I’ll you let you in on a little secret: I don’t spend hours obsessing over queries, polishing each one to Pulitzer-worthy perfection. Most of my queries are written in under an hour, two tops if it’s a really meaty topic or top-tier market.
Why?
There are tons of reasons why editors reject queries and most of them are out of my control. Half the time it feels like my email goes into a giant black hole, so it doesn’t really matter how sparkling my prose or brilliant my idea.
I try not to get too attached to one query (it’s too emotionally draining) and focus on having several ideas circulating at once to up my odds. And so far, I’m not doing too badly at this numbers game. I follow my instincts, give query drafts a quick read for typos or other mistakes, then send those babies out in cyberspace and hope for the best. Part of this is practice: once you’ve written enough queries you know how to pull out the salient points and catch an editor’s attention quickly.
How long do you spend on queries? Do you focus on quality or quantity? Do tell!
UPDATE: A colleague sent me this article on the science of pitching magazines. It’s written by a journalism prof whose features have appeared in Wired, The NY Times, and The New Yorker, so she clearly knows her stuff. And much of her advice is the exact opposite of what I wrote above! I’d be very reluctant to send a “pre-pitch” to a busy editor or spend hours conducting exploratory interviews, but I’m mainly pitching service pieces and she’s pitching features. So I guess it also depends on the nature of your stories, too.
Flickr photo courtesy of RBerteig
It depends on the topic. I'm currently researching an idea, so I'll spend some time getting familiar with the topic (I'll know enough to not sound totally clueless in the query) but probably only spend an hour or so on the query itself. I've learned not to stress about this process too much–as you said, there could be any number of reasons why your idea is accepted or rejected.
Susan – you really struck a chord with me about queries being emotionally draining.
Obviously there are the things I write that are important to me and on those queries I spend more time. But mostly I crank out queries quickly, in about an hour. Gosh sometimes if I have something that I think would be easy to write for a fairly low-paying market, I'll just crank off the query in 15 minutes.
I think if I stumbled on to something that would be an amazing story, and we're talking National Geographic amazing, sure I'd spend more time on it. And of course, the queries I really moon over for days on end, are those for the children's lit writing that I do for no pay at all (well, yet anyway)!
One thing that did strike me about those conference notes was the amount of research mentioned, something like researching 10 stories but ultimately only pitching one. It seemed like a lot of work, for one story, that might not even be accepted. I don't know if I could make a living that way.
Thanks, Janet and Sara!
I admit that there have been a few instances where I spent more time on a query. For instance, there's a feature article I'm working on now that I initially started writing for a class. I didn't write the full article for class, but I did spend some time on the phone with a source figuring out her story. Most of that information was NOT included in my query because it seemed like overkill, but having that information certainly helped. I'm also working on a query where I reached out to a source and she suggested we meet for coffee. I agreed, since she's local, and it will give me a deeper sense of what the story is. But I wouldn't do this type of work for any old market (both of these are dream assignments!).
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I tend to spend a fair amount of time tailoring queries to individual markets. But because I write on a fairly specific range of topics, I can easily adapt old queries and previously used paragraphs. The longer I play this game, the less time I take for the whole process.
I like the link you posted, but it really depends on how you define features. If we're talking 10,000-word narrative pieces, then all the advice by that writer is absolutely spot on. But most of us pitch 2,000-3,000 word features, which are a whole other beast.
I don't think there's any right or wrong way to do it. It entirely depends on the story you're pitching, the level of interaction you've had with the editor, and the process of the magazine in question. I've had a 5,000 word story assigned on one sentence alone by a publication and editor I'd never previously worked with.
I spent a lot of time on my pitches early on in my career (because like the editors, I too didn't know if I could pull a piece off), but now my queries are mostly limited to a paragraph at most, no matter who I'm writing it for.
I think my opinion is – if you have to spend a long time on a query to make it good, your idea isn't fleshed out enough. You should be able to say concretely, "First I will look at this. Then, I will talk about this. Finally, I will conclude with this." If you can't, that's when you obsess over it; maybe because subconsciously you know you need to give it more thought in order to succeed?