For obvious reasons, the things that jump out to most mainstream media covering Digital Canada 150 last week were the ones that seemed to have the biggest impact on everyday consumers. There is the promise of expanded Internet access in rural areas, for example, and revamped privacy legislation to keep data safe in an age of increasingly online and mobile transactions. For academics wondering how, or if, their research in areas like gamification, user experience (UX) design or interactive display will ever make it into the commercial market, there was plenty in the federal strategy that could help.

Probably the best news, in fact, was something that had come out before the complete digital strategy was unveiled. This is the Business Innovation Access Program, which was originally announced in the 20123 budget. It’s designed, in the government’s words, “to support innovative research and development that translates into products that benefit Canadians by connecting small and medium-sized businesses with universities, colleges and other research institutions.” Elements of the Business Innovation Access Program almost seem to have been created with things like UX in mind. Eligible technical areas, for example, include “product optimization,” and “process development, analysis or optimization.”

There was a lot more in Digital Canada 150 that touched on commercialization, including intentions to update intellectual property laws and $100 million set aside for the Canada Accelerator and Incubator program, but the Business Innovation Access Program deserves particular attention. It’s less money, at $20 million pledged, but it could represent a highly tactical form of investment.

Many of the breakthrough inventions or technologies in post-secondary labs already take years to develop. Sometimes the thought of bringing it to market must seem equally (and dauntingly) long-term. The Business Innovation Access Program, however, focuses on organizations that normally aren’t candidates for technology commercialization because their pockets aren’t deep enough. Yet small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the predominant corporate entity in this country, and a breakthrough that brings value to SMBs could have a far greater chance of commercial success than something that appeals to what is essentially a small collection of large Canadian enterprises.

SMBs are also, out of necessity, focused on a more near-term return on investment (ROI), and the Business Innovation Access Program has clearly taken this into account.  The government wants “short-term projects for which a business service or technical assistance would clearly demonstrate the potential to contribute to quicker commercialization of products or academic research.” That’s something researchers should want, too.

It’s hard to say how the government’s overall digital economy strategy will pan out, but this program, albeit a piece part of the whole, is probably the only way academic breakthroughs can get a foothold with this particular customer set. Yes, Ottawa is clearly hoping for a few quick wins here, but if the research sector could give them some, the path to applied innovation could become a lot shorter, too.

Last week, CommerceLab hosted a Google Hangout that brought together a panel of experts who could provide some advice and direction to help academics determine the best option for their work. Hosted by consultant Rick Paradis, the Hangout was the second online extension of a live workshop series that was also produced by CommerceLab.

The full recording is below, but we’ve once again captured some of the key highlights and takeaways:

Beware the $10,000 mouse trap: According to Jennifer MacInnis, senior director, applied research and commercialization, and legal counsel at Ryerson University, some researchers work on technology that may lack a viable market. If they manage to ensure someone will buy what they’re selling, it’s more a matter of how much they are willing to put into it. Many startups are founded, she said, because there isn’t an obvious company that would license the intellectual property (IP) involved.

“Startups take a lot of work, time and energy. They take people devoted to bringing the startup forward,” she said. Although finding someone to take the IP can also be difficult, “Once you’ve found your licensee, you’re turning your baby over to boarding school.”

If IP is all you’ve got, prove it: Researchers may worry that they need to build a functioning product or at least a prototype before seeking to license their technology or create a startup, but that’s not always the case, said Tai Nam, a lawyer with Miller Thomson based in Kitchener-Waterloo.

“If you are looking to license (your research) and exit, try to capture the value of IP through a registration, whether it’s patents or industrial designs, to demonstrate to investors that you have captured it in some form that’s registered and transferable,” he said. “If at an early stage you haven’t fleshed out the details and you haven’t done some experimentation to figure out what the problems might be, it might be hard to file a patent that demonstrates you have possession of the invention.”

Want a partner? First, figure out the parameters: Academics may decide instead of merely creating a startup or licensing that they will partner with an established firm to further their IP. Paula Mendonça, technology commercialization officer for Life Sciences at Genesis Group Inc., recommended thinking carefully about what kind of partner you really need. For example, there are some companies that can do everything, but are specialized in working on certain stages of development. Do you need help to build a product, to market it, to sell it, or all three? Also, consider how IP should be managed when multiple researchers are involved.

“In our case, IP is jointly owned between inventors and the university. When there is IP that comes out and we evaluate it and it has commercial potential, it needs to be assigned to Genesis,” she said. “Having one institution managing that IP definitely makes things easier. We then work it out with the individual inventors in the sharing of royalties . . . It looks unprofessional if you’re dealing with a multinational and you have different inventors pitching different things. You want to present a united front.”

