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1. Please Feed the Foxes: Advice to Aspiring Authors on Writing Non-Fiction
Part One: Choosing the Subject for a Pitch
By Krzysztof Iwanek
(This is a backup file uploaded to academia.edu. The original text has been published by Indian
Strategic Studies Forum.)
Over the past few years, quite a few people contacted me seeking advice on matters such as where
should they pitch their texts, how to choose a subject, or asking me to consult their research
proposal, an article, a statement of purpose, etc. I will not reveal the name of those persons, of
course – I treated this as friendly assistance, not something to publicly boast about. I also have no
intention of making money out of this, and so far I never have earned money that way. However, this
got me thinking that maybe I have reached a stage where I could start sharing some advice on writing
non-fiction in public as well. Admittedly, it is a risky conclusion that may get me trapped in an
arrogant teacher mode. Yet, I am willing to take that risk: what I am commencing here is a short
series of advice for aspiring writers of non-fiction. If you are an established writer, most probably this
is not something for you.
Let me start with my biases and limitations. I am a social science guy: I studied Indology, History and
Culture Studies, so when I say ‘non-fiction’, I would stress that my experience is actually limited to a
few strands of social science. Secondly, I have a typical academic background (having been employed
at two universities and having taught at two more) and no true experience of working in journalism –
this bias will heavily affect the direction in which my pieces of advice will try to turn you. Thirdly, I
have experience of working at two think tanks (one NGO and one public) and regularly writing for
one portal (The Diplomat), but a great majority of such work has been mostly limited to commenting
on Indian politics and history. Thus, to be fair, rather than saying ‘my advice on writing non-fiction’ I
should say ‘my experience in writing academic, think tank-related and media stuff, mostly on Indian
politics and history’. This would not work as a title, however, and I will also try to phrase these pieces
of advice in a way that will hopefully be useful for authors aspiring to write in certain other fields as
well.
And here comes my main bias: I am a fox, not a hedgehog. I am actually allergic to hedgehogs. I am
that boring, bespectacled academic who is all about details, those many small things; that guy who
always uses too many words because he is incapable of speaking briefly (just look at the length of
this commentary); that irritating fellow who keeps digging one small hole in one hill instead of

2. casting a glance at the mountain range around him. I organically dislike non-fiction texts whose
authors tend to offer sweeping, grandiose statements on everything and no conclusions from
research conducted on anything particular. Most of the pieces of advice I will give will be written
from this perspective. If you are more of a hedgehog, you will probably dislike these series.
But more importantly, if by chance you will take my pieces of advice and try to implement them, you
may even begin to hate me: you may find yourself in a situation where you took my advice,
disregarded a good opportunity to write something very general, and your text was rejected for
being too academic (in case it was not meant for an academic publication), while someone else
wrote a something very general, and got it published. Yes, it happens a lot, especially outside
academia. General statements attract more attention than detailed deliberations; hedgehogs rule
the media, foxes do not. Here is the thing: the usefulness of a particular writing skill depends on the
context. Being able to speak or write in short general statements is useful in the media – it does not
have to be a bad thing, it is just how it works. The same statement used in a research grant
application may lead to an applicant losing points. A hedgehog is more likely to be invited to an
interview, but a fox is more likely to publish an article for an academic journal. These are just
different sets of skills, though it is more of a spectrum than a clear division (yes, I am guilty of making
sweeping statements that turned out to be wrong more than once). In think tanks, it varies greatly -
and to be sure, you can hear a complete fox in the media once in a while, while there are many
hedgehogs living in universities. And so my pieces of advice will be heavily burdened by my
experience, my views and my biases – they may be useful in some contexts, and useless in other
ones. Everything I will write here from now on should be taken with this first warning in mind.
Having finally completed this introduction, I will now move to the first part of this series, in which I
would like to offer some thoughts on one aspect. When you are an aspiring author, how to pick a
subject of a text to pitch somewhere? This may be an attempt to write for a website, an academic
journal, or a think tank – I will try to shape the advice in a way that could be to a degree useful in all
three contexts, but please remember my warning above. The five rules I suggest following are:
(1)Write only when you can share unknown facts or share a new perspective on known facts with
the target audience ;
(2)A narrower scope is nearly always better than a wider one;
(3)Do not always follow fashions, find your niche instead;

