Oh, look, all that happened was that someone emailed pitching to write for me and they managed to be so annoying that I still can’t be certain it wasn’t spam. They were so annoying that I’ve already written to you twice today, venting. At length. It may say something that I’m fine with that writer seeing me this aggravated, but not you. I don’t want you seeing me like that, I don’t want you feeling you have to calm me down.

Honestly, I sound ridiculous. But pitching is obviously important: it isn’t a game, I have to constantly pitch because it’s how I keep a roof over my head and a Mac on my desk. There is no possible way to count how many pitches I’ve done that failed, nor how many got silence in return. Nor, to be fair, how many succeeded.

Oh! I do remember calculating once that on average, I succeeded in 10% of my pitches. So naturally, I moved to pitching in far greater volumes. It’s worked out well for me, but seeing these aggravating emails reminds me that years of doing this mean I think I’ve learned some things. Plus I’ve so often now been on both sides of pitching that I could tell this fella a thing or two.

Eventually, I did.

And yet he kept emailing.

I only had three before I blocked him but a quick lesson anyone could take is that you’re not going to endear yourself by sending a “so what’s happening?” email two days after the first approach. Waiting is hard, but get used to it. I just mostly waited through ten months for a project that then died away, so 48 hours is a blink.

Without picking on this man, though, let me offer a countdown of key things that pitching writers can do that hopefully avoid pissing off editors.

5) Tell me who you are

I don’t mean that I’ll necessarily listen to you more if you’re a famous writer, but I probably would. Or that I’d pay attention because you’re a surgeon pitching me a piece about surgery, but I would. All I mean is that you should tell me your name so I know who I’m talking to.

This fella wrote commendably concise emails but in that short space he called himself by two different names and – this is hard to explain – also referred to himself by a company name. I’m still not sure this wasn’t spam, I’m not really even certain that it was a man since one of the names could be a woman’s. It did all read like it was written by a man, mind.

4) Tell me your great idea

In truth, when you’re pitching to an editor, what you’re really pitching is yourself. You want this to be the start of a long working relationship –– and so does the editor. Finding a writer who knows their stuff, who can write, who has good ideas and also delivers them, that is gold.

There have been times when I’ve pitched an idea pretty blindly, pretty sure that it couldn’t land, but knowing that it was opening a dialogue.

Nonetheless, if you’re going to pitch, you need to pitch an idea. This fella told me he had oodles of them, but he didn’t describe a single one. Rather, he said that he could write me articles that would organically grow my SEO engagement. You see why I thought this could be spam from a company.

Search Engine Optimisation will get you higher up the Google rankings when someone searches on a topic – today. Tomorrow, Google changes the rules and you need a whole different set of SEO tricks. The answer to doing well in Google searches is not to write clickbait conforming to today’s keywords, it’s to have bloody great ideas and write them extraordinarily well.

You do also have to be doing that consistently and over a long time for it to work, but it’s the one way that does mean you keep succeeding. Google is trying to surface useful, interesting pieces and its SEO changes are to try combating people who rig the system by presenting quick crap with clever keywords.

As far as I can decode, by the way, what this fella really wanted was for me to give him ideas that he could then give back to me. Yeah, no, let me get right on that.

3) Read the publication, watch the show

I did have a meeting the other day where the producer was visibly surprised that I’d watched her show first. But if she were surprised that I’d prepared, she had no doubt that I really had. And she had no question that when I said I really liked this particular thing about it, I meant it.

There never is any doubt. If you’re lying that you’ve read something, or if you’re lying that you liked a thing you haven’t watched, it is extremely obvious. I know, for instance, that this annoying writer hasn’t read the publication he was aiming to write for –– sorry, aiming to organically grow whatever –– and that he claimed to love. There were specifics like the way he mentioned a word count that has no relation to what that publication does, but mostly it was just the undertow. The total certainty that the words about loving the publication were bollocks.

A bigger, more overt clue was how he then said that of course we’re getting it all wrong and need him to fix it. What he actually said was that he’s done a research audit on the publication and identified a content gap.

If you don’t know the aims of a publication, all the research in the world –– er, bar asking what the aims are –– will not identify a content gap. I can only think of two publications I’ve written for or edited which ever mentioned football, for instance, but apparently football is popular so they should’ve done more of it and the editors of all the rest are fools for not identifying this content gap.

2) Don’t use personal email addresses

All credit to the fella for finding my personal email address, but there’s a reason it’s personal. That address is the one I’d give you because I know you. It is one I do give editors and I have often given to writers I’ve hired, because it’s the one that gets straight to me immediately and I want you to be able to do that.

You know this, you wouldn’t ever use someone’s personal address, but this fella doesn’t. This is yet another reason why I cannot decide whether the emailer was a new writer or an old company spamming me with SEO offers.

If it is an individual, a new writer, then you could argue that finding this address fits in with his claims of researching the publication. Except that publication quite prominently displays their business email address for me. And if you don’t know that because you don’t read this publication you claim to love, there is a general email address for me everywhere else. LinkedIn, my website, I don’t know: I have a general-purpose email address I give out anywhere in order to keep my personal one for friends like you.

Incidentally, he ended his email with that phrase “if you don’t want to receive any more emails, reply with the word unsubscribe”. I’m going to be generous and assume that he has seen this on other emails and thinks it’s professional. And to be fair, my reply to him did not actually use the word “unsubscribe” as such, but then it also didn’t say a lot of rude words that I felt were quite adequately implied.

1) Do the easy research

Most of this has really been variations on how a pitch should be polite and should have something it is actually pitching. It’s been about how a pitch intended to get work has instead guaranteed someone won’t be hired. Truly, it’s all been about me, about what I thought on receiving this series of emails.

So let me look at it from this writer’s perspective. He wants me to commission him to write for this particular publication and if he lacked any ideas, if he found ways to spam me, he was probably not doing it deliberately. Genuinely, I can’t be sure, but let’s say it wasn’t deliberate, that this wasn’t an attempt to get a reply at any cost so that I can be added to some spam company’s mailing list.

It was still never going to work.

Because while yep, I am an editor, I am a producer and I couldn’t quickly count how many publications, sites or services I’ve commissioned writers for, there is one very easy fact to find out about me. I do not edit the publication he wants to write for.

That publication does not hide who the editor is. None of them do. If you want to know who to pitch to, it is supremely easy to find out.

You could just ask me.

There. I’ve got all of this off my chest and, even if it doesn’t seem like it, in a much calmer way than the two previous attempts to talk to you. I’ve deleted those two now, but to give you a flavour of them, I think they both used the phrase “flying fuck” a lot.