Pitching your work for a local holiday gift guide

Right about now, a local newspaper's lifestyle editor, a chamber of commerce's events coordinator, and a handful of area bloggers are all building the same kind of list: a "shop local holiday gift guide" meant to run sometime in November or December. These guides exist specifically to send shoppers toward small, local makers instead of the usual big-box options, and getting listed in one costs nothing but the time it takes to ask. The part a lot of vendors miss is the timing — the deadline to be considered for a guide that publishes around Black Friday or in early December usually lands in October, and some have already closed by the time a vendor thinks to look.

Why October is the actual deadline, not November

A gift guide takes time to put together on the publisher's end — gathering submissions, picking a final list, laying out photos, writing it up — and none of that happens the week before it's supposed to run. Real examples from last year's cycle give a sense of the pattern: one community publication's submission window closed in early October for a guide that ran the week of Thanksgiving; a chamber of commerce's own guide closed its call for entries in mid-October; another outlet kept its form open into mid-November for a guide publishing right before the holiday. The spread is wide, but the center of it is clear — October is the month this actually gets decided, not the week after Thanksgiving when most vendors are deep in show season and gift guides aren't on their mind at all.

That doesn't mean every door is already closed. Smaller or later-publishing guides do still take submissions into November. But the vendors who land in the bigger, earlier guides are the ones who went looking for the deadline instead of waiting to stumble across the finished piece after it's already live.

Where to actually look for one

A gift guide isn't a single well-known thing with one obvious home — it's a format that a lot of different kinds of local outlets build their own version of, usually without much promotion of the submission process itself. A few places worth checking directly, rather than waiting for one to find you:

• Your local chamber of commerce. A "shop local" or "shop small" holiday gift guide is one of the more common things a chamber publishes this time of year, often with an open call for member or local businesses to submit — sometimes with a free tier and a paid upgrade for better placement. If you're already a member, this is usually the easiest guide to get into.
• Local newspapers and city magazines. Many run an annual gift guide feature, and a decent number post a submission form or simply list an editor's email for pitches, rather than hand-picking businesses themselves.
• Local news stations and public radio. Some local TV affiliates and public radio stations run their own listener- or vendor-facing gift guide features around the holidays, separate from their regular news coverage.
• Local bloggers and influencers who cover shopping, parenting, or lifestyle content for your area or region. A direct, personal pitch to someone with an established local following can land you in front of an audience a bigger outlet wouldn't reach.

A search for "[your city or region] holiday gift guide" plus the current year will usually turn up last year's version, which tells you who runs one and roughly when it published — a good starting point even before a new submission form goes up.

What they'll typically ask you for

Gift guides tend to ask for a short, consistent set of things, and having it ready before you reach out saves a back-and-forth that can cost you a slot if a deadline is close:

• One strong, high-quality photo of the product being featured — often specified as a square crop, since that's the shape most guides use in their layout.
• A short written description, sometimes with a strict word or character limit — a sentence or two about the piece and what makes it a good gift, not your full artist statement.
• A price or price range, so the guide can group items by budget the way most of these features are organized.
• Where to buy it — your website, your Discover listing or booth schedule, or wherever a reader would actually go to purchase the piece.

Having a few finished, photographed, ready-to-ship or ready-to-order items in mind before you pitch — rather than scrambling to answer "which piece?" after someone says yes — makes the whole exchange faster on both ends.

Writing a pitch that gets a reply

The outlets running these guides get a lot of submissions in a short window, so a pitch that's specific and easy to act on tends to do better than one that's warm but vague. A short email works better than a long one:

• Lead with what the item is and why it fits a gift guide — specifically, not "I make handmade jewelry," but "a hand-stamped copper bracelet, $38, that ships within a week."
• Attach the photo and the price up front, rather than making the editor ask for it — that's usually the difference between a submission that gets used and one that gets a follow-up request nobody has time to answer before the deadline.
• Mention your local connection directly — the town you're based in, the Markets or Festivals you sell at nearby — since the entire premise of a "shop local" guide is that you're actually local to the area it covers.
• Keep it to a few sentences. An editor assembling a list of dozens of local businesses is reading fast; the pitch that's instantly usable beats the one that requires editing down.

A short, specific pitch that includes the photo, the price, and the local tie costs an editor almost nothing to say yes to — which is exactly why it's the one that gets used.

The short version

Local gift guides are one of the lower-effort marketing moves available this time of year — no booth fee, no application process most places, just a pitch sent to the right inbox before the right deadline. Chambers of commerce, local papers, local news and radio, and area bloggers all tend to run some version of one, and most of their submission windows close in October for anything publishing around Thanksgiving or early December. Look now, have a photo and a price ready, and send a short, specific pitch rather than waiting for a guide to find you.

Keeping track of a pitch you sent — who you reached out to, what they asked for, whether you heard back — is easy to lose in the same stretch of weeks you're also juggling show deadlines and booth dates. Artisans Almanac's Tracker keeps this season's deadlines and to-dos in one place, and it's free to try for 30 days at artisansalmanac.com if you want this year's holiday push organized alongside everything else.