Notes from a Hired Pen: Results of a March Marketing Sprint

Readers!

Things had been looking a bit grim over here at the offices of Jen A. Miller. Cuts in higher education have finally trickled down to me. Since 24% of my 2025 income came from these sources, it’s been a hit, and I started March the most worried I’ve been about my business in a long time.

I had a down first quarter last year too (though not as bad as this year), but my 2025 picked up after I put some effort into marketing, starting with finding $7,500 of in work nearly immediately, so I did my own personal March Marketing Sprint. I know there’s still two days left in March, but close enough. Also I didn’t have anything else to write about this week, so let’s get to it.

I got many of these action items from Jennifer Goforth Gregory’s 2020 marketing challenge but it appears her website is down right now.

 

What I did: 

• Followed up on every LOI (letter of introduction) I’ve ever sent that I had not followed up on twice. So if I hadn’t followed up, I did so for the first time. If I had once, I did so for the second time.
• Followed up on every pitch I hadn’t followed up on twice. Same thing.
• Every time someone responded positively to an LOI or follow up to an LOI (usually saying they’d keep me on file), I requested to connect to them on LinkedIn.
• Emailed every client I worked for in 2025 and still wanted to work for, to see if they had anything to assign out. I also asked them if they knew someone who could use a writer like me, to let me know.
• Same thing with clients I wrote for (and liked working for) in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
• Pitched extra services to existing clients. For example, where I write articles for an alumni magazine, I told the editor that I can also write news releases about faculty research. Where I wrote for one title at a publisher, I asked if another editor at the company could use me. Just because I know I can do all these things doesn’t mean my editors know, which is why I pointed it out.
• Whenever I turned in an assignment, I pitched something else. That might be another story, a different service, or asking if there’s anything else they’d like me to do.
• Pitched. This is not my favorite thing to do, but if I had an inkling of an idea, I just went ahead and wrote it. Sometimes it was in response to an email from an editor. Other times these pitches were ideas for editors I work with often that I’d had in mind but hadn’t written out — no more procrastination. I even wrote a few cold pitches to editors I didn’t know. March was the most pitches I sent in a month in I don’t even know how long.
• I stopped holding myself back. If I had an idea for an op-ed, I wrote it. If I saw an old editor’s name pop up on my LinkedIn feed, I emailed them at their new job. I read about a research institution in an obituary and — you guessed it — I sent that institution an LOI too.

Outreach tallies:

• 21 Pitches
• 98 LOIs
• 77 Follow ups
• 39 “Other” – things like checking in with an editor, asking if anyone else at that publication could use me, etc.

 

Results:

• Checked in with an editor I last wrote for in 2019, and got an assignment. $900
• Checked in with an editor I last wrote for in 2023, and got an assignment. $2,500
• Cold pitched a new-to-me editor at a publication I used to write for, but stopped writing for because the editor was a jerk. They’re gone now, and the new person bought my pitch — hooray for me! $1,200
• Pitched a story to a regular editor, who then asked me if I could do a quick turn around piece about something else — a story that they’d been discussing in their edit meeting when my email came in. $700
• Once published, sent the link of that story to another client, and said “I think we should do a version of this for your readers.” They said yes. $800
• Asked an editor if she had the name of the person in charge of a different vertical at the publication, and then sent them an email, and got an assignment. $1,400
• Followed up for the second time on an LOI I sent in April 2025 as part of last year’s marketing sprint, and got an assignment. $1,500
• When I turned in an assignment to an existing client, asked if they had anything else they wanted me to tackle, and got two more. $1,800
• Followed up on a “hey maybe we should do this assignment” discussion that had petered out, and got the assignment. $1,200
• Followed up on a “hey maybe we should do this assignment” discussion that had petered out, suggested a slightly different angle, and got the assignment. $800
• Followed up on a “hey maybe we should do this assignment” discussion that had petered out, suggested a new idea, and got the original assignment. $800
• Followed up on a “hey maybe we should do this assignment” discussion that had petered out, and got a quick turn around assignment about something else, for a different person at the publication. $630
• After a few more emails, that editor above finally gave me the original assignment. $1,575

 

Total: $15,805

 

Would I have gotten some of these assignments anyway? Probably. Am I still going to count them? Of course! This is my own marketing game, I can do what I want!

I did a lot of this work at nights on and weekends, using that golden “schedule send” email function. I’m tired! And now I need to buckle down and tackle the work I have due before vacation. But I still feel like I should have done more. That’s one thing about me: there’s always another ring I can grab. I’m working on it. But there’s also always April (and May, and June, etc. etc. etc.)

I also fired someone after one assignment, which I felt fine doing because I’ve drummed up all this new work. I’ll now use the time I would have spent fretting about them on finding people who will treat me like an equal, not someone who should feel oh so grateful that they even deigned to throw some work my way. No thanks!

