The first interview you conduct will probably not take place in a noisy festival green room. It will happen at eleven at night, in your inbox, when a reply arrives from someone whose book you have read three times. Email interviews are the most accessible route into literary journalism: no travel, no recording equipment, no awkward silences to fill. They are also easy to do badly. What follows is how to pitch one, prepare it, chase it and edit it so the finished piece reads as though the two of you had been talking for an hour.

Before you pitch: choose a subject you can actually reach

Newcomers tend to aim too high. A debut novelist published by a small press, a writer whose second book has just been reissued, a poet with a collection out this month — these are realistic first subjects. They are also often more revealing on the page, because nobody has asked them the same six questions yet.

Timing matters as much as the name. Pitch roughly six to ten weeks before publication, or in the fortnight around it, when there is a reason for the interview to exist at all. “I loved your book” is not a reason. “The way you handled the shift in narrators in chapter nine” is.

Write a pitch that is easy to say yes to

Keep it short. Five sentences will do. Say who you are, where the interview will appear, what you want, how long it will be and when you need it. Authors are busy and inboxes are cruel; a pitch that can be answered in one line gets answered.

Four things your pitch must contain:

1. Who you are and where the piece will run, with a rough date.
2. The angle, in one or two lines — not a shopping list of themes.
3. What you need from them: roughly how many questions, how long each answer should be, and the deadline.
4. An easy exit. “If the timing is wrong, I quite understand” costs nothing and frequently produces a yes a few months later.

A template you can adapt

Dear [author], I write for Quill Digest, a literary digest. I have just finished [book] and would like to interview you by email, chiefly about [specific angle]. The piece would run to around 1,200 words. I would send eight questions and ask for answers of roughly 100–200 words each, with a deadline of [date]. If that does not suit, no offence taken.

Adjust those numbers to whatever you have actually been commissioned to write. Never promise a word count, a publication date or “final approval” you cannot deliver. An author who is told one thing and sees another will not say yes twice.

Read the book, then read their other interviews

Read the book properly, with a pencil. Mark the passages that made you stop: a sentence that did something strange, a chapter that changed direction, an ending you are still arguing with. Those marks become your questions.

Then search for interviews they have already given. This is not cheating; it is the difference between a fresh conversation and a repetition. If three interviewers have asked about the autobiographical thread, ask about structure instead, or about the two years of rejected drafts, or about who reads the work first.

Aim to write twelve questions and expect eight usable answers. Some will land flat. That is normal.

Ask questions that produce answers

• One question per question. Stacked questions get one answer and two silences.
• Be specific. Quote a line, name a scene, refer to a decision the author made on the page.
• Use openers that require thought: “How did you decide…”, “What changed between the second and fourth drafts…”, “Why does the novel leave that unresolved?”
• Mix craft with the ordinary. Routine, research, money, the day job and the desk by the window are often more interesting than theme.
• Number the questions in the body of a plain email. Attachments get lost; numbered questions get answered in order.
• Give permission to be brief. “A paragraph each is plenty” stops a busy author from putting the email aside.

Agree a deadline, then chase politely

Set the deadline two weeks out, and say clearly that you will send a gentle reminder a few days before it. Then do exactly that. One reminder before, one short nudge three days after, and one final email a week later offering to extend. After that, thank them and move on — most missed interviews are missed because of a book deadline, a family crisis or a collapsed inbox, not because of you.

Keep every exchange in writing, including any agreement about what you may quote. If an author says something is off the record, it stays out, however good it is.

Edit for clarity, not for your own voice

The temptation is to tidy everything. Resist it. Cut the throat-clearing, the repeated restatements of your question, the sentences that begin “As I mentioned earlier”. Fix obvious slips and runaway syntax. But leave the oddities alone: the long sentence that carries the author’s rhythm, the regional phrase, the joke that does not quite land. A good interview sounds like a person, not a press release.

Never change the meaning of an answer. If you must cut substantially, or reorder sentences so that a point makes sense, send that passage back and ask for confirmation. Say so at the outset: “I will edit for length and clarity and will check anything that alters your sense.”

Before you publish: a short checklist

1. Check the spelling of every name and the full title of every book.
2. Confirm publisher, publication date and any biographical details you intend to print.
3. Make sure the written permission to publish the interview is somewhere you can find it.
4. Read the piece aloud. Anything you stumble over needs rewriting.
5. Send the published link, with a genuine thank you, once it is live.

Then start the next one. The second interview is easier than the first, and the fifth is easier still — largely because you will have learned to ask fewer, better questions and to leave the answers alone.

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