Day #50 – Please allow me to introduce myself…

With Operation Greek Migration officially abandoned today at 3.26pm EST, it is now time to fully devote myself to the demoralising art of desperately flogging ideas with disparately flagging enthusiasm.

To be fair, pitch fever has seen a moderate amount of published activity in the online world in the last week. A few interviews and previews for the Sydney Fringe Festival, a smattering of free tickets to review said shows, a promise of upcoming interviews with bona fide bands for Groupie mag and a weak attempt at toilet humour in Concrete Playground news. But considering any ranting twat can publish themselves online, and the entire remuneration from all this typing equates to this…

…at the official halfway point of Pitch Fever I’ve decided to change tack.

Commence Project Official Offline Publications (obviously haven’t got all the toilet humour out of my system). An article with a word count that can’t also be a football score, printed with real ink on genuine 120GSM stock, that can be paid for at a milk bar with actual money then cut out and sent to my Nanna for scrapbooking. If she dug that stuff.

According to virtually everyone who has an opinion on the matter, the main skill of the freelance feature writer is not, as you might think, to have a ground-breaking idea. Or even to write like Ross Gittens. It’s to know and understand your target publication and audience inside out. “Editors treat their publications like children, and they know them intimately” says Gina Perry, In Write to Publish. Sue White from Sydney Writer’s Centre has interviewed many editors on the topic and all of them list a lack of knowledge on their publication their greatest bugbear (and were gobsmacked at how often it happened, like pitches to in flight editors on destinations they didn’t even fly to).

Hence I declared last weekend ‘O-week’, and in the great tradition of all varsity orientations, spent the day with a beer in one hand, getting to ‘intimately’ know a whole lot of publications.

There are some excellent sites to peruse some of the 1600 titles in this country (more per capita than anywhere on the planet) including magnation and isubscribe. But to really get to befriend one, it’s ideal to have a physical copy on hand.

Step one: Spread every magazine you own (and have been pilfering and hoarding over the last month, from airport lounges to doctors surgeries) across office desk (or coffee table, as the case may be).

Step two: Pick up a magazine. Sniff it. Stroke it (Is it on glossy paper with a GSM of 40000 or does it have the texture of cheap public dunny bog roll? This will tell you exactly how much they’re charging for advertising space, and thus how much they’ll pay you). Have a leaf through, paying careful attention to the editorial content box (that little list of who’s who in the front) to gauge the ratio of staff writers to freelance writers.

Step three: Get acquainted. What’s unique about this particular read? And who reads it? What kind of sections does it have? How long are they? (count number of words in a row then multiply by number of rows). Where is it distributed – nationally or in the Inner West? What tone is it written in? If it were a person, what kind of car would it drive? And so on.

Step four: Place name of magazine in the middle of a blank page, encircle it with your favourite felt tip pen in a soothing-yet-cheerful shade, and let the ideas flow. Branch off with a new circle for each new idea, and link them where they relate.

Step five: Step back and admire work. Take right arm, cross over left shoulder, and pat self on back. Select least woeful of ideas and whip up into pitch to magazine, or if you’re a gambler, throw a few others in for good measure (it is a numbers game, afte rall). Open buttery Chardonnay to celebrate cleverness.

I’ve discovered that even though I love stroking my frosted aluminium MacBook (how can one inanimate object engender so much love?) I’m infinitely more productive with some old fashioned textas and an A3 drawing pad. Maybe it’s because I’m a visual person, or maybe it’s because I can’t compulsively switch between facebook, Twitter and Outlook to see if there’s been any action in the last, oh, 8 seconds. Either way, I had an unusually productive hour brainstorming the pitching direction for the second half. And rediscovering mind maps.

Day 50. About that many mind maps. 10 times that many ideas (most shite, but a couple of workable ones). A loungeroom that looks like its been under enemy fire, but the next few day’s pitches sorted.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name (Oh, yeah)….