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Earlier this week CommerceLab hosted a Google Hangout session on Startups for academic researchers, hosted by facilitator Rick Paradis. The online panel was a followup to live workshops he recently presented on behalf of CommerceLab for faculty and grad students at locations in Ontario and Nova Scotia, on commercializing academic research.

The full Hangout is available for on-demand viewing below, but if you can’t watch for the full hour, we’ve culled some of the best takeaways:

Publish before patenting, and you may perish: According to Rob Cowan, a lawyer with McInnes Cooper, it’s important researchers understand that after filing a patent, they will need to provide full details of their invention, which is then investigated in a process that sometimes takes years. Should a researcher publish a paper before doing so, however, their intellectual property rights could be at risk.

“The first step is really just keep it confidential,” he said. “With a startup, often the big consideration is, ‘Do I need a patent or is this something I can build a product around or have a service around?’ In some industries, like life sciences, a patent is more important. In ICT, perhaps less so, unless you’re going head to head with Google or Microsoft.”

Leave the lab behind occasionally: Mary Kilfoil teaches the Lean methodology at Dalhousie University’s faculty of Management in the Rowe School of Business. She said the Lean Canvas” approach, which is a way of documenting a business model, has proven particularly effective for a number of researchers turning their work into startups. But it’s not a one-time exercise.

“You have to continue to do customer discovery — that’s the most critical piece,” she said. “It’s about always being in search mode and searching for your business model. Get out of the building and talk to customers.”

Be a rabbit, not a hippo: Jake Arsenault is an example of a researcher who’s been successful with commercialization, essentially turning his Ph.D thesis into a technology called Backscatter Computed Tomography and forming a business, Inversa Systems. He went even further than Kilfoil in suggesting his peers need to have “great big ears and a little mouth,” listening for feedback wherever they can.

“You want to wear out your shoes, you want to wear out that telephone. There’s (accelerator) programs and all this stuff, but the main thing is you travel, you’re in front of the customer, engaging,” he said. “Find a killer pain point. If you have the promise of taking away that pain, you’ve got their attention.”

Keep your HR hat handy: If and when a researcher launches a startup, the next big hurdle is having the right team surrounding you, said Josh Wright, co-founder of Decision.io.

“All you do is fundraise and hire engineers. It’s a necessary skill to find and retain talent,” he said. “That company culture piece is something that’s becoming very attractive to investors . . . you have to look at what you’re good at and what you’re not. You hire for the deficiencies you have as a person.”
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An “all or nothing” strategy seems counter-intuitive when looking at the best way to commercialize risky innovations.  Conventional wisdom says that launching small, measurable experiments or pilots is the best, lowest risk approach to introducing new products or technologies. Though this seems like a prudent tack, it has not necessarily produced market wins. Numerous studies show that the success rate for new products has stubbornly hovered around 10-20%. Fortunately, there may be a better way to commercialize innovation.

Anita Elberse

A professor at Harvard Business School, Anita Elberse, has studied creativity-driven industries like music, sports, movies and publishing.  In her book Blockbusters, Elberse found that the companies with superior financial returns had strategically focused their efforts and capital on producing movie blockbusters, recruiting superstar athletes or signing popular authors. To use a baseball metaphor, these firms always swing for the fences instead of playing it safe trying for singles and doubles. According to her data, these industries exhibit a ‘winner take all’ dynamic; less than 10% of projects, teams or entertainers produced more than 90% of industry revenue and profit.

In “winner take all” markets, the best strategy is to singlehandedly aim for blockbuster products.  The best way to do this is to focus investment and management attention on proven entities, assets or projects, like a movie sequel, a superstar free agent athlete or a popular book franchise.  Funding a limited number of major innovations is not enough. You also need to front-load your sales and marketing effort to boost initial channel distribution and trigger word-of-mouth effects. Elberse considers a blockbuster strategy a lower risk approach because it improves the odds of success early on and enables firms to cut their losses if results do not pan out.

Applicability to other markets

While Elberse studied the creative and sporting industries, other information-driven sectors may experience similar blockbuster dynamics. Industries with high fixed costs, a low marginal cost (when producing more) and a high marginal profit (on each additional sale) can quickly evolve into “winner take all” markets, particularly when digital technologies reduce customer search costs and eliminate the need for physical proximity between the buyer and seller. There are many reasons for all CEOs to consider this approach for their business:

Rallying the troops

Big innovation bets focus employee and supplier attention, create positive urgency and prevent individual or departmental agendas from stealing resources. 

