The Renegade Writer Blog

Every writer has had this happen: You send a query or letter of introduction (LOI) to X Magazine, and realize after you sent is that you left in a mention of Y Magazine, which you had pitched previously. This is frighteningly easy to do when you use standard LOIs or send queries to multiple magazines.

It took me years to finally fix this potential snafu. Now, when I write a query or LOI, I do it in such a way that if I forget to customize it, it won’t have remnants of old queries/LOIs in it. For example, I may end a query with “May I write this article for you?” or “Your readers want to save time and money. My article ‘How to Save Time and Money’ won’t disappoint them.” If I remember, I fill in the name of magazine: “May I write this article for Magazine X? or “Magazine X’s readers want to save time and money.” But if I don’t remember, it’s still perfectly fine…just a little less personalized.

Have you ever left the wrong magazine’s/editor’s name in a query or LOI? What happened? What do you do to make sure this doesn’t happen? Please share your experiences in the Comments below! [lf]