I joined the WD team after working in nonfiction book publishing for about six years. I was used to getting book proposals and kept myself blissfully away from the magazine side of the brand I was working on. But when I joined WD, where the magazine and books were not only intertwined, but the books were sometimes about making magazines, I was suddenly hit with three terms that seemed interchangeable: pitch, query, and proposal.
First there was confusion and then, the moment of enlightenment: They’re similar, but not the same, and belong to those collections of terms that industry folks use so often, it can be easy to forget there are always going to be people hearing them for the first time.
The basic difference is this:
A request to a print or online publication advocating that
