâs a personal business.
Collier is determined to âkeep my own powerâ as a freelancer. âSo much of my career in the last three, four years has been over creating hacks that makes that less painful to me,â she says. Part of that involved creating a series of rules and guidelines. Among them: if Collier pitches a publication and hears nothing, she gets to decide when to withdraw the offer. Usually, two weeks on a feature is when she moves on.
Jason Fagone (The Woman Who Smashed Codes) covered querying editors on his Kill Fee podcast and on Medium. He recommends writers move on after 48 hours if they donât hear anything. Gittell cannot afford to wait that long: He pitches multiple outlets simultaneously.
âI know a lot of my colleagues are very reticent about double-pitching, or theyâll give an editor two or three days to respond before they pitch somewhere else,â he says. âI know some people who will wait a week before they pitch somewhere else. In this environment, that seems like suicide to me. I canât imagine waiting that long. Your chances of getting something placed at that point are just nil.â
Editors have told Fagone they need 72 hours or a week to reply. They invite follow-ups. He sympathizes with editorsâ workloadsâso did nearly every writer I interviewedâbut freelancers must âdraw a boxâ around idle time for the sake of their sanity and productivity.
âAs a freelancer, really the only thing you can control is how you spend your own time,â Fagone says. âOnce you start to cede control over your ability to schedule your own idea generation and development process, you donât really have control of your life anymore. Also, there are a lot of different places to land stories. I think young writers tend to get fixated on one place or another or one editor or another, but really itâs a market. I think given the reality that editors read pitches very quickly and make decisions very quickly, even if they donât respond quickly, I think freelancers should move on quickly too if they donât hear back.â
Young writers, Collier says, lack self-confidence. Namely, they donât think about shopping the story around or reframing it to sell to another outlet. Instead, she explains, theyâre so happy to have a story somebody wants that they become Sally Field at the 1984 Academy Awards.
âI want them to like me, but Iâve also got to keep food on the table and the lights on,â says Collier, whose numerous bylines include National Geographic, Salon, and AARP the Magazine. âDo you know how long it really takes for a freelancer to get the fact that they are a business? It doesnât happen the day you do it. It doesnât happen that first year.â
Monogamy makes little sense to Fagone, who believes that if a writer has filed a story that an editor is sitting onâbut has not signed a contractâthey should consider taking the story elsewhere.
âThe market for freelance stories is so diverse and so open,â he says. âI just donât think it makes sense to waste timeâŚThereâs something about the culture of the industry that encourages a kind of submissiveness. Thereâs never just one place to land an idea, and thereâs never just one editor who would give it a sympathetic read.â
You aim to develop a network of editors who pay you on time, whose rhythms and communication patterns you know. They like your work; you like them. Though, Wong warns, you may not hear from them. (Unfortunately, heâs right.) You ditch the hurt and embrace getting the idea out there. This isnât about finding your true love as a writer. Itâs learning how passion and practicality can co-exist. Dating is a frequent comparison and an apt one.
Most editors that I work with are very cool. They want to run good stories. They want to keep their freelancers happy, but occasionally thereâs going to be somebody whoâs a dickhead.
âYou have to know when to say âscrew thisâ and you have to know when to be chill, and itâs going to be different in every circumstance,â says Luke OâNeil, best known for his work at Esquire. âI think if you use your instincts youâre going to know whether or not itâs a person youâre working with in good faith whoâs just either crazy busy or has circumstances out of their control that is going to try to do the right thing by you, or if itâs somebody who doesnât really give a shit about you. The only way to get a feel for that is through experience and trial and error. Most editors that I work with are very cool. They want to run good stories. They want to keep their freelancers happy, but occasionally thereâs going to be somebody whoâs a dickhead.â
The âsame radar for social cuesâ applies here, OâNeil says. âIf someone seems like they donât give a fuck about you, they probably donât.â
Alex French, now a writer at large at Esquire, borrows a phrase from Jesusâs Son: Donât crush the bunny. In other words: Play it cool. When he was a fact-checker at GQ, French began freelancing there. He started pitching ambitious stories. A lot. The editor stopped responding. Heâd walk by his office. A lot. âBecause he sees me, heâs going to be reminded of my pitchâ was Frenchâs reasoning. That stopped working. He began asking colleagues close to the editor for updates. French tried to figure out how to run into him on the subway platform or the Conde Nast elevator. His desperation was palpable. The bunny was crushed to goo.
GQ was a great place to work, French says. For a while, it became âa personal snakepit with my own anxiety.â It was a reprieve when the editor left.
