Some writers post PDFs on their websites. Some go old school and snail mail paper copies. Others have text versions on their website or attach Word docs to their queries. So, how do you share your writing clips with editors and prospective clients?
Most of my clips are already online, so I include a partial list on my website. I think more than this would be over-kill, but I keep a complete list of my online writing using the social bookmarking tool Delicious. That way, when I’m writing a query and I need an article about, say, weddings or fitness or careers, I can quickly scroll through and find several relevant samples. Then I include these clips as hyperlinked bullet points like this:
- How Office Gossip Can Be Good For Your Career (Yahoo! HotJobs)
- 5 Ways You Bug Your Boss–And How to Stop (Yahoo! HotJobs)
- Tweet Success: Landing a Job 140 Characters at a Time (AfterTheTassel.com)
It’s more organized than sending a bunch of naked URLs, and hopefully bypasses spam filters because I’m not sending a bunch of attachments. The big caveat with this strategy is that sometimes online articles disappear or the links change. That’s why it’s a good idea to print out hard copy or use a service like PDFmyURL to save a digital copy to your computer. If it’s already too late, you can try the Way Back Machine or see if Google still has a cache saved.
I’m sure there are other equally valid ways to organize and show off writing clips. What’s your strategy? What do you do when online articles disappear?
I prefer PDF copies of my work and keep everything I've ever written as well as my current WIPs in two USBs as well as multiple computers, just to be sure I have extra copies of everything.
~TRA
http://xtheredangelx.blogspot.com
Thank you for the PDFmyURL link! It's just what I needed. Right now I have a writing website with links to samples. For now I think the urls are fine, but I have had a few websites suddenly close down and lost some links. I need a better back-up system.