Should You Cater Your Writing to Comedy Publications?

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Today’s post is about catering.

But not the kind with shrimp crostinis and a tray of delicious cookies and brownies.

Rather, I want to talk about catering your writing to humor publications.

It’s common for humor writers to ask, “hey, what’s the best way to get a piece accepted in publication X?”

Natural follow up question: How much should you consider the style and voice of a publication when you pitch them your work?

So, if you want to publish a piece in Shouts & Murmurs or Points In Case, or wherever else, which aspects of the piece should you cater when you brainstorm or write the piece?

There are a lot of possibilities: Should you be a full-service caterer? A partial caterer? What kind of catering truck should you drive: Foreign or domestic? White or off-white? Should you avoid catering entirely and just grab Taco Bell?

Whoops, I got distracted.

And while those are great questions, I think it’s easiest to break this issue into two actually pertinent questions:

A. Should you cater your core concepts or premise ideas to the publication you’re pitching?

B. Should you cater your voice and style to the publication you’re pitching?

In my view: yes, and no!

Let’s investigate.

Here are three ways you can approach your humor premise or comedy idea when you pitch publications.

Approach 1 - No catering.

When you pitch publications, just send them anything. Send them whatever ideas you happened to come up with that you thought were funny.

Ranking: might work, might be a stupid waste of time.

The problem with “no catering” is that there’s a spectrum of ideas and topics and vibes that specific publications love, and others they completely avoid, and everything in between.

An intelligent person can discern all of this pretty easily just by reading that publication, or even by surveying a few months worth of material without even reading it all that deeply.

Survey the topics and vibes and see what that publication likes, and what they avoid. You will get a sense of what is smart to send them and what is a waste of time to send them.

The issue with not catering your premise ideas whatsoever is that you’ll waste time sending them stuff they’ll never publish.

Approach 2 - Full-service catering.

In full service catering, you focus 100% of your brainpower on only coming up with ideas specifically for your target publication.

When you brainstorm ideas for pieces, you exclusively focus on the best ideas that your target publication would love.

Ranking: could work but potentially feels stifling.

This can absolutely work, and it will probably get you more published pieces than ignoring the publication’s preferred topics. My issue with this approach is that it’s pretty stifling, especially if you practice it for the long-term.

I don’t want my mind to be so constrained when I brainstorm and think up weird ideas. I want to be free. I want to go hog wild. This is more fun for me.

I don’t want to be thinking too heavily, at least not in the long-run, primarily about what a particular publication likes or doesn’t like. Instead, I want to be more focused on what I like or don’t like.

So, full-service catering could work to snag more publication credits, but to me it’s a bit limiting! It’s not as fun for me as a writer.

Approach 3 - Catering within your wheelhouse.

I call this approach the win-win approach. When you brainstorm ideas for pieces, don’t limit yourself. Be prolific. Be free. Come up with whatever funny ideas you love.

But—and this is the important part—when you select a concept to send to a publication, focus on the premise ideas in your list that are better fits for them.

Ranking: galaxy brain.

This is the approach that I eventually landed on that let me publish stuff in Shouts and McSweeney’s and Points In Case and other publications.

When I brainstorm, I go nuts. I don’t care. I let the clown roam free. And I always write the ideas that I love.

But. When I’m trying to publish in a comedy publication, I focus on sending them the 10% subset of my ideas that I feel will be a better fit for them. This raises my odds of success.

It’s a win-win because it doesn’t constrain my work. But it’s also more efficient at getting my work published.

How do you select premise ideas for specific publications?

A bit more about that in these two posts:

Now let’s talk about how the piece is written.

You might think, “if I want to publish in Shouts & Murmurs, I need to write in the voice and style of The New Yorker.” Is that true?