Pitching the World

Today my four line wonder invaded seven countries: the Country Gentleman’s Association, Country Homes and Interiors, Country Life, Country Living, Country Smallholding, Country Walking and Countryman. In case you’re not up to speed and wondering what the hell “my four line wonder” is, then I suggest you read yesterday’s post. If you’re not up to speed and wondering if this blog gets any good: it doesn’t.

So far, only one of the countries has replied, saying that they were “always interested interested in new writers, particularly of your pedigree”. Pitchingtheworld didn’t know that he had pedigree. Out of yesterday’s batch they’ve pretty much all replied and apart from one of the kindest rejections I’ve ever received, they’ve all said that they have the budget to hire freelancers and have encouraged me to pitch more thoroughly. Because of the varying nature of the magazines – on diving, architecture, climbing, snooker, insurance etc. – I feel on the verge of cracking what I set out to do with this project when it started in late September. I think what I set out to do (I was a little heady at the time) was get published in more (and more esoteric) magazines than anyone else in the country. I also wanted to keep occupied. And learn stuff. And perhaps say something about the state of journalism. Perhaps I’m starting to do all of these things. And perhaps the state of journalism isn’t as bleak as many people seem to think it is. If one four line email (a four line wonder, if you like) sent to ten magazines can provoke eight promising leads and a relationship, however slight, with eight different editors then the future might not be so bad.

Of course the future will be so bad. The above post is quite poorly written and if I’ve ever had any writing skills then they’re clearly evaporating. It seems to be the pitchingtheworld way: get yourself into a spectacular position, and then spectacularly flap it up. Oh well.

Getting motivated can be tough. You’ve seen me, you know what I’m about. I’m about dodging work and saying I’m going to do certain things and not doing them and generally not having the motivation or skills to see this project through. But I’ve undergone a bit of a sea change in my thinking and, if you had seen me earlier today, you would have seen me craft a four sentence long letter that has been sent (so far) to eight magazines. These magazines included Horse & Hound, Hortus, Housebuilder, Diver Magazine, Electrical Review and Snooker Scene. Out of the eight, two emails didn’t reach their targets, but out of the remaining six, two eds have already replied saying that they like the look of me, encouraging me to pitch more fully and giving one or two writer’s guidelines. 

God, what an arresting opening paragraph. I may well be the new Boz. But, I do have a point to make. The point, is that this morning has given me a fair amount of encouragement: if I send off my four sentence long email to another 100 places, I can expect a success rate of around 25% – perhaps a bit more. “Success rate” in this instance, meaning opening up new markets that I could potentially write for. This sliver of encouragement has also made me see the industry in a fresh light: there is a lot of work out there and some of it pays pretty well (one of the six publications is talking about 40p a word), but you have to hunt for it, and you have to be able to write a killer four sentence email. 

Now watch as I send this “killer” email to another 100 places and I’m either ignored or told to go and do something to myself. By that, I mean told to go fuck myself, but you probably didn’t need the clarification.

Now, yesterday when I said: “I’ll also be updating my progress daily (possibly twice daily – actually no way) from now on. This shit just got real” I meant it as a joke. Okay, I didn’t really, but in retrospect it seems a little hasty. For example, it’s now about 20 minutes away from the end of the day and I haven’t felt inclined to update anything, as there’s precious little to update. I’ve worked on features and smoked (yet not drank – a miracle) and that’s about all. Hardly worth posting then, except to keep a promise for at least one day, and also to say I will be posting more regularly but only when there’s at least a wisp of something to report. There’s no point just doing this: quoting part of yesterday’s post and then banging on about pretty much nothing.

Agreed? Good. This shit just got real again.

Holy cow indeed, and apologies for the long break. I’ve been in a funk, you see, and it was a funk that showed no signs of becoming less funky until sometime in the middle of last night when I decided, once and for all, to pull my act together and wrap this thing up. By the end of this month I’ll pitch another 300 magazines, no excuses. That, I realise, sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous both because it’s a considerable amount of work (regular readers will have caught me trying to outmanoeuvre considerable amounts of work in the past), and also because pitchingtheworld so far has been littered with empty and easily broken promises.

Not this time though. No way. I’ll be tearing back into that book this afternoon and continue to tear into it until I’m done. No excuses. Well, a few excuses: I’ve got a feature to write today, and another tomorrow, and a talk to organise, and a possible gig reviewing 70 restaurants to get signed off – but then, when that’s all done, no excuses. None. Until I think up some new ones.

I’ll also be updating my progress daily (possibly twice daily – actually no way) from now on. This shit just got real.

