The trick that helps me get over my fear of pitching
Spoiler alert: It's a simple Excel file đ€
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Sending new proposals to potential clients - itâs something of a day job for many creative freelancers, especially now that we have to pencil in so many projects. And going by the many responses we received to a previous newsletter about handling rejection, pitching is one of the hardest things about being a freelancer for many of you.
The thing that you â and I â seem to struggle with, is that pitching is both personal and impersonal. Itâs personal because as creative freelancers we often feel like we are our work. Youâre the one who came up with the idea, who thought it was good enough for a pitch and who was going to execute it, so how could you not take a no personally?
I donât know what a weasel motif is, but this is definitely what my face looks like when I get a rejection. Lifted from a very relatable comic by Anna Haifisch.
At the same time, pitching feels mega impersonal since it is often done over an email to a person youâve never spoken to, seated in an office that you will never see from the inside and met with only radio silence.
This paradox is the reason that I always put âpitchingâ on my weekly to-do list and that I postpone it just as often. I refine my ideas endlessly and daydream about the beautiful stories they could turn into. As long as I keep mulling over my ideas, I donât have to open them up to criticism, but it also means they remain just that â ideas.
After your responses to my newsletter, I decided it was time for change. I want to get better at letting go of proposals and not take rejections so personally. For inspiration, I turned to the pitching overviews travel journalist Lola Akinmade Ă kerström has been keeping and publishing for years. In them, she writes down whom she has pitched what, the responses sheâs received and what she can learn from them.
I created my own Excel file seven weeks ago. It details the places Iâve pitched, when to send a follow-up and the responses Iâve gotten. Itâs too early days to draw any big conclusions, but one thing has definitely changed: the overview has motivated me to send so many more pitches. Instead of taking every rejection personally, I now think of pitching as a sort of data collection process, one that will be useful to me down the road. A rejection, too, is a piece of information and a cell to complete.
Because rejections are also valuable. When you cold pitch a big company, youâre not always sure which department or employee to reach out to. A response to your proposal â whatever it is â tells you whether youâve approached the right person. Rejections can also be a way to get to know a client better. Some editors told me which types of subjects they were interested in covering. Others told me their rates (some turned out not to pay their writers, also good to know). Even others recommended I get in touch with other publications that they believed would be a better fit for my idea.
By tracking both the pitches that were accepted and the ones that got turned down, Iâve come to realise that a yes or no depends on so many factors that have nothing to do with you or your proposal. The commissioning clientâs budget or schedule for instance â neither of which you are privy to as a freelancer. That is, unless you pitch them and ask.
The fact that Iâve put my pitches in a boring spreadsheet doesnât take away from the fact that I still believe in my stories and that I am itching to write them. The times that I was able to fill a cell with green, I was just as enthusiastic to start researching, pitching and writing as always. But taking a different approach to pitching has meant putting less emotional labour into the pitching process, which leaves me with more energy for the work I actually enjoy doing.
Do you track what happens to your pitches? Let us know at freelancerthefriendly@gmail.com
Speak soon,
Selma
What Iâm watching, reading and listening to this week:
Albert Azis-Clauson, founder of the Underpinned freelance platform, offers a couple of solid tips to pitch during a pandemic.
Interesting food-for-thought question: will our cities start to look differently if more and more people start working from home?
For LadyScience.com, I sproke to Dr. Jess Wade, a physics postdoc at Imperial College London, and Dr. Clara Barker, a materials scientist at Oxford University, about why glossy diversity campaigns wonât work, unless the culture of science changes first.Â
This newsletter was written by Selma Franssen. Selma is a Dutch freelance journalist living in Brussels. She is the author of Vriendschap in tijden van eenzaamheid and has written for Charlie Magazine, OneWorld, De Morgen, De Standaard, The New Statesman, Bustle, Knack, VPRO and Newsweek.
Youâll hear from Linda A. Thompson in two weeks, a Belgian freelance journalist who writers about all things law and social justice. Sheâs written for Bloomberg Law, Deutsche Welle, OZY, International Politics & Society, USA Today, IJNet, Underpinned and Equal Times.