I got this Substack article today and I thought it'd be helpful for those doing media pitching and not getting traction. Nicole is a freelance journalist who has written for NY Times, Rolling Stone, AARP and others. Link at the end to her Substack. Full credit for this goes to Nicole Pajer. Subtle Tweaks to Make Your Pitches Timely You’ve got a solid client. A credible expert. Maybe even a great story angle to send to a journalist. But if your pitch doesn’t answer the question “why now?” it’s probably not a fit. Writers aren’t passing because it’s a bad idea. They’re passing because they don’t see the urgency. And when we, as writers, send pitches to our editors, the first thing they ask us is: “Why should we publish this story now?” We have to prove to them what we can tie a story idea to so they can tell their higher ups where this fits into the editorial calendar and then decide if it makes sense to run. What PR pitches often miss Most pitches writers get focus heavily on what: - A new product - A book launch - A service offering - A founder’s story - An announcement of a new client All fine. But none of that is a reason for an editor to assign a story today. Journalists are looking for relevance. Something that fits into what readers are already thinking about, dealing with, or searching for right now. If that connection isn’t clear, the pitch feels… floaty. Easy to ignore. Easy to come back to later (which usually means never). What makes writers actually move on a pitch It’s almost always timing. The pitches writers respond to quickly do one of three things: - They plug into something happening now. - They anticipate something about to happen. - Or they show me why this story suddenly matters more than it did last month. Here’s what that looks like in practice: You can tie clients to: 1. National holidays 2. Seasons: summer BBQ season, graduation season 3. Health awareness months 4. Pop culture moments 5. Trends But you can also do this in more subtle evergreen ways with tiny tweaks in your pitches:

This is probably one of the reasons why you wrote your book in the first place, but try and think of a mistake people typically make. (bonus if you can name a few!) Side note - this is an excellent thing to think of when creating social media content!

It turns out that licensing all of the lyrics I want to use at the beginning of each chapter is going to cost about $10,000. I am faced with two alternatives: 1. Leave the chapter titles as the song titles, and those who know the lyrics or who bother to look them up, will understand the connection. I'll also nclude the performer name for context. 2. Switch all the chapter titles and epigraph lyrics to public domain songs (1929 and earlier), even though the biography is set between 1951 and 2012. What is your preference? Is there a third option? Will it look weird that some chapters with pre-1929 songs have lyrics and the rest don't?

I know that Amazon’s rules state that our book cover can’t be similar to another book cover, so how do we check if our book cover is truly unique? I know that Amazon can be pretty strict about this. 1 - I usually just scroll through as many books in my niche as I can, but is that enough? 2 - Is there a tool that we can use to make sure that there isn’t a cover out there somewhere on Amazon that looks like mine? 3 - Curious to know what others do to make sure their cover is truly unique?