Reduces complexity

Many R&D projects, particularly small ones, can develop institutional momentum making them difficult to cancel.  Managing this portfolio can generate significant complexity, increasing organizational cost and diffusing effort.  A blockbuster strategy eliminates these wasteful costs plus allows managers to best leverage scale economies in areas like media buying and raw material purchases.

Satisfy real customer needs

Movie studios concentrate investment and time on stories, actors and directors with proven consumer appeal (e.g., a sequel).  The discipline of only targeting key customer needs in profitable segments with real innovation improves the chances of market success.

Elberse’s learnings are relevant to many other industries including education, training, professional services and software. However, not every firm is a good fit. We believe enterprises should have three characteristics:

1.  Self-awareness

Companies that are good at placing the right innovation bets tend to have a good sense of what their core competencies are and where they need to partner or bypass.

2.  Decisiveness

Though having a good innovation evaluation process is important, management still needs to make tough calls quickly in periods of uncertainty.  Moreover, following a blockbuster strategy requires firms to have a culture and performance measurement system that is tolerant of failure.

3.  Nimbleness

Rigid plans lead to risky, binary decisions. Even in the movie industry, extensive consumer research still takes place.  Producers don’t hesitate to make edits or change endings based on focus group research.

Utilizing a blockbuster approach goes against conventional wisdom.  However, there are many examples of hurting companies like Apple, IBM and Xerox that followed this strategy and have re-emerged as winners.  Managers should understand their operational dynamics, consider the strong financial business case, and analyze the impact of digital tools like search bots or recommendation engines that create “winner take all” effects.

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“Hardly! In fact, it had the completely opposite effect,” he was recently reported to say. “I got tenure very rapidly, and then I was free to follow any intellectual pathways that I felt intensely pulled by.”

The book? Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Hofstadter is now a distinguished professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University.

Knowledge: pass it on

While not everyone will go on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winner with mass appeal, there are many reasons academics should “cross to the other side” and write for a lay readership.

For starters, many funding agencies require it, says Nick Manning, director of media relations and issues management for the University of Waterloo. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) is one. The Canadian Research Chair Program also requires that professors engage in what’s known as knowledge transfer or knowledge mobilization. In other words, research findings are no longer expected to remain sequestered in ivory towers, but batted around and passed along to the masses in a way they can understand.

“There’s always a tremendous amount of interest from the general public in what researchers are doing. So it’s a really exciting thing to be engaged in translating deep thinking and knowledge gain,” says Manning. “Being skillful at that can be really rewarding.”

Simple versus simplistic

Even so, many researchers struggle with writing for that audience. It’s no small thing to move away from “academese” to write clear, concise and compelling prose that eradicates wordy clutter, particularly if it has been years since a last attempt.

Then there’s the worry that writing for the general public will mean dumbing down ideas. But that’s not an accurate assumption. A successful writer takes complexities and finds a way to explain them so, “a very bright 10-year-old can understand them,” says Manning. It’s not about dumbing down. It’s about talking straight. There’s a world of difference.

Sometimes clear writing is simply a matter of using informal or colloquial words. Write “heart attack,” not “myocardial infarction,” or “salt” instead of “sodium chloride,” for instance.

Or use analogies that connect with the reader’s world and they can picture in their minds. When describing something tiny, say it’s the width of a pin, if that’s accurate. Or something large weighs the equivalent of six elephants, or is as long as three football fields.

Clear thinking

William Zinsser, author of the seminal writer’s manual, On Writing Well, has gone so far to say that people who write convoluted prose full of jargon are actually revealing how little they know about the subject. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other,” he writes.

Clear writing, without embellishment to hide behind, actually forces researchers to understand their work so well they can explain it to anyone.

Another upside: readers tend to share a good, clear story through social media. Articles tend to go viral when they ask an intriguing question or make a slightly contentious point that speaks directly to the reader. A blog called “Computerization and its impact on intelligence,” will probably go nowhere.  But, “Your computer is making you stupid and here’s why,” is likely to pick up new readers.

Knowledge transfer complete.

Top 10 words to avoid when writing for the general public

1. One (As in, “One does not write clearly if one’s thoughts are cluttered.)
2. Yet
3. Thereby
4. Hence
5. In conclusion
6. Utilize (use)
7. It is (it’s)
8. “This article will…”
9. Facilitate (ease or help)
10. It is interesting to note

“I don’t want to meet ‘one’ – he’s a boring guy.”

