Timing is everything and nothing

... And thus we should all have some cider and make merry.

This morning, a coaching client asked me a common question. Is it better to send a pitch on a Friday or a Monday? I don’t know about you but I’ve read a lot of articles over the years about when is the ideal time to send in a pitch. The general consensus seems to be Tuesday afternoon – but I wonder if anyone has bothered to tell the editors this? Are they secretly frowning at their inboxes, calling over their colleagues and saying “Hey Susan! Look at this! It happened again. Not a single pitch for the last five days and now I got 30 of them, all in the last hour!”

I know the reasoning behind the Tuesday afternoon consensus. Monday is catching up from everything that came in over the weekend. Wednesday’s are the midweek staff meetings. Thursday is when they’re trying to get their actual editing done so things can go out before the Friday deadline. And Fridays themselves, well, who wants to do work on a Friday, right? Hence, Tuesday afternoons.

Here’s the problem with that (aside from the fact that we don’t actually know if it’s all true). We’ve reduced the success or failure of our pitches down to a nearly impossible Venn diagram. They must be sent on Tuesday afternoons! They must be under 300 words! They must get in before the mid-month editorial meeting, before the full moon, but only if the editor is wearing green and you’ve got your lucky penny in your pocket.

The truth is that if an editor wants a pitch, they want it and it won’t matter when it was sent or what font you used. Yes, some common sense and courtesy is always a smart idea (I doubt any editor wants to be swarmed with pitches the day before their Thanksgiving break) but I think we are more likely to talk ourselves out of sending a pitch because of our preoccupation with timing than we are to lose out on an assignment because we sent things too early on a Friday morning.

There’s another side to this conversation about timing.