Do You Want to Write for SAPIENS?
Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings.
The first step in writing for many English-language general audience outlets is “the pitch”—a short proposal to editors about what you would like to write. Learning the pitch is itself an important skill that is a necessary and important step in public writing. In this workshop, you will have the chance to learn the ins-and-outs of pitching, draft a pitch, receive feedback, and discuss popular writing strategies. Join Chip Colwell, the editor-in-chief of SAPIENS magazine, to develop or deepen this vital practice for aspiring or seasoned public anthropologists alike.
Be sure to check out our free, self-guided SAPIENS Public Writing Training.
>> CHIP: Great so glad to have you here. My name is Chip Colwell and I am the editorial director of SAPIENS, a digital magazine that publishes we’re based out of New York but we are — our team is really spread all over.
And SAPIENS really does have an amazing team of editors and expert writers who are deeply committed and really passionate about making anthropology accessible and also training anthropologists to become better public communicators. So I’m really glad that you’re here to learn about the magazine, to learn about the pitch process, hopefully to learn how to write with us and how to better connect
with different publics through writing video, imagery, podcasting and other kinds of ways.
So today’s webinar is about the pitch. And I want to start with just a very brief definition of the pitch because it’s going to be unfamiliar to
a lot of academics. And a pitch is essentially a brief and persuasive proposal sent to an editor outlining a story idea to convince them to pub establish it so the core purpose of a pitch is to
get an editor interested, excited about your idea, say its possibilities
To accept the pitch and then develop a longer written piece so unlike academic writing where you typically write what you — an article first and then you submit that for consideration it’s a little bit different. This is more like basically a kind of abstract that you’re constructing just a brief summary and you’re proposing that to an editor and then they’re going to consider it
about how it fits, is this something that they see as having great possibility, as something they would like to publish in their magazine. I should mention too we have a Q&A open so please use the function at any point. I’m going to keep a monitor, an eye on that on my other monitor, that’s why I’m looking down below to make sure I see those but I’m happy to answer questions as we go and then we will have time at the end as well for
any questions then. So the pitch is a format that’s used by most major English language newspapers and magazines. And there are a few different types of content that typically require a pitch. So first is the essay.
And an essay can be defined as a narrative that takes the reader on a journey of discovery so an essay typically is a story that goes from a beginning, has a strong beginning, middle and end if you think about a journey of discovery you’re going somewhere, you’re going to learn something along the way and you’re going to have some takeaway. You typically have a protagonist, some kind of conflict that’s ultimately resolved.
So this really is a story in the classic sense an oped is an opinion piece that identifies a problem and proposes a solution. So as one editor I worked with before talks about the, the oped is essentially a person pounding their fist on a table saying I’ve identified this problem in the world and here’s why people should listen to me about the solution that I’m proposing.
So given those two broad types, you can see here lists of magazines and newspapers that publish those major English language newspapers and magazines that publish those types and in most cases you’re going to have to write, if you’re interested in writing for any of these venues, you’ll have to write a pitch. There are some exceptions with opeds so, for example, the New York Times you would typically write an oped first of the entire piece.
And submit that rather than a pitch. But in most cases you’re going to have to come up with a pitch and a pitch is a really unique genre that is important to learn about, it’s important to figure out if you want to do publish writing.
So you might be asking yourself, well why write for SAPIENS or any of these? How do you know the right outlet to pick? The, you know, there’s no absolute answer of course it’s really a judgment call.
But here’s some of the questions you might want to ask yourself is the outlet I have in mind going to reach the right audience? So, if you’re interested, for example, in a more kind of scientific specialist audience but still written very broadly for that audience, you might think about writing an oped Science or Nature. If you’re really interested in policymakers and people who are in think tanks and things like that.
You might consider the Economist. If you’re interested in reaching kind of everyday people who maybe don’t have any academic bent at all, you might consider pitching Esquire or cosmopolitan a fashion magazine.
Think about your audience, who is it you want to reach and does that outlet reach that audience? Another important consideration is fitting the tone of your writing to that particular outlet.