3. (4)Devote time to learn about the institution you want to write for – what it needs and what you
can offer.
(5)Write about things that you really take a keen interest in.
(1)Write only when you can share unknown facts or share a new perspective on known facts with
the target audience.
This may be perplexing – how can I know facts unknown to others, or offer a new perspective, if this
is the first thing I am writing? Well, to be frank, maybe you should not until you can. And no, I am not
trying to be mean, this is really friendly advice (and a rule which is being disregarded a thousand
times every day – I am waving my first warning here again).
So how can one proceed from this initial conundrum? Well, asking more experienced people who
work in the field you want to publish in is one of the best first steps – there is a good chance
someone will tell you which aspects are less researched or covered, so that you may dig into them;
the same way, such person may let you know that what you thought was a very general topic has
actually been covered thirty times already. Moreover, if you are already conducting research, such as
when you are writing a book or a Ph.D. thesis, play it safe – instead of jumping into new waters, start
with picking those themes from your work that you feel most confident about covering, and try to
publish such parts of your work as separate texts.
But the key word here is ‘target audience’. An ‘unknown fact’ is of course a very relative term.
Something obvious for one person will be completely new to another. Even more obviously, your
threshold of defining what is ‘unknown’ will be different when you are writing for a news portal than
when you are writing for a think tank or an academic journal (though I would argue that the
threshold should be similar in a comparison between academia and think tanks). And so what you
also need to do is try to define your audience – the readers for whom those facts or that perspective
would be new. In more precise words: you need to try to answer the question of what kind of people
you want to reach out to with your texts, and whether the platform you are choosing is the right one
to reach them. I will try to elaborate on this a bit in points 3 and 4 below.
(2) A narrower scope is nearly always better than a wider one.

4. This is a kind of a fox’s creed for me. I am intending to write more on this in the next commentaries;
in a way, everything I wrote here is just an elaboration of this statement. For now, therefore, I am
not adding anything more to this point of the list.
(3) Do not always follow fashions, find your niche instead.
One of the reasons I am writing this text is that quite a few people have asked me how to start
publishing for The Diplomat, of which I am a regular contributor. There is a piece of advice I have
shared with everyone asking me this: find a subject no one wrote about for a given institution (and
which is still within that institution’s scope of interest), rather than writing on what everyone else is
writing about.
So, at the risk of sermonizing, let me devote a little bit of space to my first experience with The
Diplomat. Yes, I broke in there out of nowhere – I just submitted a text to them without any
connections to any editor, so you can do it too. The first text I submitted for The Diplomat was…
about Indian movies which were shot in Poland. So why do I think it worked?
Firstly, I chose a field less frequently covered on that particular platform. The Diplomat is a hive for
comments on Asian geopolitics – and thus international relations and security issues are considered
the hottest topics for authors who pitch there, there is much less content on culture. Nothing bad
about this, this is just their focus - and this is mostly what I write about for The Diplomat these days,
but it is also not something with which you can easily break in as an aspiring author. It works like this:
since this website is focused on current affairs and politics and security are the center of its scope,
prospective authors pick the currently hottest themes in Asian politics and security as their pitches.
And thus so many people end up trying to write… about the same. A war erupts or a government
falls, and instantly many pitches about this even start flowing in. Do not get me wrong – it is not bad.
This is how media works – we all want to quickly learn about the significance of a new crisis. But an
aspiring author is at a disadvantage here because the hotter a topic he chooses to cover, the more
competition he is facing because so many people are trying to cover the same subject at the same
time (while many established authors have their columns, their platforms, their connections, etc.,
which allow them to publish on many subjects without any gatekeeping). So when a war starts or a
government falls, it may not always be prudent to try to cover this very event, unless you happen to
specialize in exactly this subject. And if you do want to write about it this groundbreaking occurrence,
the best thing to do is find its completely different aspect, something a given audience has not
learned from any author on a given platform (cf. point 1).

