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These Pitches Earned Me $1000s Of Dollars

Read ’em and reap

Jessica Delfino
5 min readApr 11, 2019
photo credit: Kaitlyn Baker / Unsplash

I have written a lot of pitch emails over the years. Maybe thousands!

For years, I wrote pitch emails and got little to no response or work from them. But somewhere along the way I started to understand why, and how to write a better pitch email.

Today, I’m going to break down for you what I learned.

For anyone who isn’t sure, I’m talking about writing emails to editors, pitching them stories I would like to write for their publications that they will pay me for, but I’ve written all types of pitch emails over the years to people who I want to do business with and potential clients.

With a little tweaking, these suggestions can be tailored to pitch whoever you want to pitch whatever you want to pitch them.

When I was a new writer starting out, I would make a lot of common mistakes in my pitch emails, and some also probably not as common.

I would send people emails with no information, I would not ask for or make it clear what I was contacting them about, I would be timid, I would not be willing to state my strengths or showcase my value.

It wasn’t that I even didn’t necessarily want to do those things, it was that I didn’t know that I should do them or how to do them.

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Jessica Delfino
Jessica Delfino

Written by Jessica Delfino

I write about life with 1 husband, 2 kids, 1 cat, sometimes funny. Instagram.com/JessicaDelfino Bylines: TheNew Yorker, The NY Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s.

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