 

Recent Bylines

“Why performance reviews are now continuous,” HR Dive

 

What I’m Reading

• Fashioning the Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict, and Couture by Justine Picardie. I really liked Picardie’s biography of Catherine Dior, sister to Christian who was a resistance fighter sent to a concentration camp. And since I will be seeing some royal fashion on my trip, why not. But this book just doesn’t hang together. Focusing on the British Royal Family around WW II is not a new story (how many times do we have to read about Wallis Simpson’s fashion? even if the author writes about how she and her abdicated husband palled around with Nazis and Italian fascists)? It feels especially out of step right now as written someone who is a monarchist (Picardie’s husband’s godfather was Prince Phillip). Maybe that’s from me being an American looking in, but her devotion to the Royal Family is not a good stance given what we now know about Prince Andrew and how Queen Elizabeth II shielded him (I’m debating whether or not I should even go a museum show in London I bought tickets for months before this all came out, but we’ll see). The better book might have been focusing on the people involved in the fashion instead making them the supporting cast in this story — like Hardy Aimes, who designed for the royal family but was also a British spy; and Cecil Beaton, royal photographer who was banished by Vogue for sneaking anti-antisemitic phrases into one of his illustrations but still embraced by the family. This also ends at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. If there’s a second volume planned, I don’t think I’ll read it.
• Little Book of Schiaparelli: The Story of the Iconic Fashion Designer by Emma Baxter-Wright. This is a slim book mostly of pictures, but when we’re talking about Elsa Shiaparelli, don’t we want to look at the dresses? The most interesting bit about her life came in a photo caption: Elsa Schiaparelli with her two adored granddaughters, the children of her only child Gogo, who married Robert Benson, an American Foreign Service Office. Marisa Berenson was a model-turned-actress, who starred in the musical Cabaret and became a well-known New York socialite; her younger sister Berry was a successful photographer and married to the actor Anthony Perkins. Berry was among the passengers killed on the American Airlines plane that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 2001.” That is some history mad libs. And to take it a step further: that means Schiaparelli is the great grandmother to Oz Perkins, the horror movie director (who also played David Kidney in Legally Blonde). 

 

What I’m Watching

• Project Hail Mary. I don’t see a ton of movies in the theater but this one? Of course! Amaze, amaze, amaze. It’s a very good book, a very good movie, and a very good movie adaptation of a very good book. 10/10 highly recommend.
• The Housemaid. Ahhhh what fun, in an “everyone here is psychotic” way. I didn’t read the book this is based on, so I went into it just knowing that a young woman who needs a job goes to work for a rich family, and things go very very wrong. I recommend it.
• The Monuments Men. I’ve read the book this movie is based on (on a 2014 flight home from Italy, funny enough), and I’ve even seem the movie before, but given my upcoming trip, and my library had the DVD, why not? Glad to say it’s still good! It’s based on the true story of the work to recover more than five million pieces of art stolen by the Nazis. I also recommend The Rape of Europa documentary about this, especially if you’re ever going to Europe. The more I take in this stuff, and spend time in Europe, the more connections are made in my brain. In 2023, I stood at the end of the replacement for one bridge the Nazis had bombed, looking at another bridge that was spared, which came up in this movie, and felt something deeper than just reading about it, especially since I then went on to see pictures of how the statue of David was bricked up to protect it, then David himself. The Monuments Men opens with showing how the Last Supper was almost destroyed. If you go to see it, you can see how close it really ways, as I did last year. History! Travel! Traveling to see history to learn about the world! As Rick Steves says, traveling is a political act! Also: stolen art is still being found. This is not ancient history!
• Michael Clayton. Somehow I never saw this 2007 Tony Gilroy thriller, but that’s one great thing about having a library well stocked with a range of DVDs. I saw it on the shelf e viola. Hot take: it’s very good. I put it on thinking I’d watch half of it and then finish it later, and watched the whole thing.
• Under the Banner of Heaven. A 2022 miniseries based on the Jon Krakauer non-fiction book of the same title. Police in in Utah are investigating the brutal murder of a young Mormon woman and her daughter, with one detective also being Mormon (Andrew Garfield) and one Native American (Gil Birmingham). It also delves into both the evolution of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and how that lead to the splinter group behind this. It’s pretty dire and another thing that happened in a cavalcade of evidence that fundamentalist religion is a cancer. Also, Wyatt Russell plays one of the fundamentalists, and yes I can see why he was cast to as discount Captain America in the MCU.

 

Nail Polish of the Week

I’m Not Really a Waitress by OPI. This shimmery maroon is an OPI classic. It’s also a pretty good match for the red used in the Phillies’ retro powder blue uniforms, and I needed to look my best at Opening Day last week.

 

Until next time!

Jen A. Miller (she/her)

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