Pitching In A Pandemic And Navigating Unknowns
Look, we’re lost right now. There’s no easy way to say that, but we are.
The first step to finding your way home in these circumstances? It’s to admit that you’re lost. Even if it makes you cry. It’s ok; shed some tears, feel the anxiety, and then take a deep breath and admit it. We’re lost, and we’ve got some work to do to find our way back.
To what? To normality. To financial stability. To reliable income streams. To pitches that get commissioned. To work that comes our way because editors know us and like us. To the land of plentiful work, where we thought freelancing was tough but actually it had nothing on this.
I left a voice note for one of my dearest students tonight – I owe her a few days of pitching coaching that got put on hold when COVID-19 upended everything for everyone. “I feel like a fraud,” I said, before offering her money back instead of agreeing to work with her this week. “I don’t know what’s going to work in this context. I’ve got no answers, I’m as lost as you are.”
It was hard to admit, because I’m used to having answers. I get paid to share those answers with people and our training business has taken off because those answers often turn out to be on the money, so people recommend us to their mates. I can’t always explain the answers, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had one of those Muse Flash emails that goes something like ‘I could be wrong, this is based on nothing more than a hunch, but if I were you I’d pitch this to….’ More often than not those hunches turn out to be pretty bloody good, and the results speak for themselves. The testimonials, the lovely online community of ex-students who stick around long after the course has finished, and the fact that we have to keep running courses cos people keep asking for them.
Except this is different. We don’t really know what to tell you about how to pitch in a pandemic. We don’t know if our industry is finally about to collapse or if the economy is going to recover any time soon. We don’t why so many editors have gone so quiet. We don’t know if making a living as a freelance writer is still something we can tell people is possible. We don’t know. We’re lost, and we thought there was a map in the glove box but it turns out it’s not there.
But here’s what we DO know.
1. We all fall back into bad pitching habits when we’re under pressure.
If you’ve done our Cracking Pitches course, it’s fair to say you’ve got some dodgy old pitching habits from your past that you THINK you’ve long since laid to rest. We know this is true because we remember those first few pitches you shared with us before we set you on the path to enlightenment. (Sorry.)
And the thing about bad pitching habits is that they tend to rear their ugly heads at the very moment that we really need to up our pitching game. Such as in the midst of a global pandemic when we’re pitching our socks off cos we’re afraid we won’t be able to eat next month if we don’t start landing some commissions.
Trust us, you are probably pitching really badly right now. It happens to us all; pressure stymies our creativity and makes us panic-pitch. That’s why it doesn’t really matter if you send 100 pitches this week or not. 100 weak pitches are still weak pitches, no matter how many times you count them.
The antidote to this is to STOP. Pause. Breathe. Assess the damage. If you’ve sent sixteen pitches to Red this week alone, now is not the time to send the seventeenth. It’s time to take stock, to have an Artist’s Date – you can go almost anywhere in the world right now for free without leaving your sofa, so make the most of it. It’s also the time to remind yourself of the principles of good pitching. Revisit our course notes, fling your pitch in our secret Facebook group for an appraisal if you’re an ex-student, or ask a mate with a decent pitching success rate to take a look and tell you where you might be going wrong. Hell, if you’re really stuck then send it to us and we’ll give it the once-over.
2. Now is not the time to stop doing what works.
Yeah, things feel scary at the moment. Yes, it feels like we might never work again. And yes, working out what editors need or want right now is as torturous as trying to tell whether the person you fancied when you were 13 even knew of your existence. The difference is, you have skills now that you didn’t have when you were 13. You do. The odds are that you’re a decent writer with some impressive clippings to your name. You probably know a thing or two about how to eke an income with your words, so this is NOT the moment to convince yourself that you’re a fraud or a no-hoper. For the love of God, this – more than any other moment in your pitching past – is the moment to dig deep for a bit of self-belief and to pitch as if your life depends on it.
Don’t flake out on us now. Save it for When This Is All Over. Schedule it for when commissioning budgets are unfrozen and you’ll be able to afford a duvet day. For today, tell your writing demons to STFU and just crack the hell on doing what you know works.
Dream up dazzling ideas that capture the zeitgeist and speak light to the fears that readers are grappling with. Mine your own experience for stories that will resonate with people who, until you write that piece, will feel like they’re the only person on the planet going through that particular thing. Write pitches that sing. Email your editors and clients to ask how they are and what they need and whether you can help. They can only say no. But they might say yes, and they’ll remember that you asked. Pitch new markets without going all timid about it. Be bold, be assertive and remember that you have as good a chance as anyone of getting commissioned right now. Why SHOULDN’T it be you? Remind yourself what works, and do it doggedly.
3. When nothing is certain, everything is possible.
That’s it really. I can’t explain this much beyond telling you that I live in a house that backs onto a rugged golf course that sweeps down to a beach on the northernmost tip of Northern Ireland. It feels like the edge of the world and the safest place to be in a pandemic. Right now, living here feels like the most unimaginable gift and privilege.
And yet we live here because we ended up homeless in the most spectacularly unexpected way almost three years ago, right around the time that our main income vanished overnight in similarly WTAF fashion. And if we hadn’t lived through those dark days, punctuated with daily panic attacks and wakeful nights full of what-ifs, we would never have been in a position to leap when this incredible house came up for rent in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. From some of the most dreadful and difficult days of my life came a plot twist that I thank my lucky stars for every single evening – especially when I get to watch the sun dip behind that coastline from the cosy comfort of my sofa.
I’m not saying there are silver linings to the horror that we’re all going through right now. I’m just saying that when nothing is certain, everything is possible. And when that’s the case, even experiences that feel like an unmitigated disaster can, in time, turn out to be something very different from what we feared they were.
Hold tight, pitchers. We’re lost, but we’ll find our way through.