Inside baseball today. Sorry. I’d like to take a moment and say that maybe the most commonly expressed rule for pitching as a freelance writer, that you always indicate that you are pitching an idea for an essay and not an essay that you’ve already written, is bad and dumb and mostly acts as a form of commonplace professional deception. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been soberly advised to never tell an editor that I’ve already written a piece I’m pitching. Well, usually if I’m pitching, the piece is in my head rather than on paper, and thus I’ve satisfied this sacred compact to never write anything down before pitching. But sometimes the pitch is on paper and sometimes that paper, functionally, is the piece I’m pitching. And the pretense that a piece needs to exist only in the mind for a pitch to be worth accepting is weird and stupid and results in a ton of writers writing something and then pretending they haven’t. Everybody wants to appear to be a Serious Professional so people don’t publicly cop to this, but I know for a fact that quite a few prewrite the piece they’re pitching, at least to a substantial degree, and I suspect far more writers than just the ones I know have done it, too. I can’t for the life of me understand why this dumb pretense persists.
Sep 12, 2023·edited Sep 12, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer
I’ve been an editor at a few publications and fielded freelance pitches regularly. I simply cannot believe how many editors don’t respond to pitches even with the form rejection you mentioned. Yeah, yeah we’re all busy and overwhelmed and our inboxes are out of control--shut up. That’s the job. Answering emails is literally the job. This is especially irritating when editors call for pitches on Twitter and then surely get 250+ pitches but never respond ... either say in the tweet “I will only respond if it’s a yes,” or commit to answering the very people you asked to contact you. The way the freelancing business works now is so vexing and ridiculous that it’s a big reason I started publishing on my own.
You’re so right. It’s weird how much many editors deprioritize writer response. I did have a couple points where I had to give up -- the pitches were so many, and so wrong, and I literally didn’t have the time -- but that doesn’t make it right.
The system isn't good for anyone. I feel bad for the editors who are pressed for time, juggling 30 things every minute and wearing multiple hats, and who aren't paid well to boot. I understand why it's so hard to answer pitches. But we're in the communications biz. Communicate! Editors should have an email auto reply that spells out exactly how/when they respond to pitches (an NYT editor I worked with had this, and it was genius IMO) set up a "no" form response, explain what the process is for calls for pitches on Twitter -- anything! Not having these kinds of things makes it harder for writers *and* for these overworked editors, I think.
This is exactly me right now! Sent out a pitch I’m super jazzed about, to a publication I’ve written for - a couple times - but it’s crickets from the editor. And the power differential is weird because I DON’T want to piss off the publication (The Atlantic), but at the same time, I’m like...ok...did it go to your spam and you haven’t seen it? Or should I follow up and pester you? I wish there was a better system for this, sometimes it feels like it really comes down to who you know and less about the quality of your ideas or your writing.
Completely get that. FWIW, I would follow up after about a week in the same email chain, and include that you'll take the pitch elsewhere if you don't hear back in the next X number of days. If you hear nothing after that...oh well. Since you've written for them before, I think your pitch will be more prioritized, but it's annoying you have to nag and feel weird about nagging. Just answer the pitch, editor!
I will follow this advice Mikala! Yeah pitching is just such a weird game now; I paused years ago when I had a baby (and prioritized more steady / well-paying work, like content writing). Now that I’m back in it, it often feels like you have to have this huge, pre-existing platform on social media just to get your foot in the door. Regardless I appreciate your solidarity and tips!!
That's what annoys me about people not following up, in general - I don't like to pester you, but sometimes things do go to spam - I just want to know if it would be negligent of me not to follow up (rather than annoying to be excessively persistent). Even a completely canned non-response is greatly appreciated when it comes to anything sent, not just pitches. I just want to know that you received whatever I sent!
Pitching is labour, and the 'we are very busy and cannot reply to all pitches' is hardly solidarity from editors who consider themselves allies to the working class. It's extra frustrating in the days of Gmail algorithms that occasionally send emails into the spam folder, so you have no way of knowing if your pitch was read or not.
I'd also be interested in seeing transparent data on how many truly cold pitches are published and how many are pre-commissioned.
I'm curious about this idea of pitching as free labor. "Pitch" is an abbreviation of "sales pitch" right? To sell anything, you typically need to do a bunch of labor "for free" because you haven't sold the thing yet, but you need to have done enough work on it to know you can deliver it, how it will help the potential customer, etc. It seems strange to me to position that as "free labor" as if the publisher is gaining some benefit from that labor if they don't buy the product, as if that labor were exploitation.
