A Surefire Way to Shoot Yourself In the Foot with a Journalist

Spoiler: The phrase "let's make a deal" probably shouldn't be in your pitch.

Happy Thursday, Top Tier Community!

As a reminder, our January Top Tier Talk is coming up on the 24th … please sign up and share your questions today!

Sometimes, we have full-on brainstorming sessions to decide our next Substack topic … and sometimes, the Universe quite literally drops a topic right in our laps. And that’s the case with today’s newsletter … it stems from a recent run-in we had with a publicist.

If you’re reading this issue, then you already know that we charge a nominal fee for our newsletters — and that’s because we put a lot of time/research/effort into crafting these topics and doing deep dives on industry insights. We’re 2 top-tier journalists with about two dozen assignments on each of our plates each month, but it’s important to us that we carve out time to do this right! Plus, we host monthly hour-long Top Tier Talks via Zoom with our audiences, answer all the comments on our newsletters, yada yada yada. Writing is our full-time jobs and thus, since we’re writing articles that land in our subscriber’s inboxes every week, we do charge a little for our time. You know … like how a business run by experts in their field charges for any service!

Anyhoo, we received this random and highly disturbing email out of the blue, from a publicist neither of us has ever heard of or interacted with before: