Essay vs Pitch: Did the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Exist?

In my Anatomy of a Pitch series, I copy and paste an actual pitch I used to a newspaper editor and then dissect my reasoning in bold.

In this edition, I will do something different. In 2022, I sold an article on the Seven Wonders of the World: The guy never paid and fell out of contact. As a result, I decided to break it off into its retrospective chapters and repitch it. One main difference in the change between the initial chapter and my pitching, was that I abridged the chapter and summarized some of the directions I would take. Part of it is about piquing the editor’s curiosity and you don’t want to give it all away.

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THE ESSAY PORTION:

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were reputed to have been built in approximately 850 B.C. by the Babylonian King Nebuchnadnezzar II for his bride Amytis. Babylon is an arid area and his queen missed the lush flora of her home kingdom (located in present-day Azerbaijan).

Although that’s a great tag line, the hanging gardens didn’t actually float. However, because they were built 80 feet above the ground, inside the walls of a castle, it might have given that appearance.