The vast majority of people who sell something have to do up front legwork for which they are not paid, that the compensation for that comes only if they actually sell the product (which they have no guarantee that they will sell when it is complete). That's just part of doing business.
Edit: nevermind. Based on your essay and other responses, it must be this. Thanks.
Is it building the bespoke car only under the circumstances where you're writing the full piece prior to / during the pitch? Sorry if I'm being dense here. I just am not really following.
Obviously no, but now you've got me wondering who else is in this situation. There are plenty of skilled artisans who do custom work–tailors, building contractors, consultants–and they're not obliged to be inefficient in the way they seek employment as a matter of unspoken convention.
Tailors etc. are different from freelance writers in that their custom work requires that a customer exist so I can't imagine how an unspoken convention of that sort would work. (You're only supposed to advertise your plumbing services to one person at a time?)
There's also the supply and demand issues that crop up in creative fields. (It's hard to get a good paying gig as a musician because so many people are willing to play for free.) That gives editors the leverage to apply onerous rules to freelancers, but I can't come up with another creative field that has a similar one-customer-at-a-time constraint.
I work as a lawyer, not a freelancer, but I'd be a little concerned about pitching and idea without having at least writing out a draft. I find that you don't really know if an idea works if it is just in your head. I hate when clients want me to just discuss my evaluation with them, rather than right it out, because it is never going to be full baked.
I'm the same way, and I've been that way since I was writing essays in college. Composing the text and composing my thoughts are simply the exact same thing for me.
I feel like there's some subjects out there that are guaranteed to be fruitful in terms of producing interesting material that will become apparent as you do the research.
In software engineering, when I first encounter a problem I usually know within seconds how to write the program that will solve it. I also know that in the course of writing that program I will realize that my original idea was wrong and discover what I actually needed to do. This cycle will repeat a few times before the work is done. I call this process "thinking with my hands" and everybody works this way.
Very entertaining article, as always. Does it reflect the reality of selling a text you have? Not much, I suspect, except when you're well within the stable of a publisher's writers (or well branded). I suspect the art of 'pitching' is now restricted to AGENTS (who are currently running this disclaimer: "Not currently taking on new clients, sorry") and to the film/TV/video industry. The agent asks you for the pitch.
So ya might as well write what you need to write. Book publishers most often demand a summary of the entire book plus a sample chapter, and early TOC. If a publication or publisher is still interested in pitches, fake it, make it up retroactively, the good lord won't send a lightning bolt.
I doubt this is why it's set up this way, but I would be concerned about admitting to having written too much of a piece beforehand because sets you up for being lowballed. You're no longer arguing, "I have this great idea, but it will take me 100 hours of work to pull it together," but "I've got a half-finished piece lying here, let me tweak it for you."
"It’s also why you should stick a couple of extraneous paragraphs into your draft, which the editor will then remove, and which you will let go without a fight - leaving you with leverage to fight for the stuff you really want to keep."
I work in the ad industry, one that has its fair share of client editing and meddling. I remember reading a story about a Creative Director who would always include something like a rabbit or a blue teddy bear in his ad/TV ideas. Of course, the client would latch onto this and ask it to be removed. The client gets to feel involved in the creative process, the CD keeps his idea mostly intact.
The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: "I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure," he says, "when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer'."
I think it stops being a hobby when you begin considering opportunity cost.
Most hobbies cost money. Buying books or games or going to movies or concerts all cost money. Most people already own a computer and that can be used to write on. Or you can grab a pen and notebook, which might cost $3 total.
Interesting, in that around half the publications I've pitched to ask for a first draft upfront. I figured it was to ensure that a pitcher's idea wasn't half-baked.
If the editor's ideal world is non-simultaneous pitches only, then that's a crazy bad deal for freelance writers.
1) You pitch.
2) You wait for X weeks/months, potentially hearing nothing, all the while not even having a first draft to publish on your own site.
3) You actually get accepted!
4) You spend weeks/months writing a draft, receiving edits, revising the draft, receiving more edits, and so on.
5) Your piece finally gets published! Or maybe it gets killed.
6) In celebration, you spend your few hundred dollars (if you're lucky?) for months of work. First round's on me!
7) Repeat above. Suddenly, a year has already passed.
This pattern-matches to the job interview process in an unsettling way. Even the part about editors wanting to believe that every pitch was for their publication alone - it reminds me of how some employers are not particularly good about keeping the process going for applicants, as if they aren’t in competition to hire people.
