Chapter 1
On Pitching, or Starting Small
Dorothy Brown is a professor of tax law. As she’d be the first to admit, it’s not the kind of profession that makes people line up to talk to you at cocktail parties. (The opposite is true for literary agents, and it has nothing to do with personal charm. I once spent a party watching a young man work up the courage to talk to me, only to discover it was so he could pitch me his book idea:
What Cheese Are You? Lest you think I missed out on an amazing publishing opportunity, he wasn’t even able to tell me what cheese I am.) As a professor and now as a writer, Brown is determined to make her seemingly arcane body of research widely accessible. In doing so, she’s working against the tide of her own profession. To Brown’s great frustration, when fellow academics say “Your work is so accessible,” they may well mean it as an insult.
Brown’s research is on tax and race, a field she has essentially pioneered. Her long-term goal was to publish a trade book for a general-interest audience as opposed to an academic one targeted at fellow legal scholars, but her route to doing so wasn’t to pitch agents, at least not at first. Brown set her sights instead on publishing Op-Eds in
The Washington Post and
The New York Times. She did this with several larger aims in mind: to get her work read by both the general public and policymakers—hence the choice of newspapers read by them—and to make herself more appealing to publishers when it came time to sell a book. She pursued this goal with the doggedness of a tax professor—that is, with the systematic and relentless focus of someone who can spend hours at a time pouring over decades of tax data. She pitched
The New York Times over a dozen times before succeeding. And she eventually did sell that book,
The Whiteness of Wealth, to Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, and now has a second,
Getting to Reparations, forthcoming from the same publisher. The publication of her work outside academic journals led her to be invited to testify before Congress three times and to privately brief multiple sitting congressional representatives.
If your end goal, like Dorothy’s, is to eventually land an agent and publish a nonfiction book, the first piece of advice I always give is to
aggressively pursue publishing shorter work and to do so with as much upbeat imperviousness to rejection as your heart can muster. It is much, much easier to land an agent, and a book deal, if you have had work previously published. Pitching a nonfiction book to an agent when you’ve never published a word of prose is a bit like buying a lottery ticket. There’s no reason *not* to do it—buying lottery tickets is fun! And the ads are right when they say “You never know!” That said, while your odds of becoming a millionaire via the lotto are admittedly lower than landing an agent for a nonfiction book when you’ve
never previously published anything, they’re still, speaking frankly, not great. I always feel like the bearer of bad news when I share this fact, a much less fun part of my job than telling someone we have an offer on the table for their book, which never fails to give me chills. Publishing articles and essays will not only make you more appealing to agents once you start pitching them. Agents—particularly those of us who represent nonfiction—regularly read national newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and a whole range of media besides (often, in fact, when we should be reading books). If there is a golden ticket in nonfiction book publishing, it is writing an original piece and having an agent see it and reach out to
you—which is, in fact, how I found many of my clients.
I’m opening this chapter with Dorothy Brown’s story not only because it had a happy ending but because I think her thoughtful-step-by-thoughtful-step approach, and, above all, her attitude toward breaking into publishing, is a gift worth sharing. Unlike Brown, many writers would quit long before receiving that twelfth pass; how she thought about those passes enabled her to keep going forward. If an editor said no to a pitch, Brown didn’t assume it was because the idea was terrible or that she was a terrible writer. Brown decided that when she heard “no,” she was actually hearing “not yet” and intuited there could be a number of reasons an outlet passed on a piece that had nothing to do with the piece itself. (She also filed every rejected piece away in case it would someday be of use as part of a book chapter or another Op-Ed based on the ever-changing news cycle.) As Brown told me, and as I know to be true from years spent comforting understandably anxious clients, many writers can’t help but assume editors’ passes are due to “the substance and that’s not always what the no means. The no could mean one of thirty-two million things: isn’t a fit right now; we have something else on the topic; a former or current president just got indicted, and all of our focus is there.”
