Question: Are Generic E-mail Addresses a Black Hole?
26 May
A reader writes:
I want to submit an essay to the NYT Magazine’s “Lives” page, and the only way I can find to submit is via the lives@nytimes.com. I hate submitting pieces to generic addresses, but I’m wondering if it’s worth my time to dig further and try to track down another address for an actual person with an actual name. If they haven’t heard of me, would it even help to send it to a specific individual? The real question (perhaps for the blog) is: Are generic addresses just a black hole, a sucker’s shortcut to the rejection bin?
The editors at the Times aren’t sadists. They don’t have a dedicated “Lives” account just to torture aspiring writers like you.
What fun would such a black hole be anyway? If you really wanted to make writers feel bad, then you’d want to find away to string them along. You’d assigning stories you had no intention of running; send out contracts that you’d never sign; offer notes on drafts without reading them; say you’re scheduling their piece for two months from now and then never run it. (I imagine you’d also want to a webcam to figure into all of this.)
The “Lives” e-mail address is real, but if you submit you will still want to keep the following in mind:
1. A lot of those pieces are shopped by agents and/or are adaptations from upcoming books.
2. A good number of them also possess a sneaky yet potent newsworthiness. (Ever noticed how the woman writing about the strange connection she has with her twin sister also happens to be a psychiatrist who counsels Army Rangers in Afghanistan?)
3. The rest are either crazy emotional, or off-hand funny, or mystifying in their pointed lack of anything I’ve mentioned so far.
I have written for any number of major magazines, but I’ve never been able to crack the code on sections like “Lives” or “Shouts & Murmurs” in The New Yorker. That doesn’t mean you won’t, or you can’t, or that you shouldn’t try. But if you do, my guess is that the e-mail address will be the least of your worries.
Good luck.
Hey Dennis: …”my guess is if you do, the e-mail address will be the least of your worries.”
So what will be the “most” of the reader’s worries in this case?
I’m an editor myself, busy but not always swamped. I love new authors and love to find THE STORY that makes my day. I really could give a crap who it comes from. And contrary to popular belief, we editors do read all the subs we get. It just seems like we don’t give it the time of day because we’ve gotten very good at figuring out within a few lines whether it “suits our needs”. (That phrase, too, is not just a “torture device” but a valid, honest response.)
Submit submit submit and never stop. Start at the top and work your way down. Keep going forever, with every piece. That’s what gets you published and working.
But well-known names do sell magazines, too.