– William Zinsser

Previously in this series: 

How to bring breakthrough ideas to a mass audience

What gets the media interested in academic research stories

Media training for researchers: Crafting the commercialization message

For many academics, new entrepreneurs and researchers, speaking to the media and giving interviews can seem unnatural and nerve-racking. Or, on the flipside, some people assume that because their research area knowledge runs so deep, they’re in good shape to handle any media enquiry.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case – particularly without some kind of preparation says Nick Manning, director of media relations and issues management at the University of Waterloo. Without advance preparation and clear communication goals, it’s more likely that the reporter will misrepresent what you say or even make factual errors. That’s something neither of you wants.

“The temptation to go into any kind of media engagement without being prepared is very dangerous,” cautions Manning.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to articulate your ideas without stumbling during an interview or saying something you don’t intend to.

Step 1: Be prepared

That’s the number one piece of advice Paul Lima gives clients. The Toronto media trainer with 25 years experience likens interview preparation to improvisational comedy. While the actors onstage seem to be making up skits on the spot, in truth, they run through possible scenarios backstage before the show.

“Why would you go into an interview absolutely cold when the greatest improv actors in the world actually rehearse?” he says. “Don’t wing it.”

To prepare for an interview, write down every question you think the reporter might ask, and quickly draft your answers. You can even ask the reporter to email you a list of questions beforehand (although not all of them will) or ask for the specific story angle. Find out how long the interview will probably take. If a reporter tells you it will be short – about 10 or 15 minutes – you know the article will probably be short too, so keep your answers succinct.

Marjo Johne, a veteran freelance journalist in Mississauga who frequently writes for The Globe and Mail, says she often asks her expert interview sources to have anecdotes ready when she calls.

“I’m looking for someone who is capable of speaking in a language the audience will understand and can also take theory and apply it to real-world examples,” she says.

Step 2: Draft your messages

Media messages are not spin, nor are they only used in the political sphere. Instead, a message strategy simply helps you tell your story in a clear and compelling way to a trade or general audience.

“The best communicators that I’ve worked with always have three points they want to get across. They’ve prepared them and rehearsed them,” says Manning.

Without these messages, it’s much too easy to get off track in the interview and give reporters information they don’t really need. Armed with extraeneous data to slog through, the writer drafts an article that’s incorrect, uninspired or boring. They just can’t separate the technical from the exceptional.

Step 3: Deliver a memorable interview

Journalists always want to interview people who know how to speak in quotes. Everything these savvy sources say seems to set off a “ping” inside the reporter that makes them jot down the point and use it later.

Some people are naturally born with this conversational skill, but it can be learned by anyone. To start, write down some sound bites — simply clips of speech that capture what you want to say, says Lima. The best ones are short, revealing, memorable, interesting and sometimes pithy.

Say you are working on technology that turns textiles into colourized digital billboards that reflect user’s emotions. Don’t just prepare answers about how the technology functions (although that’s certainly important if you’re speaking to an industry publication) but come up with a few quotable lines too.

Use, “For the first time ever, we’ll actually be able to wear our hearts on our sleeves.”

Corny? Perhaps, but it’s a quote that gives a visual, real world example of how the technology will have an impact.

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These questions and more will be addressed by an online panel whose expertise covers IP licensing agreements, legal and financial issues.

On Thursday, March 27th, 1pm EDT, VIEW online at the CommerceLab YouTube channel: youtube.com/theCommerceLab

JOIN in with your questions via Twitter addressed to @theCommerceLab.

This online panel will be run as a Google Hangout On Air. If you would like to join the panel, we have spots for up to 2 academic researchers exploring the licensing option. If you would like to participate, email [email protected] with a couple sentences on where you are in your commercialization process and why you would like to join.

These questions and more will be addressed by an online panel whose expertise includes: evaluating startups and their potential, funding, legal questions, HR, growth planning and more.

On Wednesday, March 26th, 1pm EDT, VIEW online at the CommerceLab YouTube channel: youtube.com/theCommerceLab

JOIN in with your questions via Twitter addressed to @theCommerceLab.

This online panel will be run as a Google Hangout On Air. If you would like to join the panel, we have spots for 2 academic researchers exploring the startup option. If you would like to participate, email [email protected] with a couple sentences on where you are in your commercialization process and why you would like to join.

