Writers Blog 7
This week we talked a lot about different publications and how to pitch our stories. Writing a good pitch is the first step to having a piece published. I found this to be a really good lesson not only for writers but also for the general workforce. There will come a time when most of us have to pitch our ideas for something, maybe not writing, but this will be good practice to figure out what makes a good pitch. As we went over in class, a pitch makes the case of why doing a story is important and why you’re the best person to do it. A lot of it is selling yourself.
In this week’s reading by Baker, it talked about grabbing the editor’s attention. This is important when remembering that the pitch is like the first impression. I also found it funny how he talked about getting submissions that did not apply to their publications. When I was searching for publications to pitch to, I was looking for ones that accepted social issues or were more open to topics. I did not click on ones that looked like they wanted humor, knowing that this assignment was not humor.
I looked at a few different publications that I thought could work for me. The first one that I found was Brain Labs on Medium. I found this one from the link listed on Monday’s slides. The main thing that drew me in when looking at their submission guidelines was their line that says “Your ideas about how the world works”. They welcome any subjects really but one I noticed was social sciences. I thought Brain Labs could be a good publication for this assignment. I also liked the way their guidelines were set up, it seemed very easygoing and not as stressful as some of the other publications.
The other publication that I found that I thought could work was Curious Green Humans also on Medium. I found this one the same way as the last one. This one very clearly focuses on climate change and the environment. I thought this one could work since one of my ideas for this assignment was climate change and environmental degradation. I liked this publication a lot too, but I also think it’s an important one on Medium because I don’t feel like there is a lot of open writing like this focused on climate change.
I want to look at more publications before I decide which one to pitch to but these were just two I found already that seemed good. I found the worksheet we did on the different publications very helpful. For a lot of them, I was struggling to find a lot of the information. I think the worksheet helped me explore these publications and also know where to look. I think it was really helpful for this assignment but also when trying to find this information in the future. I think it also helped when looking at different publications and helped me learn more about them.