The letter below doesn’t require a great deal of explanation. For those of you who don’t know, Paul Dacre is the editor of the Daily Mail and chairman of the PCC’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee. He’s also a good egg. I was paid this morning. 

Dear Paul Dacre,
I’ve no idea if this will reach you, be ignored, or be binned, so I’ll endeavour to be brief.
In short, I’m in a tight spot. Earlier this week I was due a payment from the Daily Mail for a feature I had filed on November 5th. Today – and despite assurances to the contrary – I’ve just found out that the invoice will not be processed until the second week of January. For many writers, one unpaid invoice in December wouldn’t cause a great deal of alarm, but for this writer it has. I was banking on that payment to get me through Christmas and all the expense involved; without it, it looks as if I’m going to have to come up with novel (i.e. badly homemade) gifts for people, or no gifts at all.
I was wondering then, if you were able to use your not inconsiderable clout and get the invoice paid this month, the month I was expecting it. I understand this is an unorthodox (and no doubt annoying) approach in getting payment, but perhaps you could inject a little Christmas spirit into my life. It’s probably scant consolation, but I run an award-winning blog read mainly by journalists, and I would love to title my next post: “Paul Dacre – A Good Egg”.
Can you be a good egg?
Merry Christmas,

Pitchingtheworld

Some people I spoke to last night had some interesting things to say about Pitching the World. One of those people was a girl at a party. Another one of those people was my wife. The girl at a party reckoned she had been on this award-winning fucker, but had cause to read some posts “three or more times” to understand them. Is Pitching the World sometimes impenetrable? Is my snazzy journo-speak offputting? All this talk of copy, filing, rewrites, deadlines and so forth – although that, really, is about as technical as it gets, I don’t really know many more journalistic terms – is it not what you want? Maybe I can do a glossary. Or maybe – check this out – I can write with a little more clarity.

Second then, my wife. She claims – and you’ve got to hear this, it’s ridiculous – she claims that I’ve exaggerated my heavy drinking, poverty, cigarette smoking and general deadbeatness in order to impress readers and present an image of myself of how I would like to be. Her argument for this, being that I “buy the most expensive sausages in the supermarket”. Now, my wife is mostly brilliant, but here she’s talking complete rot. I could go into the ins and outs of why it’s bullshit, but I’m drunk, and poor and smoking four cigarettes at once. I’ve also got to file some copy, copy that was in before the deadline but had to be rewritten.

Plus, if that’s not enough to deal with, I’ve got my trial at the peerless Colchester United tomorrow and need to spend the next few hours having a series of panic attacks. Wish me luck. With the trials, not the panic attacks. I’m pretty ace at those by now.

If you were a casual observer of Pitching the World – and you could well be: I had someone on here a couple of days ago who had searched for “what are exotic meals?” and up popped this shit – you might be forgiven for thinking that within these pages there would be valuable information to read about the process and business of writing. For a start, it’s fundamentally a blog about pitching magazines with ideas for features. It also has some arresting, yet helpful-sounding titles: “Rewrites” and “Deadlines” and “Money” among them. You might read a post or two and feel as if there’s the possibility of learning something. You would look at my Rewrites post and think: ah, good, he’s going to be charting his progress up until now with some easy-to-follow pie charts. He’ll be doing this next week, because he said he would. The more you looked however, the more disappointed you would become. He’s not going to do those pie charts (and this is you), because he either is incapable of doing them, or his progress so far has been so tragic that he can’t bring himself to let us all know what he’s really been up to these last three months. This man is a soak and a fraud. Let’s kill him.

But don’t kill me just yet. I have a pretty much inescapable deadline that will see this project wrapped up. At the end of January, Pitching the World will be no more. The British Journalism Review – which, because it’s quarterly, I assume is prestigious – have commissioned an article from me about my experiences of pitching every magazine in the Writers’ & Artists’ Shitbook and I’m going to fire off something to each one in there, even if it means staying awake throughout January.

So yes, you’ll have me around for another six weeks ago and then, like Keyser Soze, I’ll be gone. Just like that. Imagine that, my award-winning blog: Gone.

Except it probably won’t be gone. And it’s not really an it, it’s just a me spouting a lot of nonsense and I’ll refuse to stop spouting nonsense, I’ll simply come up with another skeleton upon which I can piss out my half-baked thoughts and pretend it’s all very special.

One last thing: does anyone have any football boots? Size 9? My trial with Colchester United is on Friday.

There are few things more dispiriting to this writer than having to rewrite stuff. Scrap that, that’s not true: there are loads of things more dispiriting to this writer, including hearing in the same day (today, from two different people) that both my wife and Alan are “more entertaining” on this blog than I am. This would be funny if it wasn’t so dispiriting, and if it wasn’t so painfully and obviously true.

