Professionals Query First
If you are going to work with magazines, then you need to master the art of the query letter.
Every year, the number of photographers and writers increase. Talk to any editor who has at least 10 years of experience under their belt, and they will all tell you the same thing: today is not like yesterday. Today, editors are inundated by both photographers and writers flooding their inboxes in hopes of being published.
For this reason, now more than ever, if you want to be taken seriously by a magazine you need to take yourself and the process of communicating with the staff of magazines very seriously.
Not too long ago I wrote another article for Going Pro titled, Trust the Process. In many ways, what you are reading now is a follow up to this – a sequel if you will, or maybe even a part 2.
Professionals query first. It’s a fact. And if you want to be seen as a professional, then you need show an editor that you are a professional, that you know what you are doing, that you know the process, that you know their time is both extremely limited and valuable.
A query letter is like the Swiss Army Knife of communication with editors. Query letters get your foot in the door, give you a platform to introduce yourself, pitch an idea, show of your skills, and gets your work in front of who it needs to be in front of.
Sending an email that says, “Hi, my name is Jared Lloyd and I’m a professional photographer,” followed by 50 photographs isn’t going to cut it. In fact, this is a sure-fire way to have your email address blacklisted by a busy editor.
Query letters for writers and photographers are different, of course. Recently, however, I wrote an article for Going Pro titled Building Your Professional Pedigree. In this article I discussed how that working with smaller state funded wildlife magazines was a fast track for getting published and building the necessary pedigree and arsenal of “published clips” needed for working with larger magazines. And the best way to do this, the best way to build that relationship with those editors is to step outside of your comfort zone and pitch and actual story to them – not just a bunch of photographs.
For this reason, in this article, I am going to focus on the query letter for pitching a story to a magazine. I will follow up with another article all about photographer’s query letters in my next article.
Probably the easiest way to go about showing you what is needed from a query letter is to simply give you an example of one that was successful for me.
Now, this is an older pitch that I sent off to Hakai Magazine several years ago. Hakai is a British Columbia based media organization that focuses on all thing’s ocean conservation. Having grown up on an island myself, ocean conservation is near and dear to my heart. Even today, with managing and writing articles for the Journal of Wildlife Photography and Going Pro, I continue to write about the ocean, climate change, and coastal issues for various publications.
Yes, I write as much as Hamilton did.
Check it out. . .
Dear XXX,
Ever since Ransom Myers’ paper showed up in in the March edition of the journal Science back in 2007, the Chesapeake Bay has been a dangerous place to be a cownose ray. The paper, entitled Cascading Effects of the Loss of Apex Predatory Sharks from a Coastal Ocean, and published just days after Ransom’s death, painted a dim picture of collapsing trophic cascades in the Northwestern Atlantic. With great shark populations falling apart, Ransom argued, prey species like the cownose ray were exploding and beginning to eat their way through every bivalve they could get their mouths on.
From all corners of the Chesapeake Bay, reports from oystermen began rolling in with the tide and making their way onto the frontpage of local newspapers. Claims of endless schools of rays sweeping over oyster beds devouring everything in sight and of collapsing hard clam populations were chief among these reports. And down in North Carolina, the largest scallop fishery in the country was suddenly closed for the first time in over 100 years.
Naturally, the part about how every species of large shark in the Western Atlantic has seen a 95-99% decline in population over the last 40 years was left out of the story. Instead, the cownose ray became the focus of just about every community bordering the Chesapeake Bay as conservation groups and commercial fishermen joined forces to stop the alleged scourge of the Bay. And the result was a campaign with the slogan, “Eat a Ray, Save the Bay.”
These anti-cownose ray campaigns had their intended effect. Fishermen began targeting the cownose ray. Recreational fishermen were encouraged to kill on site, or simply leave them on the beach when caught from the surf. And the state of Virginia went so far as to officially change the name of this flat shark to the Chesapeake ray in hopes that it would make the animal more palatable sounding on menus.
But most insidious of all were the killing contests that sprang up, complete with cash prizes.
The largest of these tournaments is called Battle of the Rays. Participants in this event shoot cownose rays from the bow of their boats. The rules of this blood sport are simple. Kill as many as you can; the bigger the better. Once a ray in pulled aboard, they are bludgeoned to death. And at the end of the day, dumpsters are piled high with the carcasses of these animals. Those that do not fit are simply thrown back into the water to let the tide take them away.
Immediately, marine biologists up and down the Atlantic coast began publicly questioning this “Eat a Ray, Save a Bay” campaign. Solid data takes time to accumulate and assess. And as time passed, mounting evidence grew that rays were not to blame for the likes of oyster fishermen’s woes. Meanwhile, however, the popularity of the killing contests continued to climb.
I believe a story of this nature would be of interest to the readers of Hakai Magazine, and I would like to propose a feature length article that would run about 2,500 words. I am a conservation photojournalist and environmental writer with access to researchers at the forefront of this debate, and to the landscape in question. I plan to trace the origins of this issue back to the decimation of great shark populations, and the subsequent report published in Science. From there, I see an article of this nature detailing the rise of the anti-ray movement and the scramble by researchers to show that overfishing was the real problem behind the Chesapeake’s depleted shellfish populations. My thoughts are to create a narrative that weaves together the story of overfishing, trophic cascades, and these killing contests that are fueled by misinformation.
