Question of the day: I am a freelance writer with a few published clips (including the Christian Science Monitor). I'm working on a few FOB ideas for the glossies and wanted to know how to pitch these. Do you send a 'regular' query letter?
Congrats on your progress! Sounds like you are well on your way.
Wow, it's amazing how many questions I get on FOBs. I have a few in my file that I haven't gotten around to answering yet because I first wanted to note that folks can search the archives of the blog, and I think you'll find a slew of info on FOBs. If you search and still have questions, by all means, fire away!
But to answer this specific question, yes, I pitch FOBs in the same way that I pitch any other query: I send it via email to my editor. The difference with FOBs is that it's much more acceptable to pitch multiple ideas at once. Editors don't find that entirely annoying because they usually have a bunch of FOBs to assign, and in some ways, this allows them to pick and choose which, if any, of your ideas might work for their section.
So yes, just send a regular query, but in this case, you can just say, "I had some ideas that I thought might work for X section and have included them below." Then you can just pitch them in some sort of numerical column.
Does anyone else pitch FOBs differently?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Thanks for the info! Will take a look at your archives and see what comes up.
Have you considered tagging your posts or bunching them into categories? I usually find that very useful. If you label this post as FOB, for example,then one click on the label will lead your reader to all other posts labelled with FOB - an easy way to get readers to stay on your site for longer :)
Blogger makes this very easy to do, so please think about it :)
Chryselle
www.chryselle.net
Allison,
I agree with your advice on FOBs, as I usually do. Chryselle has a good point about tagging, but it would take a lot of effort to do this for several year's worth of posts. Why not just add a a search tool bar in your left hand navigation instead?
Susan
Uh..what's a FOB? ;)
I tag on my shore blog (downtheshorewithjen.blogspot.com) but haven't on my book blog (bookaweekwithjen.blogspot.com) because it didn't seem to fit the book-a-week-format. But now that I'm throwing in interviews and articles, I might go back and re-tag.
ANYWAY: I try not to pitch FOBs. I try to pich features and sometimes FOBs come out of them. With most editors I already know, I don't do too much research for an FOB pitch, but that's because we've already established a repor...
An FOB is a front-of-book, a short item that goes in the front of the magazine.
Thanks for the tips on tagging. I'll try to get around to that when I have some time.
Post a Comment