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Andrew Pulkrabrek

Pulkrabek has a background both as an entrepreneur as well as a venture capitalist, so after he walked through the basics of the 43North program I asked him why he thought it was so hard for academics to commercialize their work successfully. His answer was so thorough I thought it worth transcribing and posting in its entirety below:

My alma mater is the University of Minnesota, a top five research institution, and you’d hear that exact same concern addressed there. I don’t think people are ever going to be happy with the amount of technology that gets developed (in academia) and what gets commercialized. 

Part of the challenge with that, if I step back and look at it from my venture capital background and the private equity side of things, is that the technologies coming out of the schools are so very early stage, they’re so high risk, and what’s happened since the financial crisis is that corporate America has gotten risk-averse. They don’t want to go into early-stage deals, and they feel much more comfortable — because a lot of public CEOs live by the (financial) quarter — to keep money on the balance sheet. I’ll pay multiple times over what it’s worth today if it’s de-risked and commercialized in the market than I would if it was five years earlier and had a higher risk profile. As the CEO in that situation, I don’t want to take the risk profile of that failing, because it looks to the market and I could be out of a job in a quarter. So from that standpoint, the strategic capital has gone very far downstream. 

Venture capital has followed suit, because in some cases what you’ve seen over the last 10 years is that VCs start out, they raise $50 million, they invest it, they get the internal rate of return for their limited partners, they come back and say, ‘Well, $50 million was great, but now I want to do a $150 million fund.’ But now they’re collecting two and 20 — a two percent management fee and 20 percent (cut from the gains) — but they have a disincentive to necessarily add more staff to do the due diligence and conduct the deals. They have an incentive to keep their staff at the same levels and put the capital out in the marketplace. Now all of a sudden their internal rate of return drops. It’s a long cycle, a 10, 15-year cycle, and you can raise a lot of capital when you get a 10-year, close-ended fund. You don’t necessarily deliver a return back to your limited partners for six years. So they can tell a lot of story, get a lot of money under management. 

What ends up happening, though, is a bull-whip effect. At the end of it, the limited partners come back and say, ‘You know, we didn’t get the return we were hoping for, and so now we’re not going to go back and invest in these small venture capital firms.’ Because again, they’re higher risk. You’ve got folks that may not have that deep experience in having done the venture investing. Now venture capital says, ‘Okay, I can’t invest now in higher-risk deals, because I could lose, and I won’t be able to raise my next follow-on fund.’ 

So what have they done? They’ve gone right downstream with everybody else. That’s left the academic institutions, which may have some bench-top research done, some maybe interesting IP formed around it, saying, ‘This is something that could address a significant market.’ But you have that major gap between the bench-top research and the ability to get the first significant round of capital to be able to de-risk it and get it to the point where that money can come in.

There are no easy solutions to the problems Pulkrabek has outlined, but anyone hoping to advance what they’ve done in UX design, gamification or interactive display shouldn’t be discouraged. Better to understand the challenges upfront and prepare accordingly. It may mean doing more of the due-diligence before presenting an idea, or connecting with people who can help present it as a safer-sounding bet. Winning a business plan competition is one thing. Whether researchers can win over VCs and the equity markets is the real $5 million question.

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To be fair, back when editors took three-martini lunches and owned a fistful of red pens and bottles of whiteout, writers routinely pitched story ideas over the phone. But today’s editorial reality is different. Astoundingly so. Each day is a tornado of overfilled email inboxes, meetings, deadlines and production schedules. Those editors who escape rounds of layoffs are expected to churn out the same quality product, but with much less help.

In short, editors are busy.

So if you want to pitch a trade or consumer article idea, give editors exactly what they need to quickly decide if they will assign the article. Here’s a general guide for crafting a written query that gets results.

Email the right person

Look at the publication masthead or go online and look for the list of editors on the publication’s site. You want to send your pitch by email to someone listed as a senior editor, not a managing or contributing editor. If the publication asks that all queries be sent to one email address, such as [email protected], use it.

No general topics please

The best pitches start with a specific and targeted idea that shows you have a unique angle – and know where it might best work within the publication.

Don’t: “I intend to write an article about my most recent research regarding gamification reward systems and their effect on infant primates.”

Do: “I have a 500-word story idea for your “Uncommon Sense” section about surprising ways both toddlers and baby gorillas respond to reward systems.”

Clear subject line

Because editors often receive hundreds of emails a day, you need to be sure yours stands out. Put thought into your subject line and make it clear what the email is about. Try:

Subject: Pitch for Uncommon Sense – toddlers vs. gorillas

Not only does this subject line tell the editor you’re sending a pitch, it’s for a specific section and the subject matter is offbeat and intriguing.