So if you want to write a humorous piece the economist right not be the right spot for you if you want to write an incredibly serious piece Cosmopolitan might not be the right Venn you for you so you want to read the outlet and the tone of the pieces.
And make sure what you have in mind matches that outlet. Another important consideration is a word count. If you are thinking about writing a 5,000, 6,000 word long form essay then somewhere like SAPIENS may not be the right fit for you where we typically publish about 1500 words at our max. Likewise, if you are thinking of just like a 300 or 400 word just very, very short piece,
you’re going to want to find an outlet that specializes in crisp short pieces like that so think about word count as well. You might also consider your goals of likely acceptance so getting your oped or essay published in the New York Times is incredibly difficult. But still might be worth a try but if you have a quick turnaround piece and you want to see it out in the world as quickly as possible,
and maybe you’re new to this you might think about a place like Allegra lab or others that have a quicker turnaround, are digital only.
And that might be more tuned to academic or anthropological writing. It’s also important to do your research for your targeted venue and make sure they haven’t published a similar piece already. So typically
most magazines and newspapers are looking for fresh and new content. So, if they have just published an article that maps or mirrors exactly what you are doing, maybe your geography, your research, whatever it might be, they’re far less likely to accept your pitch.
Now thematically of course you’re going to see, you know, a lot of magazines and newspapers covering politics or migration, climate change and so on. So thematically it’s fine. And in fact that might indicate to you that they are interested thematically in what you’re wanting to cover. But if it maps too closely onto
what you are doing in terms of, you know, the exact story angle, the kind of research and so on, then it might be a little more difficult.
If you are looking for examples of pitches, if this seems like a totally new genre to you that you really want to familiarize yourself with, this is an amazing resource so it’s theopennotebook.com/pitch-database and this is a database of hundreds of successful pitches to all different kinds of venues if you want to write, for example, a piece to the Atlantic.
And you wanted to pitch them, you can select The Atlantic and see what some successful pitches look like for them so please do use this resource.
So SAPIENS as a digital magazine also uses the pitch process and we’re really excited always to see pitches, to consider them, and to explore the possibilities with you for writing for us.
Please do visit SAPIENS.org/write. This details very exactly what we’re talking about here with the pitch, what we’re expecting, some guidelines, some suggestions. And this is really going to be your main resource in developing your pitch for SAPIENS in particular. We do have a March 1, annual deadline.
This is where we consider the bulk of our piece for the next twelve months. We do sometimes occasionally consider what we think of as really urgent topics.
And poetry and some others that I’m going to cover throughout the year, but really we encourage most everyone to aim for this March 1 deadline. So getting started with SAPIENS. So as I mentioned, it’s really important to align your own goals with writing for the public.
With the outlet or venue. And in the case of SAPIENS, we are a pretty unique kind of publication. We are aspiring to take the best of anthropology, anthropological thinking, anthropological research and transform those ideas that are often formed in academic settings and make them entirely accessible to public audiences. So
we are deeply committed to taking research and not dumbing down research in any way or making it distorted simply to make it accessible to publics but taking the best of anthropology and turn it into the best of public writing.
When we talk about public audiences our primary audience at SAPIENS really is your next door neighbor, your mail person, your cousin or, you know, a family member who has been curious about anthropology, it’s about maybe imagine a first year college student.
Imagine somebody on the other side of the world Googling a question and your article popping up. That is what we mean as our primary public audience, of course there’s other levels, maybe it’s policymakers, maybe it is students in a different kind of way.
And of course we know that many anthropologists are reading SAPIENS as well so our colleagues matter. But our primary public audience are those with little to no anthropological, formal anthropological training and we do publish on anthropology and we define that quite broadly recognizing how interdisciplinary so much of the work that is happening in the field is.
But we broadly take a kind of four field approach in the classic North American tradition of linguistics, sociocultural anthropology, archaeology and biological anthropology. We do offer an honorarium. And one unique part we do is having a collaborative editorial process and what that means is, you know, if you published some academic pieces you might be more familiar with this is my work.