5. Secondly, because, following rule 1, I found interesting facts for an audience of a given platform. I am
not an expert on Indian cinema, I am no expert on shooting movies in Poland either. To be sure, that
text was nothing but a very basic summary of facts available on the Internet. There was nothing
innovative in it – it just found a niche, a border zone. I knew the basic required minimum about
Poland (my home country) and the basic minimum about the cinema in India (a country I take
interest in). I assume the readers of that text included people from Poland who did not know those
particular facts about Indian cinema, and people from India who did not know those particular facts
about the Indian movies shot in Poland.
It can be argued that this piece of advice was very media-centric and that academia does not work
that way. Well, it does – academia follows fashions too. They may be intellectual fashions, but they
are still fashions. And many academics do jump into breaking news, such as trying to write a journal
article on a recent war. Again, do get me wrong: I am not criticizing. It is good and necessary when,
say, professors of security studies look at current conflicts. The main difference between media and
academia lies in the rigidity of peer review and in the rigor of following research rules and, of course,
turnaround time. Otherwise, fashions have similar pitfalls here, and niches offer similar benefits. For
instance, one of my articles for a top-rated academic journal did exactly the same what I did with my
first pitch for The Diplomat: I found a niche, a border zone between Poland and India, just that the
focus was reverse (the article presented a little-known description of India by a very famous Polish
author). Thus, all differences aside, the core rule – ‘do not always follow fashions, find your niche
instead’ – works for academic work as well.
(4)Devote time to learn about the institution you want to write for – what it needs and what you
can offer.
Writing a text is not the only process before which you should do research – the same goes for
pitching a text. Finding a platform to write for also takes Googling, asking around, and taking notes. I
will take the liberty to share some personal experiences again. When I was employed at Hankuk
University of Foreign Studies, one of my responsibilities, just like in most universities across the
globe, was to publish. This forced me to work out a method that some aspiring authors may find
useful too. I prepared myself a table of things I could write about and of journals I could write for.
This table became the backbone of my publishing strategy, so to speak, for the next three years. I
would write an article and pitch it to a journal that had both the right scope and offered the benefits
I needed (in this case: points for publishing). If the article was rejected, I pitched it to the next journal
in my personal ranking of the best platforms to choose from, and so on.

6. While media is more dynamic, and your table may change every week, this tool may still work. In my
case, what the table included was:
1.A realistic list of narrow subjects I could write about (I ended up with just a few really, and that
greatly limited the list of journals I could write for at the very beginning);
2.A list of platforms I could write for, which I then narrowed down to a short list by checking these
aspects below: (all of which I described in separate columns of my table)
2.1 Whether a platform accepts unsolicited texts at all (yes, some do not)
2.2 How often does the platform publish and what is the length of the text reviewing process as
stated by the editors on the website – in case time mattered for me; obviously, the more time
matters for you the more you should opt for online publications which are not bound by printing
processes; there is an increasing number of academic journals which publish online on the go instead
of collecting texts for an issue. In the case of popular, non-academic portals, this point is often of
little relevance, but it is especially significant for academic journals.
2.3 What is the thematic scope of a platform. This is the most obvious thing you should know about
any publication, and I am certain you know it but remember – this does not simply mean finding a
piece of general information. Learning about the scope is not reading one sentence that says that a
given journal or website, publishes on, say, politics of European countries. Following what I wrote in
points one and three, remember you should read a huge, representative sample of texts published
by a given platform (a journal, a website, etc.), to know exactly what subjects are covered, how
they are covered, which have not been covered that you could cover, what are the current trends,
what are the editorial rules, etc. It is a big mistake to try to publish a text for a given platform
without reading anything which that platform has published so far.
2.4 And of course, what benefits does the platform offer. When I wrote for academic journals, the
benefits were counted by the points earned by publishing for it as per journal rankings. As an aspiring
author, depending on what you need, you may also rank the platforms you will try to pitch for by
material benefits (if any), their popularity, or how good do you think they would look in your CV.
Finally, remember – each rejection is both a failure and a lesson. I learned some of the things I am
sharing here because some of my texts had been rejected. You just need to focus on what you
learned from a given rejection instead of taking it personally.
(5)Write about things that you really take a keen interest in.

7. This is the only point that needs no elaboration. Believe me, if an author is passionate about
something, most of the time it really shows (unless he is passionate but still writes in an extremely
boring way). It is also a rule you should follow not only for the sake of others (=your readers), but
also for yourself. Writing about something which does not really interest you is a real torment.
Nearly everyone has to do it once in a while but avoid this situation as much as you can.
Well, that was my first attempt ever to publicly share writing advice. I am not certain how it went,
but I hope someone will find it interesting (or maybe even useful?). If you have questions or
suggestions of aspects I could elaborate on, or if you just want to tell me this was an idiotic take, you
can find me on Twitter at @Chris_Iwanek.