19 Pitch Calls from Paying Publications
Where to Pitch This Week (12.13.24) | Editor requests from Glamour UK, the Washington Post, and CN Traveler. Plus paid opps to write about gaming, food, opinion, culture, and porn addiction.
Hello, happy Friday, and welcome to Where to Pitch This Week!
It’s Friday the 13th. Spooky! But also December. Merry! Have a Merrily Spooky day.
This coming week should still be pretty active with editors, though things might slow down after the 20th. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pitch, it just means it might take a little longer than usual to hear back from editors.
Life’s a Pitch!
Life’s A Pitch! A column where I take reader stories and help form them into sellable story ideas.
I’d love to get more ideas! If you have a nonfiction idea that you’d like to see in newspapers or magazines, send it in. Ideally, these would become 1000–1500 word essays, op-eds, or lightly reported stories, so keep that in mind when sharing. To submit your idea for a future edition, click here and fill out the form.
Tara’s Story:
This is a creative nonfiction piece about a garden of my youth built with Citibank money and left in the public trust. It is a memoir about people's motives, the importance of beauty, and hubris. As you can tell, it is hard to describe, and I'm wondering if any reels or videos ever help as part of a pitch. I illustrated with old family photos.
It features the tension between money and greed; sharing and grieving. I am descended from John Jay and the Founder of Citibank. My parents were hippies.
Tara, there are tons of potentially interesting things about this story.
I know you might be pitching this as a full memoir, but you could also pull little moments or individual stories and pitch those as essays. It won’t spoil your memoir, it will only get more people interested in your completed book.
For an essay pitch, what’s one standout moment in this story that’s never left your mind? Think of an image, piece of dialogue, or interaction. If you start from this potent but small moment, you’ll be able to address some of the memoir’s themes, but you won’t have to fit a book-length motif into a single essay.
Look for that micro-moment in your bigger story. Maybe it’s the fact that you, a descendant of John Jay, are standing up against Citibank. Maybe it’s a moment in the garden where people came together against greed.
Pick something that feels small but specific as the starting point of your essay. That will make it easier to fit into 1500-ish words and simpler to pitch.
And, you might pitch 10 stories based on this overall idea. You never have to sum it all up in one piece.
Also from Amber: Write Your Pitch in 30 Minutes - Free Workshop. Find out what editors want in a pitch, avoid common writer mistakes, and flesh out an idea in less much less time than an average TikTok doom scroll. Former students sold pitches to Huffington Post, Insider, and The Guardian after watching this workshop. Watch it now - for free!
Where to Pitch This Week: New Paid Writing Opportunities
Below, we’ve got editor requests from Glamour UK, the Washington Post, and Condé Nast Traveler. Plus paid opps to write about gaming, food, opinion, home renovation gone wrong, high/low culture, and porn addiction.