How to get into the New Yorker

The inaugural edition of How I Did It

Ah, the New Yorker. Paragon of American periodicals. High on mount writing. Many will pitch, few will make it in, those lucky enough to do so will find themselves in the company of such wordsmiths as Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, and Salman Rushdie. I myself made it to base camp in 2016, and I’m going to tell you how I got there. If you are attempting the summit, or thinking about it, perhaps you will find my tale useful.

Spoiler alert: this is not a how-to guide so much as it as a How I Did It, which, let’s be honest, is about all I’m qualified to offer. Additional spoiler! You will not find email addresses or mockups here as sharing those is at least an invasion of privacy and maybe against the lawz.

A bit of Friends in Napa news: Air Mail, a publication to which I also contribute, called out the book as one of their favorite recent reads, and the New York Post included Friends in Napa in their 13 best books of the month. Accolades! I’m honored.

Moving on. I first pitched the New Yorker in 2016. A friend working at All Def Digital, a media company helmed by Russell Simmons, told me that he was putting together a “Black Oscars” as part of the #oscarssowhite campaign. This, to me, sounded like a fabulous story. It had all the right ingredients: timely, edgy, celebrity. Mind you, a story need not involve celebrities to be of interest to the New Yorker, and much of my work for them has focused on Average Joes and Jills, but as with selling cars or vitamins or soap, sometimes, it helps to have a famous name attached.

Case in point.

While I was a regular contributor to the New York Times, I wrote mainly for the Style section, and I reasoned that this story would fall squarely in the department of Arts, to which I did not contribute. The paper of record also had, at the time, several salaried reporters charged with chronicling the ins and outs of Hollywood. To do this story for the New York Times would mean stepping on several sets of toes. As at 1OAK on a Friday night in the early aughts, sometimes you have no choice, but you’d better be sure that you need that vodka soda because you might get slapped while getting it.

I digress. I Gchatted Charlie Curkin, then my editor at Surface, now at Elle Decor, to get his thoughts. “Try Susan at the New Yorker,” he said, and then — this is the part where he ensured I would be indebted to him (in a good way, not in a 0.99% APR kind of way) for the rest of my life — he copied and pasted her email address, as well as that of her assistant. Just like that. Journo code of conduct: you only do this for people whose work you know. You could do it for every Tom, Dick, and Harry, but that could reflect poorly on your judgement, and Susan (or whomever) may stop responding to your emails. I thanked him and went on my way/composed my pitch.