And you might get some reviewer comments that you have to incorporate but it’s still on your tone terms. You get to decide on a title and so on and so forth.
But we have an expert team of editors who have been doing this for a long time and know how to transform anthropology, make it accessible and reach very broad publics so we work very closely with our authors in a collaborative process to develop the piece of writing. And have very specific strategies around titles. And
kind of framings as much as the promotion to reach really broad audiences. And at SAPIENS, you know, some of our pieces might be read thousands of times, sometimes tens of thousands of times, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of times. We get typically about 3-5 million readers for about 120 or so articles every year that we publish. So we’ve really figured out a lot of the tools of the trade.
To make you successful in this process. Let me pause there because I see a few questions and let’s go ahead and tackle some of those.
The first is how to find funding or grants to publish. Unfortunately, at SAPIENS we don’t provide any funding or grant beyond the honorarium for the successfully published piece. So if you’re looking for funding or grants to publish, I would suggest, you know, finding those organizations that provide funding.
Another question is what counts as anthropological thinking for submitting pitch to SAPIENS especially for writers working in practice-based not academic or alt academic settings. There’s no hard and fast rules here. There is a place in — when you pitch us to make your case for how your proposed piece fits within anthropology.
So some examples of what might be convincing for the editorial team is, you know, I’ve published this work in this academic journal. I received grants for this research from these places. I, you know, the core theoretical idea underpinning this idea, underpinning my proposed piece is drawn from this anthropologist. Or you could argue my methods that I use for this research that I want to write about was anthropological in these ways.
So in short we’re looking for some framing of a piece that is drawing very clearly from anthropology and evidence of this can be from publications, from grants, from the nature of the research itself. Or some of the ideas that are embedded within the piece. Another question how often do you accept articles. We welcome pitches from anyone and everyone so we don’t really formally distinguish between Ph.D. students and those who are further along in their careers.
I will say it’s exceptionally rare for us to publish undergraduates typically because the ideas themselves often just need a little more time to mature. But if you are a graduate student and especially if you’re pretty far along in your research, we really welcome your pitch.
And the opportunity to consider your work. Let’s do one last question here, how many pitches do you normally get per year? And what again is the number of pieces you normally publish? We don’t put the numbers on our website as an acceptance rate but to give you a sense, the last pitch deadline we received about a hundred pitches and of those we moved forward with about twenty of those. So that kind of gives you maybe a ballpark of what we typically look at
in a pitch season. All right, so let’s move on a bit here.
So what to expect in writing for SAPIENS? So the very first step is the pitch itself so this is what we need to get started with you as a potential writer.
So you’ll submit your pitch, we have a full editorial team that will evaluate all the pitches we read every single one, every single editorial member of the team reads them. We discuss them in depth, one by one, and then we make a collective decision on the pitch. If your pitch is accepted, an editor will reach out to you. The process usually takes us about a month to get through all the pitches so usually by Aprilish we are sending out our acceptances.
And then if you are kind of an author that we’re looking at for a quicker turnaround piece, so, something probably aimed for the summer, late summer, early fall we would ask for a draft within four weeks sometimes if your proposal is more of a less thematically less of a pressing piece, so something that could be as relevant today as it would be a year from now we might put you a little further down the schedule so we might not ask for the first draft for maybe
two or three or four months and that’s really just to space out our write source we have a nice cadence for the editorial team. So once you’ve submitted your first draft, you have a specific development editor.
Who is assigned to work with you. And in, within our team, we have expert Ph.D. anthropologists, people who have both formal academic training in the field and editing and popular writing experience. So, for example, myself, I’m not a development editor but I’m representative of a lot of our team where I have a Ph.D. in anthropology, I am and was an academic for about 25 years now. And I have also written for the New York Times.
The Guardian, I have trade press books and so on. Basically you are most likely to be working with people who really understand these two worlds. And they’re going to be developing the piece with you.
