Be catchy and to-the-point: “What you have to bear in mind is that press gets a lot of emails every day, and you are going to have to grab their attention very quickly and very efficiently… please, short subject lines. I don't have a lot of time for reading, and you will do both of us a favor if you keep it short.”

Have an informal - but not too informal - tone: “Presumably, if you're a game dev, you also like games. We already have something in common! So just approach the press as if you're trying to tell somebody about your really cool thing that you're making. Don't be overly, like “Oh my God, check out my sick game, here's a bunch of swear words, we’re friends” - because that's really off-putting.”

You could use simple/easy comparisons as a touchpoint for your game: “So personally, I think if somebody comes to me with a pitch that is ‘this game is X meets Y’, I am happy to take that and write about that. Because that is a better way of understanding what a game is like than just calling it… a narrative adventure. That's a ‘nothing’ description, that tells you it's got a story and a story, useless.”

Provide key art - ideally layered - and with an option to remove the logo: “If you give me the key art and you include the logo, what is going to happen is that I will crop it. I don't have enough time to Photoshop out a logo, and it probably wouldn't be that easy. So I'm then cropping, you know, a good, maybe, half of what's in that key art… And why would you want someone to do that to your beautiful key art?”

Don’t fit too much in the email subject line: “My number one thing that you should not do… is a really boring subject line. You would not believe how many people send out emails with a 30-word subject line so I can't even see the whole thing - I'd have to have a super wide monitor, I can't read that.”

Don’t pretend to love the writer’s output if you don’t: “You can address a journalist as a fan. You can say “hey, I really love your work!”, as long as it's true. People keep [pitching me with] “I really love your work, I read…” and then it's the name of literally the last thing I wrote. That's not even subtle, you've just Googled me. We're not stupid, We can tell if you're not actually a fan.”

Don’t send out non-newsworthy announces which clutter inboxes: “Sometimes people will say ‘our game is on Kickstarter.’ And that used to be a good hook when Kickstarter was new. It's not anymore - same with ‘our game is on sale’. Unless it's like a ludicrous sale, like, it's gone down to one cent, I'm not going to write about it.”

Please spellcheck and sanity check your emails: “We're all writers in the press, we're all very anal about spelling and grammar… [but] I've gotten so many press emails where they misspelled the name of the game. [I think] “Oh, no, okay?” - because it just shows that you didn't care enough. Like, this is your big project, this is your moment - and you didn't care enough to check that it was spelled right?”