You have a portfolio and you have an extensive background in writing. You’ve dedicated hours and hours of your life reaching out to every publisher you can find…but not one has replied. So what are they waiting for? 

The 3 Things all publishers are looking for:

• Matching criteria 
• personalized resume
• Initiative

“Be authentic, kind, and patient. Take initiative and ask a lot of questions”

— Runa sandvich, Senior director of info & security @ NY Times magazine

Matching Criteria

When a publicist is sorting through the hundreds to thousands of different stories, they’re looking for a specific genre. More often than not, they will have submission guidelines within the genre they are looking for as well.

For instance, if you were to submit a fictional story or poem to a website that specializes in creative nonfiction your story is going to be thrown into the recycle bin before they finish reading the title.

The best thing you can do to avoid this is to see if they list accepted genres inside submission guidelines, if not check the articles/stories inside the website and look for patterns within each piece to get an idea of what the publicist wants.

As for the submission guidelines within a genre, you’ll be finding criteria like:

• word count
• Specific file type (For example: .pdf .Doc .rtf )
• Font type and size
• The body of an email (For example Name, Work Title, Biography)

If you simply submit your article or story to every publicist without personalizing or modifying the work itself, it’s going to be thrown away with remorse. I know, I know, “I can’t change my story its perfect and it won’t be the same.” Well, this means two things. You haven’t reached out to enough people specializing in your genre of writing or… your piece is not yet whole.

It’s important to specialize your work to what the publicist likes even if that means removing a couple hundred words or editing in a couple attention grabbers and who knows, the publicist’s criteria could be exactly what your piece needs to be complete. 

Personalized Resume/Cover Letter

Whether you’re trying to join the NY times or get a single book published you need to get publicist attention first. 

Cover Letter:

This is the first impression of your character. (No, not your character in the story, YOU) The first thing this is going to show the publicist is whether or not you took time to understand what they are looking for and how you best fit in that spot. Show them you took the time. 

Here are a few things you cover letter should include but don’t limit yourself to these, take the time to learn how to make a proper one from the thousands of references & builders online! 

Resume

Keep it relevant. The resume you used to get a job at the fancy restaurant down the street is not going to work on a publicist. specialize it. If the publicist is looking for works on “new world Views” don’t tell them about how many conservative articles you’ve written. If you don’t have any specific to the publicist, find a new one or create new stories that fit that genre. Even if you’re not accepted after spending the time to make those stories you will still have them for future revision and use.

Initiative

Sounds like a given but so many of us fail to take the steps needed because the stairs seem to go on forever. You won’t get your work published if you don’t submit it. Maybe you have been submitting everywhere. You can make it through 20 different websites and not find one willing to publish your piece. 

Writing the work itself is the easy part; taking these steps for granted is what holds most people back. It takes time and patience to go through a website and specialize your work for each website but it will be a shortcut compared to randomly submitting everything to everyone. 

Who knows, you might get lucky, but doing it the right way is a lot easier than doing it a hundred times over.

Best of luck, 

       Zachary Werdell