And really anything that requires two people to interact on a timeline has some version of "it's common for the other person to leave me hanging." I've done a lot of interviewing, being interviewed, selling and care work, and being ghosted is incredibly frequent. I don't date anymore, but I've heard that's pretty bad too.
I'd love for someone to study this. I feel awful if I'm even five minutes late to an appointment, I sure as hell would never deliberately miss one. Who are these people that book appointments and then no-call-no-show?
On the other hand, I'm definitely guilty of not responding to personal emails, and I'm sure I've missed follow-ups to interviewees in the context of interviewing hundreds of people and neglecting to hit some button in the ATS software.
This is the complete opposite of the job interview process as I know it. When you're interviewing a candidate, you assume that they're also interviewing with other people. Why wouldn't they be? There's no taboo on mentioning this. The candidate is selling their labor: obviously they're going to shop around for the best deal.
Of course I work in software, where skilled labor is in short supply. I imagine it all comes down to who is in competition with who.
I haven't had nonfiction published many places where I wasn't a columnist and so had a lot of editorial control (also, these magazines were small so no one really paid attention to what I was doing), but fiction editors also have some dumb requirements.
Perhaps most closely related to this is refusing simultaneous submissions. Almost no one waits for their story to be rejected before sending it elsewhere because then just submitting a single short story may take you literal years before it gets published (assuming it's good enough to be published, which is a different funny conversation). Some magazines will tell you that they take 3-12 months before they've made their decision, which is a crazy amount of time to tell people to wait for a decision (I know the practical limitations that make this timeline relatively sensible) before seeing if anyone else is interested.
But I've also experienced a fair amount of professional editing and I can often tell just by the number of notes how confident someone is in their position. I think a lack of confidence leads to increased notations, which often just make a sentence slightly different rather than better and sometimes risk ruining the rhythm of a sentence (which probably matters more in fiction than nonfiction, but also not really). I recently had a story accepted and then received the edits that made me think that the editors didn't even understand what they were reading and so I had to spend about two hours defending stylistic choices that were so baked into the texture of the piece that changing them would make the story not only different but quite bad. And, of course, all of this is unpaid labor.
Perhaps the funniest thing about editors for fiction, though, is that the only real qualification required is an email address with "magazine" somewhere in it along with a wordpress site to host stories on. And so the editor may very well just be some random person who woke up one day and said, "I'm starting a magazine!"
Coming from a design background, I would extend the idea that if you find you can’t develop total emotional indifference to rejection, creative work of any kind is not for you.
Resigning yourself to some degree of unpaid labour is also pretty universal in that broader context, as well.
Just the nature of the beast if your work involves any kind of creative thinking - it's not really something you can turn on and off at will, or draw boundaries around too rigidly.
In software development before a change is accept it has to go through a "code review". It's a process where the rest of the team gets a chance to see the proposed change and provide feedback. Sometimes, some members of a team are constitutionally incapable of simply approving a change without suggesting some sort of edits. A tactic to dealing with that is to include a poorly written piece of code only to have something to fix during the review.
"But long experience teaches me that there are in fact a number of editors out there, including powerful ones, who are deeply predisposed against pitches that have been rejected elsewhere."
I'm not in the media business and it's been some time since I considered myself anything close to a news junkie, but for a while I've suspected that much of what's driving staffing and editorial decisions has more to do with sociological pressures within the industry than with the need to put out a high-quality product.
For example, why is there still such an emphasis placed on "breaking news" or on not being scooped? Back when the primary news vehicle was the morning paper and the evening news, I get why you wouldn't want to lose a whole day. But in the age of Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle, it's not clear to me why this should matter. As a reader, I'd much rather read an accurate, well-sourced piece than read something that's the equivalent of typing "First!" in the comments section. As far as I can tell, the emphasis on breaking news persists as an artifact mostly because editors want bragging rights.
There's probably something similar happening with pitching. No editor wants to be seen by her peers as publishing some other editor's rejects. From the reader's perspective, this makes no sense. I want something accurate, well-written and informative. I don't care about provenance. But it makes prefect sense from the standpoint of the ego and career path of the editor.
"Inside baseball today. Sorry." - Don't be, this was truly interesting! I absolutely love reading your stories, tips, advice, tales of how the sausage is made in the writing/publishing biz.
