This is an excerpt from a transcript of mediabistro.com's seminar, "Tricks of the Trade" held February 27, 2006 in New York, led by freelance trade journalist Fern Glazer. Register now for Fern's next "Tricks of the Trade" seminar in New York on June 7!

I don't know anyone who's ever been sued. I mean, you know when you're working on a story where there's a good chance you might be sued and I would take it one step at a time with that, and plan out your strategy. So that's selling yourself...the way that I feel is, it's worked for me. Pitching, we talked a little bit about that. Let's say we start out with something that we know. You know the wine business. I would immediately get the publications or look at them online, do whatever I could and start to get a sense of the kind of stories and based on my knowledge, come up with a couple of ideas, brainstorm and come up with a couple of ideas.

And then do the same that you would with a consumer magazine. You know, craft the lead that you think would be the lead of the story. It's gonna grab attention, it's gonna let the editor know that you know their publication. That you know, you know the style and the tone. Follow the lead paragraph with another paragraph that's gonna say, here are the kinds of sources that I'm gonna use to write this story which would be similar to the ones that you found in here. And then wrap it up with a third paragraph about you and why you're the right person to write for this.

With trades, I think that that starts a dialogue. It might not be the right story, it might not be something they need, but they immediately see that okay, this person has it together and then the dialogue, the door is open and you can start talking about you know possibly writing for, or well, that's not really what we're looking for or we've already done something like that and well, what about this, are you available to write this?

More here.