To create the best.
best possible piece of writing for public audiences. So after you have typically kind of a back and forth with your development editor, we’ll have a finalized draft, then we have additional editors that will review it. So typically you’ll have two or three additional editors that are reviewing it. Then there’s a copy edit version and we do have a fact checking process and so we ask our author to provide an annotated draft.
Which is a draft with footnotes to specific references. Once you get through all of that you are moving towards the final edited version. The title and images and captions are chosen by the editorial teams again because we have expertise and knowing what kinds of titles and captions and images really capture the hearts and minds of most readers.
But we’re going to get your input on that throughout the whole process as well. Finally the piece will be published and you’ll be notified and we invite you to help promote your piece within your networks. And then at that point you can also complete a paperwork for the honorarium.
And let me pause here and answer a few more questions. I see coming up.
Question is, do you publish something like reflections from the field? Which are in line with recent ideas of DI and decolonial thinking. Let me get to that shortly because I’m about to talk about story types and the second question is if I want to publish as a first author of graduate studies would I be renowned, would I need a renowned anthropologist researcher as a coauthor for credibility?
The answer is no so we do welcome coauthored pieces typically two or three at the most. Sometimes there’s occasionally more but two or three is the usual kind of right amount. In terms of people to work with. But really at the end of the day, we don’t look up people’s backgrounds. We don’t ask for your CV or ask if you have a Ph.D. yet. It truly is going to be the persuasiveness and the quality of the pitch itself.
That is at the end of the day what matters most so there’s no need to get overly concerned about your status, you know, finding renowned or well-known anthropologists. These won’t be factors in our consideration.
So at SAPIENS we do publish a whole range of story types we publish essays, opeds, videos, illustrated videos, photo essays we really encourage the multimedia working especially right now. If you have something that includes video or photos, photo essays, those are very much welcome. Our written essays are typically no more than 1500 words and our opeds are usually about 650 words.
Those are our targets. And poems, are welcomed as well. And there’s sort of a length requirement there. So across these forms of writing essays, opeds, book excerpts and so on, we have a specific set of story types. That we ideally are looking for. And you’ll find this at SAPIENS.org/write so do look at this in more detail but here are the six story types that the editors are trying to place a pitch in.
First we would consider is this what we would call research insight? So these are pieces that share an author, anthropological research by sharing first person interpretive account of key findings or insights so an example would be an archaeologist who makes a series of findings. That are really exciting
. You know, we have a piece for example about the earliest evidence of bread making and the archaeologist who made that discovery is sharing their account of it. A personal history are pieces that are closer aligned of what you might think of as memoir or personal essay. But still grounded within ethnography.
The critical take those are essentially opeds for the record. These are pieces that aim to correct miss and misconceptions or elaborate on encyclopedic information with an anthropological twist. There’s examples of this here when you go into the website. There’s myths of race and gender and so much in our world that anthropologist consist provide insights too.
Culture crossing are pieces that are crafted to evoke wonder, curiosity or an intercultural aha moment so anthropologists who often place themselves in unique cultural contexts might have a moment to share. And then finally our moving hearts and these are pieces that are highly stylized.
Might be extremely lyrical that might include ethnographic fiction. So those are the six types that we are trying to categorize our pitches in.
Because these are the genres that we publish in and we’ve really worked hard to find the genres that are going to work well with our audience so these are the ones that tend to do best. So in pitching, again we have this annual deadline. Throughout the year we will accept poetry submissions and those on urgent topics and those that are invited by the editors.
By urgent topics we mean pieces, as anthropologists we cover a lot of topics that are very important to cover and feel urgent to us and are relevant, you know, urgent to our world.
But are not urgent in the sense of being newsworthy meaning that there’s some things that happen. Sometimes there’s some event, like right now in the United States there are fires in California, right? Massive fires in California, if you want to write on that, it probably needs to be published right about now. A year from now, two years from now, three years from now it’s going to be less relevant.