Still, rewrites. In a sense I’ve been lucky: over the last three or so years I’ve only had a handful of stuff come back to me from editors that has needed to be rewritten. This isn’t, as you probably don’t suspect, because of my brilliant, error-free copy, but more because I’ve cultivated an image among the people I work for as being half-man half-psychopath. I put this down to spending a lot of my waking hours drunk, mad, careless and sweary. It works, most of the time.

Still, rewrites. This afternoon, I have to rewrite a bunch of stuff I filed on Friday. This, as I say, is possibly only the fourth or fifth time this has happened but it still feels like a kick in the teeth. Perhaps I’m too insecure or unbalanced or heady, but whenever I have to rewrite stuff I consider packing it all in. What if I’ve produced the best writing I’m ever going to? What if every time I write something from now on, I’m going to end up having to rewrite it? And what if that rewrite isn’t good enough? Rewrite a rewrite? And what if,  whilst all this is going on (whilst I’m spending my whole career rewriting stuff), what if Alan and my wife are coming onto Pitching the World and outdoing me in the writing stakes, and they strike up a relationship and – well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Still rewrites. Yes, still those damn rewrites. I’m supposed to be doing them now. And the deputy editor who I’m supposed to be doing them for, for some reason, reads this blog religiously and will no doubt see all of this and wonder why the hell I haven’t been doing my rewrites and, when he receives them, will put the poor quality down to me messing around updating Pitching the World. He can even quote bits of this post at me if he chooses, just to rub it in. He can say, look, before you even started rewriting this you knew it was going to be of a “poor quality”, you said as much on your blog. You only have yourself to blame. 

Yes, rewrites. Almost makes me nostalgic for the days of beetroot and cigarette butts. Life was much simpler back then.

What’s one of the greatest things that can happen to a writer? For a poet, it’s getting a fiver in a card from your Nan and a handjob – not from your Nan – in the same day. For this writer, it’s getting double-paid. Sometimes, this can happen through syndication of your work, but for pitchingtheworld earlier this week it was from a flap-up in accounts and I got paid twice by the same publication for one piece of work. Usually I would give the money back straight away. In this instance however, I was fully immersed in beetroot-shaped poverty and  had just received an email from the accounts lady, an email that was destined for the publisher but accidentally sent to me, and simply read: “Can you tell this guy to fuck off.” 

Now, this lady in accounts isn’t the first person ever to tell pitchingtheworld to fuck off and won’t be the last, but I felt a bit put out as all I was doing was chasing up money that was late and owed to me, and threatening them with the UK Late Payments of Commercial Debts (interest) Act 1998. It’s a good Act, I like it, and worth bearing in mind when chasing up money.

But it’s not all good news, it never is in the life of pitchingtheworld. No, now I’m in credit with said publisher and they’re tossing me bits of work here and there to do and it’s quite tricky doing work that you’ve already been paid for. Is for me, at least. 

Still, I’ll do it and try to do it well. Know what else I’m going to do? Here’s what: next week you’ll all be able to feast your eyes on a series of pie charts that I’m working on, that will chart my progress so far. Imagine that. It’s going to happen too. Not like previous promises that I’ve made then spectacularly broken. There’s no way the pie charts won’t happen.

How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. How do you make pitchingtheworld’s older, better, but just as screwed up brother laugh? Same answer.

Yes, you should have seen me the other day as I told him that I was fast becoming a “Malcolm Gladwell-type figure”, a man who, yes, makes money through his writing, but also trousers up to $40,000 per time for public speaking. I had, you see, lined up a gig at Brighton and Hove’s City College to talk to the journalism students there about the pitching process. “This,” I told my brother “is the way to make money. Not books. You won’t make much money from a book anymore [for the record, I didn’t really know what I was talking about here]. This. Talks. Doing this.”

Doing “this” though, isn’t quite as lucrative as I had imagined. I was offered £25.00 for my talk. Out of this, I have to pay my own expenses and travel, including a return ticket from London to Brighton, though the course leader told me that if I “booked early enough” I could get a single for £3.00. I told her I’d think about it.

Yesterday I celebrated pitchingtheworld’s two month anniversary (I say celebrated, but it passed by without me noticing). If, two months ago, you had told me I would be writing for the Daily Mail, have trials lined up for a professional football club and be keeping this blog going with tens, sometimes hundreds of daily readers, I would have fallen over.

If, on the other hand, you had told me that I would be making roll-ups out of cigarette ends, eating beetroot (and only beetroot) for my lunch, grinding my teeth down to nubs over late payments and generally not pitching as much as I would like because the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook gives me the fear just looking at the fucking thing, then I probably would have said “Yeah, that sounds about right.”