Know the format

Your pitch is not a letter, so don’t write it like it’s one. Successful pitches (LINK TO SIDEBAR PAGE BELOW)are usually formatted like this:

1. The headline. Most pitch  writers forget a well-crafted headline. Stand out from the crowd and give the editor a reason to keep reading.

2. The lead. Launch your query, another word for pitch, with the lead of your actual story. Not only are you hoping to intrigue the reader, you want to show that you write well and understand the consumer or industry trade publication’s tone and style.

3. The story you intend to tell and how. Once you have the reader hooked, explain the main body of the story. Exactly what points do you hope to make? Who will you interview? Will you highlight your own research as well as other relevant research? Will you use statistics or surveys? What format do you expect to use? If you are writing for a Web publication, are there any relevant links? Be clear about what you expect the article will cover.

4. Your qualifications. Quickly explain who you are and why you are the best person to write about the topic. If you have written for other consumer or trade publications, include that information. If this is your first time writing this type of article, simply leave it out.

5. A call to action. Thank the editor and let him or her know you are looking forward to their response. (Tip: If you don’t hear back within two weeks, follow up.) A quick word: Although you might be tempted to send out your query to more than one editor at a time to cut down waiting, think carefully before you do. Editors hate finding out, after your pitch has been sent to other editors in their office and approved for assignment, that you have already sold it to another publication. At the very least, alert the editor that you’re sending your pitch as a simultaneous submission.

6. Clips. If you have writing samples or clips, paste them onto the bottom of the email. Never attach documents. Editors won’t open them. If you don’t have clips, know that with your professional and pitch-perfect query letter, the editor knows you can write.

Remember, editors are always looking for ideas that are interesting, fresh and new. Your research is likely all these things. Better still, you have a deep understanding of area of expertise. And if you write well? To a beleaguered editor, your article pitch is golden.

What does a pitch look like? 

No matter what your topic is, most pitches will follow a similar formula. Here is one of mine that landed me an article in Canadian Family magazine  in 2013. After following up with the editor once, she assigned a story that was somewhat different than the one I proposed here. That’s common. (The publishing trend today is to run shorter articles– the finished product for this one ended up being 600 words.) Not only was it shorter, it focused more on the psychological and biological reasons for fear as a parent. We didn’t use my proposed sidebars either, although one topic was rolled into the completed story.

Head: Mama Gets Her Roller Coaster Groove Back

Feature: 800-1,000 words 

I used to be a roller coaster daredevil. The bigger the teeth rattling drops, turns, spins and loops, the better. There was even a time when one of this country’s national newspapers considered me their amusement park scary ride expert.

But that all changed the moment I had kids.

It turns out there may be a biological reason lightening speed roller coasters now give me the creeps. According to research in Canada and the U.S., a mother’s hormones and even brains go through a shift that keeps us from doing risky things once we have children. (And yes, my former skydiving dream has crash-landed too.) Apparently our bodies want to stick around long enough to watch our children grow.

This story is about how I push against my biological leanings and started riding roller coasters again. (I’m honestly a bit freaked out, but will do it for a story!) I would head to Orlando, the amusement park capital of the world and hit LEGOLAND for its “pink knuckle” rides. Then I would work my way up to some of the more adventurous coasters at Disneyworld and then, finally, hit Universal Orlando to ride The Hulk.

Of course this story is not just a play-by-play report of each ride, but also a thoughtful and fun examination of how motherhood changes our bodies, minds and priorities. It will ask and answer the questions: Can I ever have my old life back? If I could, would I want to?

Sidebars: There are a few possible sidebars for this memoir-travel story to give the reader some news to use: How to know if your kids are ready for roller coasters (even if you’re not); best roller coaster theme parks; best parks for the whole family; what to say to yourself if you’re already strapped in, but you want off the ride!

Editor X, I see this story running in your June issue, in time for summer vacation planning. I can have it turned around in two weeks after assignment. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

All the best,

Kira Vermond

You will notice a few things about this pitch:

1. I am emulating the tone and style of the magazine, which is conversational and personal.
2. I’ve given a headline to let the editor know what the pitch is about. It’s not meant to be used in the story. The final headline was: From Risk-Taker to Risk-Avoider: How Thrill-Seeking Changes After Motherhood.
3. The pitch follows the formula: anecdotal opening, an explanatory paragraph, more information about who I will be interviewing and the points I will cover, how long it will take me to write the article and when I see it appearing on the stands, and a call to action.

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