The further away you get from it. So urgent topics are those that are current events that are happening right now that are going to be far less relevant the further away you get from it. In evaluating the pitches there’s some key questions the editorial team is going to be asking themselves is this grounded in anthropological insight? The theories, the methods, is it based in anthropology? Does it have a clear and compelling message at its core?
This is really important, anthropologists will often have a lot of ideas and arguments packed into an academic paper for public writing you typically get one shot. You have one core idea that you want your audience to walk away with so we’re going to be asking ourselves is that, is there a clear and compelling message at its core? Does it have a clear storytelling component? Or argument?
So for essays we’re looking for a story, we’re looking for a journey from a beginning, a middle and end with protagonists, with some conflict that’s resolved and then something a reader can walk away with or if it’s an oped is there a clear argument at its core? Is the author well prepared to tell the story or make the argument? So an example I often give is for me personally I’m really, really passionate about climate change.
But I have never received a grant about climate change. I’ve never published in academic venues on climate change, I’ve never done any research on it. It’s just something I’m interested in in the world.
However, in terms of my research I’ve done a lot on the return of sacred and stolen items from museums, the return of sacred and stolen items from museums back to native communities. So if I’m going to write a piece on repatriation I have the background, I have the expertise, I have the research on all of that. So if I were to propose a piece on climate change, I would have far less success writing for SAPIENS than I would writing a piece on repatriation.
So that’s what I mean is the author well prepared to tell the story and finally is this a timely story or argument adding new viewpoints to current conversations? So we are looking for some sense of novelty. And relevancy, is this piece that you’re proposing, is it something that’s new?
Is it a new angle? A new perspective? Or is it just repeating what we’ve already seen and we can read in any other place. And then is this relevant? Is this going to connect with people in their lives? Today. Is this something that’s going to speak to them? So those are some of the key questions we’re going to be asking ourselves as we evaluate these pitches. We totally understand that for many anthropologists this is going to be a brand new process.
So we take that into consideration. You know, we don’t really expect most people who are pitching us to have it totally nailed and totally figured out so we have a lot of flexibility in our mindset when we’re reading these pitches so please understand that we’re trying to be welcoming and encouraging and understanding.
That this is going to be brand new for a lot of you. But hopefully you’re also going to be learning along the way so that even if maybe you’re not successful this round, maybe you’re successful another round or you can take your pitch to another venue because there’s so many that require pitch if you’re going to write for general publics.
I’m going to pause there and look again see if we have any additional questions.
Okay. What are some common mistakes? We’re going to cover on that. How much do you focus on grammar and accuracy on posting submissions. How long does it take to submit. Someone suggests Grammarly which is not a bad one perhaps. You know, this — the quality of the writing does matter.
Right? So if we, let’s say in an extreme version can’t even make sense of what a person is writing or what they’re trying to argue, that’s going to be unlikely to be persuasive to the editorial team.
You know, if — on the other extreme let’s say it’s a brilliant pitch that’s very clear, very insightful, very relevant, all the things we’ve been talking about but has one typo. That’s not going to be a huge deal for most of the editors.
So, you know, ideally, the reality is somewhere in between of course. I will say it’s a competitive process where there’s more people who want to write for us than we can accept because we’re limited by our budget and editorial team and how much we can simply take on.
That the more polished, the more clear it is, the fewer mistakes there are, the more likely it is to have success.
Another question is are you open to a new piece targeted for a public audience based on previously published work written for specialists? The answer is absolutely yes, so it is really quite common and I think a very natural process to have an anthropologist have an academic piece and article, a book, piece of writing, but for academic audiences.
And you can take those core ideas, the research itself and transform it for public audiences. So that actually is very much an ideal situation that we’re looking for is like for you to be able to say I have published this in X academic venue and here is how and why it is going to be totally relevant and interesting to broad publics where we’re more careful is if you have published this in other venues.
Say a version of your research for another public venue. In that case, it’s sometimes fine as long as there’s not too much overlap. Let’s say you have written a piece for the conversation or The Atlantic we would want your new pitch to have something fresh about it so we’re not merely copying what’s already been published but if it’s for an academic audience.