I’ve been an editor at a few publications and fielded freelance pitches regularly. I simply cannot believe how many editors don’t respond to pitches even with the form rejection you mentioned. Yeah, yeah we’re all busy and overwhelmed and our inboxes are out of control--shut up. That’s the job. Answering emails is literally the job. This is especially irritating when editors call for pitches on Twitter and then surely get 250+ pitches but never respond ... either say in the tweet “I will only respond if it’s a yes,” or commit to answering the very people you asked to contact you. The way the freelancing business works now is so vexing and ridiculous that it’s a big reason I started publishing on my own.
You’re so right. It’s weird how much many editors deprioritize writer response. I did have a couple points where I had to give up -- the pitches were so many, and so wrong, and I literally didn’t have the time -- but that doesn’t make it right.
The system isn't good for anyone. I feel bad for the editors who are pressed for time, juggling 30 things every minute and wearing multiple hats, and who aren't paid well to boot. I understand why it's so hard to answer pitches. But we're in the communications biz. Communicate! Editors should have an email auto reply that spells out exactly how/when they respond to pitches (an NYT editor I worked with had this, and it was genius IMO) set up a "no" form response, explain what the process is for calls for pitches on Twitter -- anything! Not having these kinds of things makes it harder for writers *and* for these overworked editors, I think.
This is exactly me right now! Sent out a pitch I’m super jazzed about, to a publication I’ve written for - a couple times - but it’s crickets from the editor. And the power differential is weird because I DON’T want to piss off the publication (The Atlantic), but at the same time, I’m like...ok...did it go to your spam and you haven’t seen it? Or should I follow up and pester you? I wish there was a better system for this, sometimes it feels like it really comes down to who you know and less about the quality of your ideas or your writing.
Completely get that. FWIW, I would follow up after about a week in the same email chain, and include that you'll take the pitch elsewhere if you don't hear back in the next X number of days. If you hear nothing after that...oh well. Since you've written for them before, I think your pitch will be more prioritized, but it's annoying you have to nag and feel weird about nagging. Just answer the pitch, editor!
I will follow this advice Mikala! Yeah pitching is just such a weird game now; I paused years ago when I had a baby (and prioritized more steady / well-paying work, like content writing). Now that I’m back in it, it often feels like you have to have this huge, pre-existing platform on social media just to get your foot in the door. Regardless I appreciate your solidarity and tips!!
That's what annoys me about people not following up, in general - I don't like to pester you, but sometimes things do go to spam - I just want to know if it would be negligent of me not to follow up (rather than annoying to be excessively persistent). Even a completely canned non-response is greatly appreciated when it comes to anything sent, not just pitches. I just want to know that you received whatever I sent!
Fiction editors typically reply. It takes forever, but a reply is the norm. If they can do it, anyone can.
That being said, the big scam is asking for no simultaneous submissions, like I'm going to wait months before I submit the same thing somewhere else.
For a writer, the way around that is to withdraw the submission if it's accepted somewhere else.
It's a dumb game, but it's thd same sort of thing FDB is talking about.
Ha, I also commented about simultaneous submissions!
Pitching is labour, and the 'we are very busy and cannot reply to all pitches' is hardly solidarity from editors who consider themselves allies to the working class. It's extra frustrating in the days of Gmail algorithms that occasionally send emails into the spam folder, so you have no way of knowing if your pitch was read or not.
I'd also be interested in seeing transparent data on how many truly cold pitches are published and how many are pre-commissioned.
I'm curious about this idea of pitching as free labor. "Pitch" is an abbreviation of "sales pitch" right? To sell anything, you typically need to do a bunch of labor "for free" because you haven't sold the thing yet, but you need to have done enough work on it to know you can deliver it, how it will help the potential customer, etc. It seems strange to me to position that as "free labor" as if the publisher is gaining some benefit from that labor if they don't buy the product, as if that labor were exploitation.
The vast majority of people who sell something have to do up front legwork for which they are not paid, that the compensation for that comes only if they actually sell the product (which they have no guarantee that they will sell when it is complete). That's just part of doing business.
Does the salesman build the car bespoke for a particular customer?
Is that what pitching is? Building the bespoke car?
Literally yes
Edit: nevermind. Based on your essay and other responses, it must be this. Thanks.
Is it building the bespoke car only under the circumstances where you're writing the full piece prior to / during the pitch? Sorry if I'm being dense here. I just am not really following.
Obviously no, but now you've got me wondering who else is in this situation. There are plenty of skilled artisans who do custom work–tailors, building contractors, consultants–and they're not obliged to be inefficient in the way they seek employment as a matter of unspoken convention.
Tailors etc. are different from freelance writers in that their custom work requires that a customer exist so I can't imagine how an unspoken convention of that sort would work. (You're only supposed to advertise your plumbing services to one person at a time?)
