Package a story pitch to catch the editor’s attention

A few years back, Teri Cettina faced a common struggle that many writers come up against from time to time. She was trying to pitch the magazine Real Simple with a piece on how to treat kids’ common health ailments. How could she freshen up the evergreen topic and catch the editor’s attention? What would ultimately help her publish such a piece?

“I didn’t have anything really different about the content to pitch, so I tried to look for a way to package it differently,” says Cettina, an Oregon-based freelance writer.