How to Pitch Yourself as a Writer Before You Feel Ready
Nobody feels ready.
That is the thing nobody tells you when you are sitting on the edge of something new. You are waiting for a signal that you have done enough, learned enough, practiced enough. That the work is good enough to show someone. That you are legitimate enough to call yourself the thing you want to be called.
The signal does not come.
I spent years wanting to write. I had been a storyteller my whole life. As a kid I wrote stories for my dad. In college I gravitated toward anything that involved putting words together. When I started my photography career I was drawn to the narrative behind every image, not just the image itself.
But I did not pitch myself as a writer for a long time. Because I did not feel ready. Because I told myself that writing was something other people did. People with journalism degrees. People with clips. People who had already been published somewhere that mattered.
What I did not understand then is that the clips come from pitching. The legitimacy comes from doing the work. The readiness never arrives on its own. You manufacture it by moving anyway.
Here is what I learned from finally doing it.
The moment I stopped waiting.
Six years into my commercial photography career I hit a wall. Work was still coming in but the industry was shifting underneath me. Brands were asking for more than images. Digital publications were hungry for content. The market was rewarding people who could deliver a complete package, not just a folder of selects.
I was standing in my grandma's kitchen at her eightieth birthday, talking to my mom, confessing out loud that I was not sure the photography career was going to hold the way I had built it. That conversation cracked something open.
After that night I started writing. Not for anyone yet. Just writing. Getting the muscle moving. Learning what my voice actually sounded like on the page versus what I assumed it sounded like. There is a difference, and it takes time to close the gap.
A few months in I decided to pitch a magazine. Not because I felt ready. Because waiting was not working.
What a pitch actually is.
A lot of photographers overcomplicate this.
A pitch is not a resume. It is not a portfolio review. It is not an application. A pitch is a short, specific proposal for a story you want to tell. It answers three questions: what is the story, why does it matter to the readers of this publication, and why are you the right person to tell it.
That last part is where photographers have a built-in advantage that most writers do not.
You have already been to the places. You have already met the people. You have already lived the stories that publications want to tell. You are not pitching something you researched from your desk. You are pitching something you experienced with a camera in your hand.
That is not a small thing. Editors want writers who can show up and produce both the story and the visuals. Finding someone who does both well is genuinely difficult. If you are a photographer who can write competently, you are already ahead of most of the writers in their inbox.
The pitch I sent that changed things.
I will not pretend my first pitch was polished. It was not. It was too long and tried to explain too much. But it had a real story at the center of it, a place I had actually been to, people I had actually met, images I had already taken. The editor could see the whole thing in her head because I gave her something concrete to look at.
She said yes.
That first yes did not mean I was a writer. It meant I had one clip. One clip is enough to get the next pitch read with more attention. The second yes comes faster than the first. The third faster than the second. The legitimacy you were waiting to feel before you started is built in the doing, not the waiting.
What to pitch and where to start.
Start with publications that already cover the subjects you shoot.
If you shoot adventure travel, pitch adventure travel publications. If you shoot outdoor gear, pitch outdoor lifestyle magazines. If you shoot hospitality, pitch travel and food publications. You are not starting from zero on these subjects. You have been living inside this world professionally. You know the brands, the locations, the people, and the stories that readers of these publications actually want to read.
The pitch does not have to be complex. It can be as simple as: I just spent a week photographing a road trip through Northern California and came back with a story about what it actually feels like to travel sustainably through landscapes most people only see in photos. Here is my angle. Here are two or three images. I can deliver both the text and the visuals.
That is a pitch. Short. Specific. Concrete. With a built-in visual component that most writers cannot offer.
The worst they can say is no. Most of the time they do not even say that. They just do not respond. And that is fine. You move to the next one.
How the clips build on each other.
Once you have one published piece, your next pitch is not starting from scratch. You are not just a photographer who wants to write. You are a photographer who has written for a publication. That distinction matters more than it should, but it does matter.
Every clip makes the next pitch more credible. Every published piece trains your voice. Every editor relationship is a door that can open to another door. The publication you pitch today might refer you to a brand that needs a writer. The brand that needs a writer might refer you to a PR agency. The PR agency might call you for a job that only exists because you are the complete package.
That is exactly how the Rivian project came to me at the end of 2024. A PR agency reached out needing someone who could photograph a week-long road trip through Northern California and write the story for a digital publication. That brief only landed with me because I had spent eighteen months pitching magazines and building clips that proved I could do both.
The brief found me. I did not find the brief. That is what building the body of work does over time.
The practical steps.
Make a list of ten publications that cover the subjects you shoot. Do not aim for the biggest ones first. Aim for the ones where your specific experience is most directly relevant.
Read three to five issues of each one. Understand the tone, the length, the kinds of stories they tell, and the kinds they do not. A pitch that shows you understand the publication gets read differently than a generic story idea.
Write a pitch for each one. One paragraph describing the story. One paragraph explaining why it fits their readers. One sentence about who you are and why you have access to this story. Two or three images that show what the visual component looks like.
Send them. All ten.
Some will not respond. Some will say no. One or two might say yes. One yes is enough to start.
You will not feel ready when you send them. That is not a signal to wait. That is just what pitching feels like before you have done it enough times to be used to the rejection.
The photographers who are writing for publications, landing hybrid briefs, and building careers that compound over time are not more talented than you. They are not more credentialed. They just sent the pitch before they felt ready.
Send the pitch.
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Reflection questions:
What story from your last six months of shooting could you pitch to a publication today?
Which ten publications cover the subjects you already shoot? Have you ever actually read them cover to cover?
What is the real reason you have not pitched yet? Is it skill, or is it the feeling of not being ready?
If you landed one writing clip in the next 90 days, what door would that open that is currently closed?
This lesson comes from my ebook The Adventure Photographer's Playbook and it costs $10. Why so cheap? The goal is to help as many new to mid level photographers as possible go from nothing to getting booked in 18 months:
The Adventure Photographer’s Playbook is an e-book created by full-time photographer Dalton Johnson to help new photographers go from nothing to booked in the adventure photography space.
This adventure photography e-book goes over the business and what “making it” as a photographer in the outdoor space requires. Covering topics such as pricing, marketing, building a body of work, reflection questions, and everything you need to know to make a career out of adventure photography.
Updated: June 2025