There's also the supply and demand issues that crop up in creative fields. (It's hard to get a good paying gig as a musician because so many people are willing to play for free.) That gives editors the leverage to apply onerous rules to freelancers, but I can't come up with another creative field that has a similar one-customer-at-a-time constraint.
I work as a lawyer, not a freelancer, but I'd be a little concerned about pitching and idea without having at least writing out a draft. I find that you don't really know if an idea works if it is just in your head. I hate when clients want me to just discuss my evaluation with them, rather than right it out, because it is never going to be full baked.
Yes, for me, the idea of writing really barely exists before it exists in text. But my process is just my process.
I'm the same way, and I've been that way since I was writing essays in college. Composing the text and composing my thoughts are simply the exact same thing for me.
I feel like there's some subjects out there that are guaranteed to be fruitful in terms of producing interesting material that will become apparent as you do the research.
In software engineering, when I first encounter a problem I usually know within seconds how to write the program that will solve it. I also know that in the course of writing that program I will realize that my original idea was wrong and discover what I actually needed to do. This cycle will repeat a few times before the work is done. I call this process "thinking with my hands" and everybody works this way.
Very entertaining article, as always. Does it reflect the reality of selling a text you have? Not much, I suspect, except when you're well within the stable of a publisher's writers (or well branded). I suspect the art of 'pitching' is now restricted to AGENTS (who are currently running this disclaimer: "Not currently taking on new clients, sorry") and to the film/TV/video industry. The agent asks you for the pitch.
So ya might as well write what you need to write. Book publishers most often demand a summary of the entire book plus a sample chapter, and early TOC. If a publication or publisher is still interested in pitches, fake it, make it up retroactively, the good lord won't send a lightning bolt.
I doubt this is why it's set up this way, but I would be concerned about admitting to having written too much of a piece beforehand because sets you up for being lowballed. You're no longer arguing, "I have this great idea, but it will take me 100 hours of work to pull it together," but "I've got a half-finished piece lying here, let me tweak it for you."
"It’s also why you should stick a couple of extraneous paragraphs into your draft, which the editor will then remove, and which you will let go without a fight - leaving you with leverage to fight for the stuff you really want to keep."
I work in the ad industry, one that has its fair share of client editing and meddling. I remember reading a story about a Creative Director who would always include something like a rabbit or a blue teddy bear in his ad/TV ideas. Of course, the client would latch onto this and ask it to be removed. The client gets to feel involved in the creative process, the CD keeps his idea mostly intact.
Ah but, ah but, you work in advertising, not essays or fiction. Not the same.
'Every species of marmot has its own foraged diet.'
Bruno the Aphorist
I write fiction, and the rule is, don't bother submitting anything that is not 100% complete, ready to publish.
Funny how it's different for essays.
I assume for nonfiction there's leg work involved in terms of the actual research that needs to be done.
Or you could tread the path followed by both Charles Ives and Tom Clancy: insurance as the path to riches.
After that you can indulge your creative impulses as you will.
I love that story.
"Obviously I'm installing your dish washer".
There's also this:
The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: "I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure," he says, "when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer'."
Yeah, don't quit your day job. Especially fiction writing. It's an expensive hobby.
I think it's one of the cheapest hobbies. It just also doesn't pay anything.
Opportunity cost is still cost
I think it stops being a hobby when you begin considering opportunity cost.
Most hobbies cost money. Buying books or games or going to movies or concerts all cost money. Most people already own a computer and that can be used to write on. Or you can grab a pen and notebook, which might cost $3 total.
Hard to find a hobby cheaper than that.
Interesting, in that around half the publications I've pitched to ask for a first draft upfront. I figured it was to ensure that a pitcher's idea wasn't half-baked.
If the editor's ideal world is non-simultaneous pitches only, then that's a crazy bad deal for freelance writers.
1) You pitch.
2) You wait for X weeks/months, potentially hearing nothing, all the while not even having a first draft to publish on your own site.
3) You actually get accepted!
4) You spend weeks/months writing a draft, receiving edits, revising the draft, receiving more edits, and so on.
5) Your piece finally gets published! Or maybe it gets killed.
6) In celebration, you spend your few hundred dollars (if you're lucky?) for months of work. First round's on me!
7) Repeat above. Suddenly, a year has already passed.
I’m sad this post was not actually about baseball.
I was sad it wasn't about the aughts-era UK indie band.