Of course, I am open to discussing this idea further with yourself or the editorial board if you believe there would be a better arch for Hakai.
You can find two published clips relevant to Hakai Magazine below.
The State of Predators. The Coastal Review. Winner of best column writing in the North Carolina Press Awards for 2015. https://coastalreview.org/2015/08/the-state-of-predators-sharks/
The Ocean: Calming a Stormy Mind. The Coastal Review. Winner of best feature writing in the North Carolina Press Awards for 2016. https://coastalreview.org/2016/06/14971/
Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to discussing this with you further.
Cheers,
Jared Lloyd
406-XXX-XXXX
There it is, in all its glory!
The query letter.
Now, let’s dissect this thing in such a way that you can emulate it in your own communication with editors.
Dear XXX.
This is important. Get this right. It might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how often I hear editors complain that writers and photographers don’t even bother to look up who they are sending an email to. Instead of “Dear Ms. Smith” or “Dear Mr. Kahn,” more often than not the first communications are addressed to “Dear Editor” or worse yet, “To Whom It May Concern.”
Don’t be this person.
Do your research. If the publication is printed, then check out the masthead for appropriate names and titles. If the publication is online, then search around on the magazine’s website or Google your little heart out until you find the current editor. And make sure you are sending it TO THE RIGHT EDITOR.
Big magazines have lots of editors. The Journal of Wildlife Photography, for instance, is not a big magazine. But we still have two editors – me (the senior editor) and Danielle, the managing editor.
Larger magazines may have senior editors, managing editors, assistant editors, associate editor, editor at large, photo editor, and many more. If you don’t know who you should email, then search for submission guidelines. If you cannot find these after an exhaustive search, then call the magazine and ask. If there isn’t a phone number to call, then find the email address of one of the lesser editors, meaning NOT THE SENIOR EDITOR, and ask them where the appropriate place to send a query letter would be.
It seems small. But trust me, this is a big one.
From here, you see that I didn’t bother introducing myself till the end. I didn’t regurgitate some pedigree or biography about myself. Instead, I dove straight into talking about the story. And in doing so, I showed the editor that I valued their time, understood what was most important to them, and gave them an example of my own writing skills by telling a story within the query letter. This article was science writing, and therefore I changed the tone of my pitch to reflect that.
This is the secret sauce.
Let your query letter showcase your writing abilities – or at least the writing style that you are going to take for that particular piece or publication.
I would argue that above all else, above the pedigree, above the published clips, above even the strength of the story, your ability to formulate a pitch in the form of a story itself, is what matters most. At least this is what has been communicated to me by numerous editors over the years.
When writing for a magazine, you will likely work directly with at least one, if not several editors, from the magazine to formulate the story. This makes it stronger, it helps target the story to the audience they intend it for. This article for Hakai Magazine, for instance, had me back and forth with 2 editors after the article was initially submitted.
My point in stating this is that there is often a collaborative effort happening here to help make your story stronger through the process. This is expected. This is standard stuff at times. But it’s your ability to actually tell a story that is what editors are looking for and want from you through all of this. If your query letter is dry and stale, then it suggests you are a dry and stale writer.
For this reason, it’s critically important to be able to explain your story idea, any backstory necessary, the hook that will give people a reason to even want to read the story, and a basic breakdown of your intended story arch. And all of that must happen in 2-4 paragraphs.
Another important thing to understand about this is the difference between a topic and a story.
To say, “I want to write an article about grizzly bears,” is never going to fly. Grizzly bears are a topic, not a story.
But if you approach a magazine and say, “I would like to do a story on the impact mountain pine beetles are having on the dietary habits of grizzly bears, resulting in an increase in human-bear conflicts each year,” now that is completely different. The impact of the mountain pine beetle outbreak that is reshaping forests from Arizona to Alaska right now is the largest insect outbreak ever recorded in history. It will have long lasting impacts for the next 100 years across the West. And with this story idea, you are diving deeper to show how that it is already having an impact on grizzlies that have in turn led to an increase in people being mauled by bears.
Story vs topic. This is one of those little details you have to understand if you want to succeed.
You will notice that it’s not until the very last paragraph of the article that I even mention who I am and why I am the right person for the job. I keep it brief. The editor doesn’t need a soliloquy about me. Short and sweet. The proof is in the pudding here – which is your story idea.
Next up, I chose to include two published clips to show this not my first rodeo working with publications, and I also have experience working with biologists for stories of this nature and experience with science writing for a general readership.
You have to remember that most magazine articles are written for someone that has a 4th – 7th grade reading level. Believe it or not, most adults in the United States read at a 4th grade reading level. Magazines (not academic journals) that cater to the intelligentsia, publish at a 7th grade reading level. So, when talking about complicated or science heavy subjects, being able to simplify is paramount.
All in all, the this query worked out to be about 1 and a quarter pages when typed out. Yes, that’s a long email. But it gets the job done. It sets the stage for the story. It explains the problem. It explains the story arch. And it shows the editor I can deliver if given this assignment.
Mastering the art of query letters is important. This is not something that should ever be taken lightly. It’s your first impression with an editor. And as we all know, first impressions are everything.
If you would like to learn more about query letters, check out The Writer’s Digest Guide to Query Letters by Wendy Burt-Thomas. This was an invaluable resource for me.