Very much drawing directly from that makes a lot of sense for us. Okay. Do you publish work from a multispecies perspective for example challenging conceptions of more than human agency and human and nonhuman animal relationships.
Most definitely and so, explore our backlog our archive, we publish for example a piece a couple years ago, it was really wonderful piece of writing from an Italian anthropologist.
Of, from the written from the perspective of COVID. Of the virus itself. So we very much welcome kind of out of the box creative thinking, creative writing. It’s of course going to depend on its execution. But in terms of creative kind of nonnormative types of writing, that very much is something we would welcome.
A question is much of academic writing is grounded to literature review and theories. In what extent do we need to include previous research in the pitch? Not at all. This is not an academic piece of writing, we don’t really need a literature review. We’re not going to be looking for that.
The only thing in that sense we’d really be looking for is if, you know, what you are proposing to write you yourself have written this somewhere else. We would want to know, yes, I just published an oped in the conversation. And this new piece that I’m proposing to you is different in these ways.
But no literature review is needed in the least.
Let me do one more for now. I see that some articles in the magazine are written in Spanish. Do you accept pitches for these written in other languages. This is something we talk a lot about and are aspiring moving towards but at the moment unfortunately right now we only go from English to non-English languages. So and it’s based again on limited budget, limited capacity within the team and so on.
So unfortunately, right now it’s an English to non-English language process. But if that is something you are able to do, we very much encourage you to write for us in English.
And then what we can do is translate it into non-English languages. And we have done this, we do it en masse for Spanish, Portuguese, French, and we have occasionally published pieces like in Italian for example.
We’ve also included other languages more often in the oral tradition. We had an author translate her piece from Papua and we put the audio of the translation on the website as well. We’re open to being creative around translation processes too.
Okay. So let’s move towards the final section here of the presentation where I am going to outline a very simple way to organize your pitch and pitches at the end of the day are actually pretty formulaic. We’re not really looking for too much creativity in the pitch itself. The story, maybe what you’re going to write is very creative, maybe out of the box, we just talked about. But the pitch itself should be really pretty clear and
should fit this formula. So I would say, you know, I don’t want to put an exact number on it. 90 plus percent of our send pitches follow this formula. So this is not the time and space to get overly creative. And it’s because we’re having to go through 100 or maybe even more of these, we’re looking for clarity, for
ways to make easy interpretations of what you want to say and how you want to write. So the very first paragraph is going to recommend that you open with a brief story that gives us a sense of your ability to give a
rich sense of place, of people, of direction, of a journey ahead. Secondly, sorry a second paragraph is being very clear about what you want to write and who you are, why you’re qualified to write the piece that you want to write. Then thirdly, you’re giving a big picture view of what your narrative is, the characters and why your story matters right now.
Okay, so I’m going to go through now each of these three giving you some concrete examples and I’m drawing this from a, we edit it slightly to make the point but from a real pitch that was practiced by one of our colleagues who’s given me permission to use this. The first paragraph is to nail the story. This is what we saw when it was provided. Incarceration is supposed to be a punishment (reading).
Very clear statements. Really quite interesting. Very important but this is not showing the ability to take the reader on a journey which is what we want to see in most of our essays. We want to see a sense of story that will draw in a public audience maybe who has never thought about these questions before. To them, they have no emotional or intellectual curiosity about it yet.
So we’re using storytelling to really draw in a public audience. So step away from this academic largely logically laid out argument and instead this is the revised version. (Reading).
So what you see here in the opening pyre paragraph is a very, very powerful story.
Where maybe you haven’t thought about this problem before but you’re drawn into Gerry’s life and is told at what is at stake for someone like Gerry and perhaps what is at stake for all of us in society as we think about people going back and forth across the prison system and so the story gives us something at stake.
