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When I used to edit magazines for a living, I looked forward to dealing with the query letter “slush pile.” Sure, I worked for smaller mags, but still big enough to have their own slush piles. And yes, although I could have delegated the work to editorial assistants, I didn’t, preferring to devote at least a few hours a day a week (usually Fridays) to go through the queries.

The queries, after all, represented a lot of the content going into upcoming issues, not to mention the new writers I would soon be working with.

But there’s a reason why many editors prefer not to do this work themselves: Much of what came in (I’d say easily 90%, likely more) was useless.

It wasn’t a quality of work issue — most never even got far enough for that to come into play. The bulk of the queries were for article ideas and proposals that simply didn’t fit the publication. In fact it was painfully obvious that most queries were from writers who never bothered to check what kinds of articles the magazine ran, let alone those that ran recently.

Which leads us to the one thing you can do to improve the chances of your query getting noticed: Know your market.

You’ve likely heard it before, but from experience, precious few of you seem to be really listening. Which is sad, because in this day and age, it’s just so darned easy to familiarize yourself with your target market. In most cases, you don’t even have to actually read any of the stuff the market’s already published — a quick glance through a year’s worth of a mag’s tables of content should suffice, paying particularly close attention to more recent issues. Guess how much of this information you can dig up online, gratis.

Here’s something that may interest you: Even if a query wasn’t of interest, I often took notice when it was obvious the writer knew the magazine’s content. Which would then normally get me to read the writer’s samples, and if satisfactory (at this point, they usually were), I usually started communicating with the writer to see if it would lead anywhere.

More often than not, it would.

You see, magazines need content. And editors need to find that content. Do your query right to help them do that, and you’ll be helping your career immensely in the process.

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