Dorothy correctly intuited the black-box nature of a newsroom and how unsolicited pitches fit into it. There’s a mistaken notion that editors (and by extension, agents) spend much of their time fielding pitches, but that is actually just a small part of what editors at media outlets do and how they think about what they publish. As Vann Newkirk, a senior editor at
The Atlantic who works with many emerging writers, explained to me, being an editor is a “social job.” The bulk of an editor’s time is not spent sifting through over-the-transom pitches and giving deep thought as to which ones to take. Instead, the majority of his day is spent interacting with writers he is in the process of publishing: on Zooms, over coffee, on the phone, or improving their work on the page, and then working with the rest of his colleagues to figure out how the parts fit into the whole. Vanessa Mobley, an Opinion editor at
The New York Times who oversees the guest essays team (that is, pieces by nonstaff writers), put this aspect of the job into context: Every week the opinion section has a meeting where the editors talk about ideas for guest essays. Individual editors often lobby to push a writer or an idea into the “report,” their term for the sum total of what the Opinion section of
The New York Times publishes. Publication decisions are made not just by how much one editor likes a piece or an individual writer. Rather, any pass you receive is made in the context of a whole chain of decisions, calculations, and the ecosystem of other writers and pieces already commissioned that most likely have little to do with you or your talent. As Mobley’s description of her job makes clear, editors themselves are engaged in their own version of pitching. Especially at major outlets with sizable staff, editors who work directly with writers must get a sign-off from their bosses to commission a piece. The mechanics are slightly different from publication to publication, but the overall process is largely the same. At
The New York Times Magazine, for example, writers work with a story editor on their articles. As Jake Silverstein, the editor-in-chief of
The New York Times Magazine, explains, “Story editors are ones who have their primary relationship with the writer. They’re going to be the ones who developed the idea back and forth with the author.” The story editor, in turn, “brings the pitch to one of the four ‘top editors,’ the editorial director, and myself, to advocate for it. That’s the group that makes decisions to green-light or red-light a pitch.” At
The New York Times Magazine, much like at the Opinion section, story editors attend a weekly meeting, bringing in pitches from freelance and contributing writers with whom they have been in conversation or developed an idea, as well as from the contracted writers whom they are assigned to edit. To mangle David Mamet, editors, like writers, Always Be Pitching.
I believe this external context is why there’s such a mismatch between how it feels to give a pass versus how it feels to get one. (It feels terrible! And personal, though in most cases, there’s nothing personal about it at all.) In order to get published, you need to submit excellent materials and put a lot of time and effort into writing them. Far less time and effort go into reviewing the initial pitch, even for the most thoughtful editors, in large part because of the volume of submissions an editor receives and because any editor worthy of the title spends a good part of their day improving the pieces they do want to publish and advocating for them with their higher-ups. I share this reality not to make the process feel impossible (it’s not—and the sample pitches at the end of this chapter will offer suggestions on how to improve and target your pitches so you have a higher success rate), but so that the weight of decisions rendered doesn’t feel so very weighty. It’s natural to think of editors as gods on high, the outlets that employ them as a kind of Olympus, but in many ways, editors are in a structural position much like your own—they too are fighting to get “their” pieces published. And just like you, it’s in their best interest to do so—the more good work they manage to bring in, the more traffic or attention they bring to a website or magazine, the more they are valued by their employer. More encouragingly to know, writers who get published regularly in the same publication are usually published by the same editor again and again, a win-win for both parties. That editor, particularly if they “discovered” the writer, is in turn invested in the writer’s work and career.
So I’d like to suggest the first of two ways to reframe how you think about the process of pitching articles and essays:
It is not (just) the quest to add the name of another media outlet to your list of clips. Imagine instead that you are seeking an editorial reader who will understand and advocate for your work, who will improve it and help bring it to a wider audience. And when you get a no, it may just be a “not yet”—at least not with this person, at this moment.
The good news is that while it’s intimidating to pitch articles and essays, it is easier to publish one than it is to land an agent. The bar to entry is lower for editors seeking regular content for their publications and thus the demand for material by media outlets is much higher than the publishing industry could keep up with for book-length projects. Digital outlets in particular have not just a weekly or even a daily demand for new content but an hourly one. (This volume issue is also why it takes so excruciatingly long to hear back from editors when you pitch articles.) The height of the bar for publication varies not just by format and outlet but also by section of the publication. Per Jake Silverstein of
The New York Times Magazine, it’s easier for a first-time freelancer or a new writer to break into the “front of the book” (FOB)—the beginning section of most print magazines where shorter pieces appear—than to get a commission to write a longer piece. This is in part a practical decision by the magazine, a bit like not planning a weekend trip with someone before you’ve gone on a first date. As Silverstein explains, “Sometimes we get pitches from freelancers who we haven’t worked with before for features where we think the proposal is interesting, but it’s a little too ambitious for us to assign to a first-time writer. Maybe it involves very expensive travel, or high-stakes investigative work. In those cases we probably won’t assign, because we haven’t worked with the writer before. We often encourage writers who are new to the magazine to pitch ideas that are a little easier to assign for their first features—profiles, domestic stories, that sort of thing.” At
The New York Times Magazine, “The Letter of Recommendation” in the front of the book is often a proving ground for new writers. Rachel Syme, now a staff writer at
The New Yorker and an ambitious and assiduous student of magazines, charted her path to publication through learning about and then pitching the smaller, FOB sections. Her first piece published in
The New York Times was in fact a “Letter of Recommendation” in the magazine. Getting it published helped her establish a relationship with the magazine, and more important, with an editor who appreciated her work and would continue to publish her. FOB sections vary by outlet and change all the time; becoming a student of them will help you understand where and what to pitch.
Copyright © 2026 by Alia Hanna Habib. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