This pattern-matches to the job interview process in an unsettling way. Even the part about editors wanting to believe that every pitch was for their publication alone - it reminds me of how some employers are not particularly good about keeping the process going for applicants, as if they aren’t in competition to hire people.
And really anything that requires two people to interact on a timeline has some version of "it's common for the other person to leave me hanging." I've done a lot of interviewing, being interviewed, selling and care work, and being ghosted is incredibly frequent. I don't date anymore, but I've heard that's pretty bad too.
I'd love for someone to study this. I feel awful if I'm even five minutes late to an appointment, I sure as hell would never deliberately miss one. Who are these people that book appointments and then no-call-no-show?
On the other hand, I'm definitely guilty of not responding to personal emails, and I'm sure I've missed follow-ups to interviewees in the context of interviewing hundreds of people and neglecting to hit some button in the ATS software.
This is the complete opposite of the job interview process as I know it. When you're interviewing a candidate, you assume that they're also interviewing with other people. Why wouldn't they be? There's no taboo on mentioning this. The candidate is selling their labor: obviously they're going to shop around for the best deal.
Of course I work in software, where skilled labor is in short supply. I imagine it all comes down to who is in competition with who.
The viewpoint of the interviewer and the viewpoint of the candidate are not necessarily going to match.
I haven't had nonfiction published many places where I wasn't a columnist and so had a lot of editorial control (also, these magazines were small so no one really paid attention to what I was doing), but fiction editors also have some dumb requirements.
Perhaps most closely related to this is refusing simultaneous submissions. Almost no one waits for their story to be rejected before sending it elsewhere because then just submitting a single short story may take you literal years before it gets published (assuming it's good enough to be published, which is a different funny conversation). Some magazines will tell you that they take 3-12 months before they've made their decision, which is a crazy amount of time to tell people to wait for a decision (I know the practical limitations that make this timeline relatively sensible) before seeing if anyone else is interested.
But I've also experienced a fair amount of professional editing and I can often tell just by the number of notes how confident someone is in their position. I think a lack of confidence leads to increased notations, which often just make a sentence slightly different rather than better and sometimes risk ruining the rhythm of a sentence (which probably matters more in fiction than nonfiction, but also not really). I recently had a story accepted and then received the edits that made me think that the editors didn't even understand what they were reading and so I had to spend about two hours defending stylistic choices that were so baked into the texture of the piece that changing them would make the story not only different but quite bad. And, of course, all of this is unpaid labor.
Perhaps the funniest thing about editors for fiction, though, is that the only real qualification required is an email address with "magazine" somewhere in it along with a wordpress site to host stories on. And so the editor may very well just be some random person who woke up one day and said, "I'm starting a magazine!"
Coming from a design background, I would extend the idea that if you find you can’t develop total emotional indifference to rejection, creative work of any kind is not for you.
Resigning yourself to some degree of unpaid labour is also pretty universal in that broader context, as well.
Just the nature of the beast if your work involves any kind of creative thinking - it's not really something you can turn on and off at will, or draw boundaries around too rigidly.
In software development before a change is accept it has to go through a "code review". It's a process where the rest of the team gets a chance to see the proposed change and provide feedback. Sometimes, some members of a team are constitutionally incapable of simply approving a change without suggesting some sort of edits. A tactic to dealing with that is to include a poorly written piece of code only to have something to fix during the review.
"But long experience teaches me that there are in fact a number of editors out there, including powerful ones, who are deeply predisposed against pitches that have been rejected elsewhere."
I'm not in the media business and it's been some time since I considered myself anything close to a news junkie, but for a while I've suspected that much of what's driving staffing and editorial decisions has more to do with sociological pressures within the industry than with the need to put out a high-quality product.
For example, why is there still such an emphasis placed on "breaking news" or on not being scooped? Back when the primary news vehicle was the morning paper and the evening news, I get why you wouldn't want to lose a whole day. But in the age of Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle, it's not clear to me why this should matter. As a reader, I'd much rather read an accurate, well-sourced piece than read something that's the equivalent of typing "First!" in the comments section. As far as I can tell, the emphasis on breaking news persists as an artifact mostly because editors want bragging rights.
There's probably something similar happening with pitching. No editor wants to be seen by her peers as publishing some other editor's rejects. From the reader's perspective, this makes no sense. I want something accurate, well-written and informative. I don't care about provenance. But it makes prefect sense from the standpoint of the ego and career path of the editor.
"Inside baseball today. Sorry." - Don't be, this was truly interesting! I absolutely love reading your stories, tips, advice, tales of how the sausage is made in the writing/publishing biz.