The Golden Pencil: The Freelance Writer’s Resource

Q&A - How Do I Submit Clips?

by Anne Wayman on January 29th, 2008

Dear Anne,

Recently, in response to an “over the transom” article I submitted, an editor replied stating that he wasn’t accepting freelance pieces at the time but to forward my resume and writing clips.

Being new to freelance writing, I only have a few clips and absolutely no knowledge of the format in which editors generally receive clips. For instance, should I send him the Microsoft Word format of the published clip with some blurb about where and when it was published? Or should I send the piece photocopied directly from the newspaper or magazine where it was published, leaving the editor more confident that it was, in fact, actually published? Further, what about pieces published electronically? I could send the piece in word processor format or just the URL which is problematic due to the ever-changing nature of the internet.

Any advice you have on this subject would be greatly appreciated as I have noticed that adhering to proper publishing etiquette greatly increases the chances of being published.

Thanks Again,

Pat

Hi Pat,

First of all congratulations on getting the query out. And congratulations again because the editor wants clips. Excellent.

You ask some good questions. Unfortunately, there isn’t one right answer.

I use a credit list instead of a resume; I have it on the web (see the link) and I have a word version. Even though you don’t yet have as many credits as I do, you can create something like this.

You don’t say how you sent your query or how the editor communicated back to you. If the editor sent you email, I’d send the credits with live links back the same way… I’d probably copy the credit list into the body of the email in case they don’t accept attachments. (You might want to email this to yourself first… it won’t be pretty, but you need to make sure it’s readable.) If your correspondence was via snail mail, use that. (Remember to spell out any links with the full url.) In either case, right up front make it clear you’re sending this in response to the editor’s request. Keep it short and sweet.

Re tear sheets or copies of tear sheets. It’s much easier to send copies of actual articles via snail mail. You can, of course, scan them and send the scan, but those files tend to be bulky and get stripped out with spam filters. Having your own website really helps because you can put clips, scans and links up easily and it’s super easy for an editor to take a look.

Finally, you’re right… links to articles tend to disappear but usually not right away. Go ahead and link, but make sure your description of the link includes the publication’s title, date of article publication, title of the article and a one sentence description of it. That way, if the link goes bad, at least the editor will know roughly what was published. I check links like this a couple of times a year and when I find a broken one, just remove the link itself, but keep the information about the article.

Hope this helps. And I’ll bet some of our readers have other suggestions.

Write well and often,

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