3 Things That Cause a Freelance Writer to Delete Your Pitch Email

We all have a love-hate relationship with email: We can’t live without it, but it often becomes an insurmountable thing that we can never truly “catch up” on. It can be tricky to weed through the most important pitches and ideas sometimes, so that’s why it’s critical to craft emails that catch freelance writers’ attention right away.

Creativity in pitching can take many forms, but there are three major blunders that will lead me to delete, not respond to or completely miss your pitch.

1. Sending a new pitch on a long chain about something else.

This happens so often and is a pet peeve of mine. Say we’ve worked together on a story and have an email chain that’s 20-some emails long: Don’t follow up again on the same email saying “While I have you…” and pitch a new story idea. Simply start a new one with a relevant, specific subject line that I can easily find and search for in my inbox. “While I have you” is really an erroneous phrase, as I’ll recognize your name if we’ve worked together before and be more inclined to respond when it’s a fresh start for a new story angle. It’s hard for me to stay organized with new ideas if they’re buried in these long chains, and therefore I’ll be less likely to work on that story idea.

2. Using a misleading subject line.

I’m working on a blog for 2020 about the most compelling pitch subject lines that worked, but for now, here are a few things that never work: Using all caps in your subject line, leaving it blank (you’d be surprised how often this happens), being extremely vague (i.e., “Idea for you,”) or using something that is too long to fit in the Gmail preview box. If you don’t use a subject line that immediately helps me see your email’s relevance to me, I probably will not respond right away or even see it.

3. Attaching massive photos.

I like to keep thorough archives of email chains that I’ve had with various publicists, as I often search my Gmail for keywords, properties, destinations and more when researching stories. However, there is limited storage space, and emails with attachments of 10, 12, 15 MB or more kill me. (The absolute worst is when people tell me they’re going to send photos in multiple emails because they are too large, and I end up with 10 emails in a row, having to download each of them.) I have to delete these emails eventually to stay under my storage limit, and they can take forever to load and distort the accompanying text as well, especially on my phone. For the love of all things, please use Dropbox links if you must send photos or large files in a pitch email, or simply get my attention and interest first before sending any sort of attachment.

Now I want to know from your perspective: What leads you to delete or not respond to freelance writers’ emails, if at all? What is puzzling you about your email pitches to writers?