How To Pitch Articles To A Magazine

Before thinking of ideas to pitch, you need to know the mag – the tone, the audience, and the type of pieces we tend to do. At Company readers are under 30, cool, smart, young women who LOVE fashion, and our articles rarely go over 800 words. It’s can be a good idea to pitch for sections that exist – we do a monthly ‘Company Report’ and careers ‘How I Did It’ and lifestyle ‘Love My Life’.

DON’T Pitch something our Company staffers could write

What can you offer as a writer we can’t get in house? It could be an experience; access to an interview; or perhaps just the tone of your writing. I get A LOT of emails saying, “I’d LOVE to interview your cover star”. Yep, we all love interviewing A-listers but we pay our writers to do this. Unless you’re bezzies with Beyonce and can get us access think of an original feature idea with a USP to you.

DO Keep your pitch short

Pitches should be sent through email. Each idea a paragraph long - a basic summary of your article, including anyone you want to interview and a hook to show why your piece should be published NOW (rather than three months ago)! Say everything you need in 200 words. Anything more and you’re wasting time writing it if it’s not selected. Two or three ideas per email is ideal.

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DO Think of the article’s cover line

Cover lines are the words on the front of the mag that get it picked off the shelf and bought. Past examples of ones we’ve loved here are: ‘I Get Paid to tweet’ and ‘Blog Virgin to YouTube.' If your piece has a great cover line that will get peeps buying the mag - I’ll definitely want the idea.

DO Be visual

You don’t need to design your idea (we’ve got an amazing art team) but Company is all about the design so if you can tell us how the piece might look it’ll help the sell. Have you thought about pitching your ideas through Pinterest or Tumblr? Our new #Foodclub columnists Alice and Laura pitched their idea as a A5 Company-stylee designed up PDF - apart from the idea being BRILL, it was clear they understood our the mag.

DO A quick Google of your idea before you send

Check your idea hasn’t been done millions of times by someone else. And if it has think how you can add to yours. EVERYONE has done ‘Best Apps Lists’ but maybe you can interview the founder of an amazing new app we don’t yet know about? We’d publish that!

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