Opportunities 11/25: How to Write Feature Pitches

Five steps to writing great magazine feature pitches.

For this week’s Opportunities newsletter during the holiday, we’re offering some advice instead, from Study Hall co-founder Kyle Chayka. Read on for a guide to writing great magazine feature pitches. Chris will be back next Wednesday with more opps. 

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Five Steps to Writing Feature Pitches

Feature pitches for magazines are a genre of their own. You have to both outline a long story — could be 7,000 words! — and embody the tone and approach of the story itself in your pitch. The editor has to open your email, get hooked by the narrative, and then by the end think it’s worth spending thousands of dollars and months of their life on. It’s like writing a mini-book proposal or a cover letter for a job that might not exist.

Here are the things I’ve learned about pitching magazine features, though many of the same steps could be applied to essays that rely on research or reporting. My feature pitches tend to be around 500-800 words long (seriously) and often involve a good deal of reporting, as many as five or ten interviews. It can take a lot of work to decide if the piece is worth doing for writer and editor alike, but the more work you put into the pitch the easier the process will go.

I’m sure all writers’ pitches look different! This is my very biased personal take. The Open Notebook has a great database of science feature pitches, especially for prestigious outlets like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Check those out, too.

1. Decide if it’s a feature.

Features need to have enough material to sustain the reader’s attention over many thousands of words. They need to expose a story that hasn’t been told before, bring a new perspective on an old subject, or introduce some unforgettable characters. Not every story does this. A lot of ideas are great for a 1200-word news hit but don’t have enough depth to merit the full feature treatment. Often, features are about things that have happened already or people who are already famous rather than trying to forecast or describe something as it’s happening. You will probably have some idea of where the story starts and where it ends. Unless you are already famous or have a memoir-worthy life story, a feature about yourself is probably going to be a tough sell.

2. Decide who the characters are.

Features need narratives, no matter who or what the piece is about. Even if it’s just about ideas or trends, it has a narrative of the conflict between ideas or the evolution of a trend. Narratives need characters: the protagonists of the plot, the figures that readers will become attached to over the course of the piece. In true crime, characters are easy: murderer, murderee. In profiles, the character is the principal subject, but a few other characters might come and go.

If your feature pitch does not highlight specific, prominent characters, the editor will probably be like, “Does this story have any good characters?” You should have an answer. “Good characters” are characters with personality, who give good quotes, who have interesting backgrounds or do interesting things.

3. Write a compelling lead.

Feature pitches need leads just like finished features need leads. The opening of the pitch itself should grab the reader, AKA your editor, and pull them into the story, hinting at the stakes and the scope of what will unfold. Most of my feature pitches have started with the same lead that I file in the first draft of the piece, and it often stays that way through to the finished version. Writing a good pitch lead, launching straight into it, gives the editor a sense of what the story will be like when it’s in the magazine / website / whatever.

If “characters” are the base unit of the feature story, then “scenes” are the second level up: moments in which characters perform actions or interact. Good leads often open in good scenes, which conveniently introduce characters and conflicts. If your story has already happened, or begins at a certain point in history, then starting at the beginning is always good. There’s a reason the first line of every New Yorker story is a “In [INSERT DATE HERE]…” Most feature pitches can start with a paragraph of scenic lean and then a nut-graf paragraph explaining the wider context and stakes of the story. Aside from “who are the characters” you will also have to answer the question of “why should I care about this.”

4. Show you understand your piece.

The body of the feature pitch is description and process. You zoom out, broadening the scope of the opening scene; identifying secondary characters or important research or information; and show the forward momentum of the narrative. Is the story already over, a la true crime? Or is the feature catching it in a pivotal moment of evolution? Keep in mind that a feature could take literally years to get edited and published, so ideally it works as well to be published in three months as six or nine. Or, if it needs to be published at a certain time, explain that. (Maybe it’s pegged to the debut of a film or launch of a project.) (Keep in mind this is just my experience.)

You want to clearly explain how the story will be executed. That includes your reporting process, who you will talk to, where you will go, what kind of scenes you will capture in the piece. If it requires a big travel or security budget, note that. How many words will the story be? Is it an essay, reported feature, or profile? In order to accurately represent these things, you’ll need to understand the publication that you’re pitching. New York Times Magazine profiles, for example, are usually shorter than their newsy features and follow a very specific structure. The editor will know immediately if you haven’t read the publication closely enough.

5. Give your credentials.

Especially if you’re cold-pitching a new editor, you need to justify why they would want to invest so much time and effort into your story. This doesn’t require a whole resume, just clips of previous writing in comparable publications and / or past work that justifies your expertise in a certain area. Maybe you’re a music reporter who wants to profile a musician, or you have a strong background in cybersecurity and you want to break some news about Palantir. (Note I have zero knowledge of investigative features.) If you’re proposing an ambitious feature, cite an ambitious feature you’ve executed in the past.

Beyond credentials, the pitch should evince friendly enthusiasm and suggest that you are a productive, pleasant, and prompt individual to work with, even if we all know that writers are none of those things. If it’s a cold pitch, these vibes are even more important. The editor should want to hear more from you; if you’re overconfident in your idea or trying for a hard sell, they probably will not think you’ll be fun to work with. You need to flexible and aware that the editor knows their publication better than you do: they’re the ones who will need to sell the idea, in turn, to their bosses. It’s pitches all the way down!!!