On outreach

and the InkyGoodness 100 rejection challenge

I was planning to share with you a bit about what sort of emails I sent out this week, and maybe show you the images I sent in those emails, or the PDF collections that I sent out with the. I was going to write about the thinking behind who I was emailing and why I was doing it in mid-September and mid-week. And I might even have shown you the funky Airtable spreadsheet I had created, rather than the very basic an boring Excel spreadsheet I started out with a few years ago.

I was also going to tell you about the really cool 100 rejections challenge that I’ll be joining in with as part of my InkyGoodness membership, which encourages us to really push ourselves to submit and to reach out (for work, but also for other opportunities and in other areas of our life). I was going to tell you about what I had learnt about myself from the resources and zoom replay available as part of the challenge.

But I’m not. Because I have been far, far, too busy with work and I have a lot to get through before Chris and I go away to the south of France for a week. And then we’ll be away, so I guess these emails and this digging deeper will have to wait until the end of the month.

Except the end of the month is not such a good time, in the book publishing world, at least. Because that’s getting a bit too close to Frankfurt and people will be concentrating on that and the email will sit unread until after the book fair, by which point, it will have been joined by hundreds of other emails from book fair contacts and book fair attendees. (The run up to Bologna is also not a brilliant time to send emails out - well, to children’s publishers, at least.)

So, actually, I should really, really, really send emails out today. Right now. Only, no. It’s a Sunday. I should write them today and save them so I can press send on Tuesday morning. (I don’t schedule any more because Outlook almost always eats my scheduled emails and chews them up and digests them and, well, then I can’t find them and they are not super organised scheduled emails but non-existent emails that no-one ever receives.)

Instead of telling you about all the useful and organised outreach I did this week, let me tell you about what I will send out (or save ready to send out) later today. I am not going to overthink it too much and I am not going to put pressure on myself to write the perfect email and share the exact perfect images and pick the exact right people to email.

I am going to pick three people who I have worked with in the past and I am going to add three people I have emailed before and had semi-positive responses from (i.e. people who have actually replied and said they love my work and will keep me in mind when something suitable comes up. While I appreciate that this means I’m probably in a database somewhere, expecting that database to do all the heavy lifting is unfair. Reaching out once or twice a year to people who have expressed that they like your work is not a bad thing. It’s not rude. It’s stalkery. It’s not being pushy. It’s a perfectly acceptable and acknowledged thing to do.

It is so weird that we, as illustrators and artists, often feel wrong about reaching out to say ‘I’m here!’ or ‘I have some capacity coming up’. I have absolutely no qualms about sending out those kind of emails with my educational publishing freelancer hat on. I have built up methods for this, which usually start with the people we work with the most and just a quick email to say some current projects are winding up and we’ll have more capacity opening up in a month or so. If that doesn’t net any solid bookings (and honestly that is frequently enough), I then update our ‘What we’ve been working on and what we do’ PDFs (sometimes I send out one for the business as a whole and sometimes I send one each for each of us; it will depend on whether we’ve mostly been working on the same projects or separate ones). Sometimes I’ll include a rate sheet, but frequently I don’t and leave that for enquiries coming back.

I have no qualms about sending those emails out. But sending an email to art directors who might possibly commission me feel like shouting ‘Look at me! This is the art I have created. This is me. This is my whole identity. Please love me. Please don’t reject me.’ Why is it so much harder to treat this work in the same way as I do typesetting PowerPoints, building and editing interactive quizzes and managing projects? These skills are also part of my identity. I’m very good at both things. But I am so much more personally invested in the illustration because… why? Because we are encouraged to build a style and a voice that comes from deep within us, which therefore means that every piece of work we put out there is, to some extent, baring our actual soul. Yeesh!

To be fair, it has gotten easier to send the illustration outreach emails out. Every time I send a bunch I feel less anxious. I trick my brain into making it feel like the emails I send out for the other business. I set up processes. And it gradually feels less and less soul-baring and more and more just being a professional in a slightly different space.

I understand that I need to send a lot more of these out because (a) I am not as established as an illustrator as I am as an educational publishing freelancer but much more because (b) a publisher will need and use a much wider pool of illustrators than they will of editors/project managers, because they will need a particular style for a particular project; they can’t use the same illustrators over and over again for everything (which is much more possible for editing, typesetting and project management). So, if I need a base of 5 or 6 main clients in educational publishing, I would need a base of probably closer to 20 main clients in illustration.

And all of this means that the InkyGoodness 100 rejection challenge will be incredibly useful to me and fast track that journey toward the point when outreach and pitching is just totally part of normal working life and no longer gives me the same feeling as passing a note to the guy or gal I fancied in English class many many moons ago. I am very determined to notch up my 100 rejections and then to keep going and notch up 100 more…

This week, I will send out some very simple emails that say something along the lines of ‘I really loved working on XXX with you back in XXX…’ or ‘I’ve reached out to you before, but it’s been a while…’ ‘I have some illustration capacity opening up from mid October and would love to help out if you have any relevant illustration projects. Here are a couple of recent pieces of work and you can see more on my portfolio. I’d be happy to discuss any projects that you have coming up that might be suit my style.’

And that’s literally it. Once we’re back, and finished off a couple of chunks of work that will be waiting for our return, I will go deeper into researching more people to contact, pulling together some more targeted PDFs and also seeing if I can pull together the author-illustrator pitches I’ve been working on and thinking about for a while now.

If you’re doing the InkyGoodness 100 rejection challenge, or any other rejection challenge, well done and go get em! If you’re not, and have similar issues with outreach, consider giving it a go. The more you reach out the easier it gets. Believe me. And quite a few of the Inky peeps who did the challenge last year got some great projects out of it. You can read more about it over on Ginger’s substack - and subscribe while you’re over there, because she writes the best newsletters.

100 Rejections Challenge

I’m going to be away for a week from Wednesday and there’s a fairly decent chance that I will not send out a newsletter next Saturday. I’m not promising not to, but just warning you that I may be fully and completely enjoying down time.