Selling Your Writing Over The Internet
By Phil Philcox

If you have a book or an article to market, you can go the regular route (print it out on paper, fold, stuff in envelope, find an editor’s address, lick a stamp, drop it in the mail, wait a week or more for a yes or no, etc.) or you can do what I do. I create a web page for each of my book ideas and set it up like a proposal with text and photos. It looks better than any of the text-only proposals I’ve submitted in the past and will certainly catch an editor’s eye... if you can get them to look at it. You can put it online at no charge and just direct editors in that direction. My e-mail proposals letter says, "I have a proposal on a book about (subject) at http (web site address). Would you take a quick look and let me know if you’re be interested in seeing more? If not, just delete it. Thanks."

You can see a sample of my proposals - The Great Castle and Historic Hotels of Europe proposal at http://pressassociation.homestead.com/castle.html and The Potato Cookbook at http://homestead.com/pressassociation/potato.html.  I have ten web sites like this for ten book projects I’m working on.

Using Homestead (http://www.homestead.com), you can create web pages like mine for free and post them online like I did also for free (honest!). Everything you need to know about how-to-do-it is right there at the Homestead site. Once you get everything set up, you have a proposal you can send to editors by e-mail... but you need editors to contact. I search magazine websites online, Writer’s Market, and other writer sites, and compile a list. For the castle hotel book, I found 39 travel book editors that might be interested.

Now that 2001 is here, I’ve become a bulk proposer, realizing sending one query to one editor and sitting around (sometimes forever) for an answer is outdated and doesn’t fit into my survival-as-a-writer plans. In the 40+ years I’ve been writing, I’ve had editors hold a query for six months or more and on numerous occasions received no reply from an editor even though I included a SASE. Not everybody will agree with this bulk proposal technique but I’ve sold many of my 45 books and over 1200 magazine articles this way and have to go with the results.

I have a database called E-Mail Publisher and World Newspapers 2001 (http://emailpublishing.homestead.com/email.html) that lists over 10,000 magazines (by subject), newspapers (by state/country locations) and book publishers (most by subject) all over the world. Each entry contains an e-mail address or web page, so I can reach 10 or 100 editors with one click of the mouse. I use it all the time and dealing with magazines with no overlap in readership (readers of Dallas Lifestyle don’t read Adirondack Life), I’ve sold one article as many as 25 times. As a full-time freelance, I need every advantage I can get and it works for me. This past week, I submitted eleven articles to over 100 magazines and newspapers. In the past month, I’ve sold eight articles on how to make long distance telephone calls free over the Internet to magazines using the EMP/WN2001 database.

There was a time when writers and editors communicated via the mails and often a writer’s output sat in an opened envelope in an in-box for weeks until someone got around to looking at it. If the writer was lucky, they bought it. If not, they’d scribble a rejection note and a week or more later the writer got the bad news and they’d start all over again. Today, there are options. Why not use them? If an editor insists queries be submitted by regular mail, then you can choose to follow their rules or stick with the e-mail solution. Many writers have and if enough writers use this technique, maybe editors will agree it’s a lot easier to take a look at a web page than it is to open an envelope, unfold a query, read it, make a decision, write a note, stuff it in an envelope, lick the flap, lick a stamp... well, you get the idea.

The author is the Editor/Director of The Press Association. Many of his books are available from amazon.com. Many of his online articles can be found by searching for Phil Philcox with any search engine (http://google.com works best). You can reach him at pressassoc@knology.net. 

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