It gives us something to connect to even if we never thought of this and then there’s the punchline, there’s this question at the end that provokes us to ask, yeah, what does this all mean? So that is what we’re looking for in the first paragraph. In the second paragraph you want to summarize what you want to write and who you are. Here is the drafted first version of the second paragraph. (Reading).
So this sound very much like an academic abstract in many ways, very long opening sentence using some jargon and saying in this article I will do X, Y and Z and referencing in this case academic journals which may not be that relevant for this particular story.
In contrast, this is something we might want to see from our colleague pitching here. (Reading).
Some really important pieces of information that really nail it here. First it tells us exactly how many words they’re thinking of. Gives us a sense of the scope that they’re looking at. Tells us that this will be a story that takes us on a journey of Gerry’s life but for a bigger purpose.
We learn here that the author O doing this as part of actual research on the ground and that they’re a community organizer.
So we feel we can see their experience that we can draw from as editors and instead of outlining the academic generals. They talk about having opeds. But acknowledging that this would be something new for them as well.
So for the third paragraph, this is stepping back, telling us about the bigger structure of the piece and why your story matters right now so this is how it was first approached, academics care deeply (reading).
For us for a public facing magazine this is not a very convincing paragraph. It’s telling us academics care about this so they can ask more questions. It tells us academics care about this as a kind of case study and it makes a broad claim about how anthropology can contribute rather than how this specific piece of writing can illuminate the problem for broader publics.
So we are not advising this kind of approach but rather something more like this. (Reading).
So here very clear arc to the story and the much bigger context of why all this matters and who is going to care about it. This is for policymakers and the public because we really need to understand the reality of people’s lives.
So then we’re going to put all of this together and so this is what the main part of your pitch will look like, right? So it’ll be like three or so paragraphs. That summarize all these three points. And by the end of it, the editors should be able to have very clear answers to these questions.
What’s the story you want to tell? Why are you the person to tell it? So what? Why does it matter and why now? So what’s the story, why you, so what and why now? Those are the questions if you can answer those questions in a compelling and cheer way within about 300 words you’ll be in extremely good shape.
So you want to practice putting all this together. I highly recommend that you put together a draft. You send it to your neighbor, your cousin, your best friend who is maybe not an academic and get a sense from them, is it clear, compelling, interesting, they will probably help you identify is there any jargon? Is the story unclear and so on but you’ll probably go through multiple drafts typically.
Think of it as a MIPny essay that you’re putting together.
And this is a kind of abstract then so if and when your piece is send, you then have your — a very straightforward path for writing your first draft. So the pitch itself is going to be sort of the very first important step in writing for publics and you’re going to want to practice it.
Develop it, read those examples that I sent from — that you saw on the database, from the open notebook, and really commit yourself if you can to the craft of the pitch process itself.
I will just say finally that, you know, at SAPIENS but at many other venues where editors are often having to filter through so many different pitches and often we’re getting a lot of really good ones.
And so we accept the ones that we do in part because of the quality of the pitch but that’s not our only consideration so, for example, if you are a sociocultural anthropologist maybe your pitch was really amazing, really wonderful, really excited about it. But in this pitch season, we were just inundated with sociocultural piece.
Pitches. So there’s only so many we can accept because we need to balance it out with other parts of the discipline. Maybe you have an incredibly wonderful pitch however we have a piece that we already accepted from our last deadline that you have not seen yet, it’s not on our website but the editorial teams know that it’s in process and it is too similar to what you’ve pitched.
All this to say is hopefully not to get too discouraged if you don’t make the cut for this year. We really do welcome resubmissions if you have questions, you’re welcome to reach out to me or to other editors, we want to fulfill our mission of getting anthropology out in the world. But a big part of our mission too is empowering anthropologists to become better storytellers for general public.
So we’re equally committed to that as well. So let me turn now in our last ten minutes to any final questions so please do put those in the Q&A.
Okay, if we want to create a multimodal piece how do we incorporate those into the pitch. Even if you have a pitch that’s video based we would still ask that you summarize it as a pitch.
