Ask Rachel: How do you score interviews with famous people?

Mihal asks: You’ve interviewed some fabulous women, do you have any tips of the best way to approach people for an interview - someone like Caitlin Moran, did you approach her directly or go through a publicist?

As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the person is, the more likely gatekeepers are involved. So, interviews like Tina Fey, Natalie Portman, Kate Moss? Were all organised via a negotiation between my editors and their publicists. My only involvement was being the contributor lucky enough to get to interview them.

People who are well known in their fields but not internationally famous are a different kettle of fish, though. I thought I came up with the Caitlin Moran profile on my own, so much is it “the kind of story that I would write”, but a quick check of my email archives reveals that her Australian publicist (whom I knew through our days on a certain magazine forum ten years ago) contacted me and asked me if I’d be interested in writing something about her book.

I then pitched a profile to my editor - explaining who she was, as she hadn’t “broken” in Australia at that point, although she was getting heaps of buzz in the UK - the idea was accepted, and Caitlin’s publicist put me in touch with her directly to organise a time and place (something that would never happen with Tina Fey… unless you worked for the New Yorker or something, and then maybe). If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have hesitated to contact her over Twitter, email, or to approach her publicist in Australia or the UK myself.

So, a couple of tips for setting up similar interviews yourself:

- Look for people who are doing work that will be of interest to the publication’s readership, but who aren’t “celebrities” per se (I’m thinking people like writers, designers, artists, chefs, directors, activists, business people and so on… you get the idea). These people are usually more interesting to speak to than A-listers anyway, because they haven’t already had 93 previous magazine profiles written about them.

- To approach the publication or the interviewee first? Chicken or egg? It depends on who you have the stronger relationship with. When I’ve pitched these kinds of stories, I’ve often done it tentatively: here’s an interesting person, here’s why they’re interesting, here’s why I’d be a great person to write about it. Then, if the editor expresses interest, I’ll go away, approach the interviewee and ask if they’d be interested in doing a profile with that publication. If you don’t have strong clips though and you do have an existing tie to the interviewee, it might be worth getting their buy-in first, to make your pitch more solid.

- You don’t need to write profiles in order to interview interesting people. I speak to interesting writers, researchers, commentators and so on all the time for topic-based feature stories. When writing these, don’t be afraid to aim high - approach the most exciting people you can for comment. The worst they can do is say ‘no’.

I hope that helps! How do others go about organising these types of stories?