âI think a lot of people behave this way,â French says, âbut nobody acknowledges it publicly.â
***
IT’S A BUSINESS for the writers, and itâs a business for the editors. As newsrooms contract, editors get more responsibility. A pitch or a follow-up on revisions may not be on the top of their list, even if itâs on the top of ours. âItâs never personal, ever,â Fagone says. âItâs just the mechanics of how these places work.â
âOne editor went to lunch with me and showed me her phone afterwards,â Dunn says. âIn the course of a one-hour lunch, she had received 150 emails. So they are just barraged. I didn’t hear from an editor recently for a while, and when she finally resurfaced, she apologized and explained that after a big wave of layoffs at her magazine, she is now doing the work of three editors. This happens so often, and it makes me feel sorry for them, which tamps down the frustration.â
Ted Scheinman, senior editor at Pacific Standard, gets up to 30 cold pitches a day. His boss, Nick Jackson, is big on respecting writers, so Scheinman devotes an hour a day to responses. Offering prospective writers what he wants is time-consuming and âa constant struggle,â but the former freelancer finds it worthwhile. Regularly, writers who miss the mark initially come back with a usable pitch after Scheinman spells out what he wants. The magazine gets a wider range of material and buoys its reputation as a writer-friendly publication.
âBeing as transparent as possible, that word gets out,â he says. âSometimes Iâll hear from a first-time pitcher, âHey, so Iâve heard youâre mainly looking for reported culture features for the back of the book.â Thatâs great. That really simplifies my job. If you treat freelancers decently, like human beings and like colleagues, then that also gets around among freelancers. You have some goodwill.â
Iâd probably say that if a writer doesnât hear from me, itâs 95 percent of the time thatâs my fault, not theirs.
Timing is huge for editors. Consider Naila-Jean Meyers, a senior editor at The New York Timesâ sports department. She has weekends off, so an email written on Saturday will get buried under âprobably 150 other emailsâ by Monday morning. When Meyers covered the US Open this summer, she only answered tennis-related emails. When we talked in late September, she had no room for pitched stories until at least mid-October. On top of that, the paperâs sports department was relocating that dayâjust after its editing structure was overhauled.
âIâd probably say that if a writer doesnât hear from me, itâs 95 percent of the time thatâs my fault, not theirs,â Meyers says. âI get a lot of email. Itâs not easy to keep up with all of it. At a really basic level thatâs what it is: Keeping up with correspondence is difficult. I get a lot and It piles on and it piles on. If I donât answer right away, then the chances of me forgetting it or the chance that I never read it in the first place are pretty high. So I would hope that reporters donât take silence personally, because I would be very hard-pressed to think of a reason why it would be personal, and not just me getting bogged down in my own emails and not having a very good system for managing story pitches specifically.â
Not having an easy answerâor having to forward an emailâmeans a writer could be waiting. âI think those can get caught in a pile,â Meyers says. âI wish, after all these years, I had a better system for it. I have yet to commit to anything so efficient.â
âThereâs no one way to do this shit right right now,â Scheinman says.
***
SOME OUTLETS (such as The Washington Post) provide a specific online forum to pitch or be considered for stories. More provide instructions on how to query. Editors provide calls for pitches and offer tips on Twitter, the 24-hour hotel bar of journalist social media. Yet the silent treatment persists.
Programs donât answer pitches or send invoices to accounts payable. People do. Editors change jobs, change their minds, or, in Millerâs case, unexpectedly die (she wouldnât get into the details out of respect for the editorâs family). OâNeil spent over a yearâincluding discussions and reportingâwaiting for The New York Times Magazine to move on his story. It was relegated to its website, where he was paid less than the print rate. OâNeil declined to sell it elsewhere for fear heâd have to do a full-scale rewrite. âItâs one of those examples where youâve just got to kind of suck it up,â he says. âIâd only do it for a place like The Times. I wouldnât do it for some regular-ass website.â Former Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist John Gonzalez loves freelancing full-time. He hated chasing down around $8,000 in fees from airline magazines. âI think they were trying to play fast and loose with books,â he says. When his editorial contact, a friend, finally surfaced, he corrected Gonzalezâs grammar. The relationship, both personal and professional, ended. It took almost a year for Gonzalez to get paid.
When it comes to (normal) day-to-day correspondence, Dunn wonders if thereâs a better way. Even responding ânoâ to a pitch would work. âIt takes a few seconds,â she says, âand it’s so much better than being ghosted.â
Freelancers owe it to themselves to follow up or to move on. âI donât take it personally,â Meyers says, if a writer lands a pitch originally sent to her elsewhere. âItâs your work, you want to get it placed, and if I didnât get back to you fast enough thatâs on me.â
All Miller asks is for editors to keep writers theyâre working with informed, and to remember who is on the other side. âIf you think a writer is a commodity that you can discard,â she says, âthen a magazine is a commodity that I can discard too.âÂ
OK, sometimes it is personal.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a quoted source after additional reporting came to our attention.
RELATED:Â Two dozen freelance journalists reveal the best outlets to pitch
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.