So the editorial team doesn’t have to sit through the whole video. But then in the pitch form that you’ll find submitable which is the platform we use for our pitches.
There’s the opportunity to upload pictures or video or other kinds of digital content. If there’s something else that you know, you want us to see and to consider for the pitch but you can’t upload it you can always include a link.
So maybe put it somewhere else that’s accessible and we’re happy to take a look at it that way.
Will the slides be made available? Yes, within a week I am going to upload this video to our website. And I will put up the slide presentation as well. And you can search on the website how to pitch SAPIENS. It’ll also be in the link in the write for us section as well. So within a week please keep an eye out for those updates.
What happens if the topic I want to pitch about is something I didn’t receive a grant for but find it endearing fieldwork. There’s fine. There’s no requirement for our pieces to have research that is grant funded.
So you know, we publish all kinds of pieces for example. What come to mind is a professor talking about one of her classroom activities. Not research based really not grant funded. But it was a really interesting story about this classroom activity that she was doing that was super interesting and did very well with our audience. Right?
So, yes, if you do have a grant funded research, if your piece is based on research definitely include that. Especially if it’s a piece that’s going to be based on, you know, make an argument based on evidential claims, that sort of thing, so that’s very, very helpful but not a requirement. So, please do include it if you can and don’t stress about it if it’s not relevant for your piece.
What was the pitch that you personally found most interesting the past year? Which has been the most popular piece in the past year?
Gosh, to be honest, I am not sure I can recall off the top of my head the most interesting pitch. I will say you know the typically those that we do select so like the finalists if you will, they’re all really good. They’re all really interesting. I really embrace personally the four field tradition.
So I’m really interested across all of anthropologies practices. That’s hard to say. For some of our best pieces from last year.
I’d recommend we publish the editorial team picked our favorites. We all voted as a team and listed our favorite pieces as the best of 2024. If you go back to our archive and search if for best of 2024 that gives you a sense of what the editorial team was most excited about last year in the writing that we received from across all of the fields.
Can you repeat about writing not writing about the topic we want to talk about. Yes, I can go over that again. So if you have published an academic piece. So a piece in current anthropology the journal of human evolution, some clear academic venue and let’s say it’s on topic X and now you want to make topic X accessible.
You know, the discoveries, the findings, the insights, whatever it was that you published on and now you want to make that accessible for your neighbor, for your barista, that is wonderful. We really like that.
That’s often a very good kind of natural flow because you have the research done. It’s already published you know what your arguments are. And now it’s just how do you craft a story around the elements of the arguments, the ideas that were in your academic writing?
If you have not published your ideas in an academic venue before that’s also not a problem. We welcome pieces that are totally fresh, you’ve not published on at all in any venue yet so it’s not a requirement. It’s just that if it’s already published in a book, in an academic journal that’s often very useful.
Now where it gets a little more blurry is if you have published for a public audience on the same or similar topic. There we’re going to look pretty carefully just to make sure that what you’re proposing so write for us is new and fresh and not a rep — doesn’t replicate what you already published for public audiences, so hopefully that gives you a clear sense of what we’re looking for.
And what our thinking is when it comes to previously published work.
Thank you for all the thank yous. How many pitches do we receive throughout the year? We it’s hard to quantify because we get pitches throughout the year and sometimes we reach out to anthropologists whose work we see and are excited about. But typically we get about a hundred pitches a year.
And we publish, we select about twenty or so of those through this pitch process, through this March 1st deadline. So we’ll see. You know, we’ve only been doing this annual pitch deadline for a few years now. And so it’s been — there is some variability. But hopefully that gives you a sense of kind of the overall volume of both those pitches that are proposed at the deadline.
And those that we accept.
Great, so our time is up and I think those — that’s the end of our questions for the moment. My e-mail is chip@SAPIENS.org. I welcome any questions or feedback you have about our process or this presentation.
All that is very much welcome. So please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to connect. So thank you all so much for your interest in the magazine and I hope to see your pitch soon. All right, take care. Bye.