How to Pitch a Magazine (in 1888)

For women writers, Eleanor Kirk’s 1888 guidebook was a way to break into the boys’ club of publishing.Photograph by John Edwin Phillips, 1892. Courtesy Library of Congress

Today marks the publication of the ninety-fourth annual edition of “Writer’s Market”—that standby of aspiring writers and the bane of slush-pile-reading interns. A holdout from the time of Underwood typewriters and S.A.S.E.s, the print version of “Writer’s Market” soldiers on in an era of Mediabistro and Submittable. But the creators of the series didn’t invent pitch guides. Credit for that belongs to a nineteenth-century suffragette working from her Brooklyn apartment. Largely forgotten today, Eleanor Kirk was “the most pronounced of the women’s rights women,” as the New York Herald put it in 1870—a firebrand spoken of in the same breath as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Widowed twice before she turned forty, left with five children to support, Kirk cast aside her old name, Eleanor Maria Easterbrook Ames, and reinvented herself as a sharp-elbowed reporter for the New York Standard—“Not an erasure, not an addition, no alterations,” she once warned a meddling editor.

Her first fame, though, came through the short-lived Working Women’s Association, started by Anthony and Stanton in 1868. Kirk quickly asserted herself in the group. “With one end of a Rob Roy shawl thrown defiantly across her bosom … [she] asked if ladies who were not working women should dictate [the W.W.A.’s] constitution and officers. Eleanor threw a withering glance in the direction of the elegant ladies with gold mounted glasses,” the Herald reported. (“And I must confess that I don’t like this wholesale condemnation of men that I hear every night,” she added at another meeting.) It was no surprise when the outspoken Kirk was tapped, the following year, to succeed Anthony as president of the association—but she shocked the group by turning down the post. “MRS. KIRK’S HAND GRENADE,” a headline in the Sun read the next day. Anthony pleaded in vain with her; Kirk was, she warned, “making the great mistake of her life.” (And maybe she was; the group went on to form part of the nucleus of the National Women Suffrage Association.)

Kirk’s dilemma, fittingly enough, was that she really was a working woman. Though she continued lecturing on behalf of women workers and in favor of suffrage, and even served as the organization’s secretary for a time, she could not afford to lead the movement. Instead, she supported her household over the next two decades by writing brash columns in which she dispensed parenting advice and covered the latest goings-on in New York City’s salons and courtrooms (and, in one case, at a speed-typewriting tournament). During the same period, she also penned a novel of divorce rights (“Up Broadway”) and a stage comedy (“Flirtation”). By the eighteen-eighties, Kirk’s columns were in syndication, reaching millions of women through a hundred and fifty newspapers nationwide: “SHE IS BOTH PARAGRAPHIC AND BREEZY,” as one slightly mystifying Dallas Morning News headline promised. Working and travelling were especially important to Kirk, and she directed much of her ire at the absurdities of constrictive Victorian clothing. It was “the plain and positive duty of every woman” to shorten her skirt; Kirk urged her readers to take up biking and mountain climbing, and snapped that anyone lacking the courage to wear bloomers “would do well to remain in her rocking chair on the piazza and solace herself with her embroidery, novel, and pug dog.”

Kirk, who often pushed for newsrooms to employ more women, was confounded by questions from those who couldn’t break into writing. This inspired a slim volume, one so odd that Kirk had to publish and sell it from her home at 786 Lafayette Avenue, in Brooklyn: “Periodicals that Pay Contributors; to which Is Added a List of Publishing Houses.” The year was 1888. “I want to help the girls who feel they can write if they have a little encouragement,” Kirk later explained in one of her columns. “I know what uphill work it is.”

“Periodicals that Pay” was preceded by such all-around writing primers as “Haney’s Guide to Authorship” and the advice magazine The Writer. But Kirk’s book was the first to arrange markets systematically and advise readers on how to break into them—by noting what material they ran, and the names and addresses of their editors. Reading “Periodicals that Pay” today is a window into a world in which Strawbridge & Clothier’s Monthly and Brainard’s Musical World still roamed the earth. Some advice remains unchanged, though. Wildly pitching in all directions, Kirk warned, was a waste of time—and, back then, of postage: “The helter-skelter way of sending manuscripts to and fro … without an inkling of the character of the papers to be catered to is useful only to ‘Uncle Sam.’ ”

Kirk’s guide exhorts writers to keep up with technology—that is, to buy themselves a typewriter—and begs them to stop sending lousy pitches. “Does not want poems about love and roses,” an entry for The Journalist magazine warns, “nor stories about the widow who was starving until she wrote a magazine article which placed her in luxury.” One entry, for a women’s newsletter, is even more forthright, and includes exactly when to expect payment—something that many publications still can’t bring themselves to reveal:

JENNESS-MILLER MAGAZINE, THE. Monthly, 5 pp. Editors Annie Jenness Miller, Mabel Jenness. Desires articles of general interest, especially to women, but not upon dress or dress reform. Maximum length, 4,000 words. “We can always find space for bright, well-written articles, original articles upon subjects of general interest. We pay the first of the month following publication, never before. Will not be responsible for MS. unless registered, and all articles must await their turn to be read.” Address, The Jenness-Miller Editorial Dep’t., 363 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.

Today, having such information at one’s fingertips is easily taken for granted. But, for Kirk’s peers, women who didn’t have college friends in the business, who didn’t mingle with freelancers in Manhattan or Boston—women, in short, like the newly widowed Ellen Ames once was—her guide offered a way to break into the boys’ club of publishing. Her advice found a ready market: it was reported that she received “a bushel of letters a day,” and a St. Louis fair even featured “an Eleanor Kirk doll named after Brooklyn’s well-known editor.”

Kirk immediately issued another how-to (“Information for Authors”), a manual that holds up surprisingly well. (As she points out, with some prescience, “Reading is not the only recreation of the present age. Leisure is absorbed in a hundred other ways, unknown to us half a century ago.”) She also launched a feminist magazine cheekily titled Eleanor Kirk’s Idea, sometimes bundling it with her author guides as a double shot of can-do. Under the motto “Women for Women,” the Idea featured such headlines as “Why Women Should Vote” and “A Tax Upon Trailing Skirts”; over the course of its thirteen-year run, the magazine increasingly reflected Kirk’s fascinations with astrology and health reform.

Not everyone was enchanted: the Times labelled it “the amateur maniac’s own journal.” If so, she had company. Her son Samuel moonlighted from his newspaper job to help get issues produced, and Kirk’s housemate, Caroline Le Row, a Vassar elocution instructor, contributed articles on education reform. Their closeness was so remarkable as to inspire a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article marvelling at its “complete refutation of the prevalent idea that long friendships are not possible among women.” Whether theirs was a Boston marriage or something more, the two remained inseparable for four decades.

Eleanor Kirk worked well into her seventies, printing everything from author how-tos and health manuals to astrology guides and sets of “Gumption Cards” (vegetarian recipes). But after her death, in 1908, she sank into obscurity, rarely mentioned except in misleading appropriations of her work in abortion debates. Yet the genre that she invented lives on. At their height, Eleanor Kirk’s guides were being hawked at Brentano’s bookstore, through her magazine, and in her newspaper columns. Giving pitching advice to prospective writers was a good idea. Too good, perhaps: in 1894, one of Kirk’s rival freelancers, James Knapp Reeve, lifted it for his own guide, “Five Hundred Places to Sell Manuscripts.” And that was a fine business, too, until Reeve was scooped, in 1921—by none other than “Writer’s Market.”