3. Don't pitch topics. Pitch stories. That can take anywhere from one sentence to three or four grafs, but it's rarely longer.

4. Do not send your pitch as an attachment. It will get read faster if you put it in the body of your email, because that way the editor you're pitching can read it on her iPhone/iPad/Samsung Galaxy S4 while in line for lunch or waiting for a meeting to start, instead of having to be at her computer in her office. Take advantage of your chance to grab someone's attention during an interstitial moment by making your work easy to absorb by people with cutting-edge media consumption patterns.

5. But beware of being too cutting edge: Do not text or direct-message story pitches, unless you know an editor really, really well and have a great rapport. Respect your idea enough to send more than 140 characters explaining it.

6. Editors who work with free-lancers tend to accept pre-written stories less frequently than stories they can talk to you about before you file. It's more fun for editors to be part of the thinking and shaping part of putting the story together -- this is called "front-editing" -- than to just come in after the fact and clean up. So as between sitting down and writing something to file unsolicited and sending a query first, send the query.

7. That said, if you're going to send a complete draft unsolicited -- and plenty of these do get published -- odds of publication go up markedly if it is already clean and well-composed copy when it arrives. Don't send rough drafts unsolicited; send your best work. Spell check. Have a friend copy-edit you if you need to. You've gone through all the trouble to write something you believe in -- take that extra step to polish it.

8. The same goes for fact checking: You need to have everything locked down before you send something you've already composed. Think about it: What if the editor wants to run it right away? You don't want to have to scramble on the fly to confirm things and/or tell the editor your facts aren't actually already airtight.

9. Always include your phone number in your pitch email, in case the story idea is intriguing but not quite right for whatever reason. That will allow the editor to reach out to you to tweak the concept, instead of having to chase you down. Your goal should be to minimize the number of email volleys an editor needs to have with you to put something in play.

10. If you don't hear back about a pitch within a couple of days, depending on the news value of the pitch, it's not unheard of to send a follow-up email. Sometimes people are busy and lack of response doesn't always mean you've been rejected.

11. If your pitch is time sensitive, say so in the pitch and say you'd love a response within a set period. Also, if you're pitching about an event that's been planned for months, don't wait until the day before to send a query.