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For most people, “becoming a writer” means first and foremost getting published. And really, getting published for pay. That first sale is a watershed moment for the fledgling writer, a moment of validation that you have something to say that other people want to hear.

These days, getting published is less and less of a challenge – but getting that first paycheck can be harder than ever. The Internet has opened up a huge range of opportunities for people to publish their work free or for insultingly low rates – blogging, article sites, search engine optimization, and so on. While these can be great ways to start building a reputation for yourself and even earn a couple of dollars here and there, they simply are not the basis of a strong writing career, and the low barrier to entry makes it hard to feel like you’ve made much of an accomplishment.

National markets – whether websites, magazines, or book publishers – with editors, production staff, and marketing departments are what we’re usually looking for in terms of publication, and they tend to pay something at least within the ballpark of a decent amount – something we can feel positive about. Unfortunately, these markets are highly competitive at the best of times, and getting more so as an increasing number of publishers fail or scale back in response to tough economic times – not just the recession, but increasing postage costs and paper costs have hurt publishers at  the same time that audiences have increasingly turned to free entertainments on the Internet.

All that said, there is still a large market for professional writing. Every magazine on the newsstand, every book in the bookstore, and almost every A– and B-list website on the Internet needs high-quality professional content and is produced by someone willing to pay good authors to produce it. And the good news is, once you get past the first couple of sales, you can start to relax – first of all, you’ll feel more comfortable about your own marketability, and second, you’ll have a growing body of “clips” (samples) to impress future editors with.

Start at the top

The process of getting into print has several purposes for the budding writer. One is to give that sense of validation, and the hunger for this often drives writers to make un-smart decisions early on, like publishing for free or low pay for too long under the guise of “paying dues”.

A more important function of early publication is to see where you stand in the writing field – how good are you really? This is a lot more important than validation, at least as far as your career is concerned, as the less time you waste publishing beneath your level, the sooner you can earn the freedom to follow your muse wherever it leads you.

So my advice is this: send your first pitches or submissions to the highest-level outlets you can find. That is, if you’re writing about politics, pitch Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly or The Nation; if you’re writing about sports, pitch Sports Illustrated; if you write short stories, pitch The Paris Review. You will probably get rejected – which isn’t such a bad thing in and of itself, as failure usually teaches us pretty important lessons. If/When you are turned down, turn to the next highest-status outlet in your niche, then the next-highest, and so on down the “totem pole” until you get a piece accepted.

The idea is to start at the highest possible level. If you don’t have any clips yet, refer editors to your blog, or ask some respected bloggers in your niche if they could use a guest post by you (most will accept, since most don’t pay anything and have little to lose) and use those posts as clips. If you’re submitting finished manuscripts, don’t worry about the lack of clips – have a great cover letter and a great opening, so your material can speak for itself.

This takes time, and may well engender a bit of disappointment (though if you keep telling yourself you’re querying top markets you aren’t likely to get into, the sting of rejection might be more manageable). But far too often people who start with the no-pay, easy markets stay there for way too long, uncertain of themselves and unwilling to move out of their safe zone – even when their writing merits much wider attention (and more pay).

Next Time: Building on the first sale to create a platform for yourself.

Of all the things that writers have to do, the task that seems the most burdensome is the step that’s most crucial to getting our work into print: submitting it. Sending out submissions isn’t just a bookkeeping nightmare – you have to remember where you sent it and when and how long to wait before following up and whether the work was paid for or not and if not when it’s going to be paid and who you need to contact at each publication and how many times a piece was rejected and when it’s going to be published and… – it’s also an emotionally super-charged experience. Every query or finished piece you send out is yet another chance for some person you don’t know to reject you, and the psychological toll of rejection adds up pretty fast.

WordHustler is a new service that aims to take at least some of the hassle out of submitting. While they don’t offer personal therapy for rejection anxiety sufferers (yet?) they do offer an incredible system for finding markets and contests to submit your work to, sending work out, and tracking your submissions and responses. And it’s a real end-to-end service – they do all the work of evaluating markets, printing manuscripts or queries, and even mailing out your work – all you have to do is select markets, write cover letters, and click “Send”.

Here are some of the things you can do with WordHustler:

• Research markets in their database of over 3,000 magazines, publishing houses, and contests. Each entry is evaluated by hand to weed out scams and assure accuracy.
• Create cover letters and queries using their online LaTeX interface. LaTeX is not a word processor, it’s a typesetting engine, so documents produced on WordHustler look like they’ve been professionally printed. Talk about standing out! (According to Anne Walls, one of the founders, they’re looking at expanding this for the creation of manuscripts as well.)
• Track your projects. You can upload your manuscripts (in PDF format only, for now, but more formats will be accepted down the road), add notes, tags, status, and other information, and search by word count, degree of completeness, or keywords. When a project is done, you can instantly find relevant markets and contests according to genre, tags, and other criteria.
• Send submissions to selected markets. Once you’ve identified a market, written your cover letter, and uploaded your manuscript, WordHustler does the work of assembling your submission, according to the publisher’s guidelines. If the publisher wants the first ten pages, they send the first ten pages. If the publisher wants a reply postcard, they send a reply postcard (pre-addressed to you). Whatever instructions the publisher gives, WordHustler follows.
• Track submissions. Your dashboard lists all the manuscripts you have out, and you can mark off responses as they return.
• Get advice. You and your fellow WordHustlers can comment on markets and vote them up or down, so others benefit from your experience. The WordHustler blog offers advice, interviews, and market information. And they’re growing: more social media and community features are on their way.

The best part is, everything except printing and mailing submissions is free. WordHustler charges only for sending out manuscripts, charging a pretty fair rate for printing, compiling, and shipping your manuscript depending on the size of the submission.

Actually, that’s not the best part. The real best part is that WordHustler is founded and run by two authors, Anne Walls and John L. Singleton, so they know from first-hand experience about the problems writers face. WordHustler was created to manage their own submissions – it grew out of the actual experiences that writers have juggling their submission tracking and market research with the creative work of actually writing. I’ve been emailing back and forth with Walls for the last couple weeks, and it’s clear that her and Singleton’s top priority is to serve the interests of writers.

It’s clear, too, that they continue to look for new ways to add even more value to the service. I emailed Walls with a list of ways I thought WordHustler could be made even more useful; in almost every case, they were already working on the things I’d suggested, and were very open to the few ideas I had that they hadn’t already started working on. That, to me at least, is incredibly promising.

So market listings are free – the point isn’t to profit from listing markets, but to provide writers as much information as possible. Writer feedback on markets is listed, so we all benefit from each other’s experiences. Unethical or predatory markets (like contests that exist solely to drive sales of the published book of “winners”) are removed, or not listed in the first place.

In the final assessment, WordHustler is a well-thought-out and useful service, and I highly recommend writers check it out. As with all tools, it’s entirely possible that it won’t fit your particular style or needs, which is why I put together a whole series on submission tracking techniques and tools – find the one that works for you. But WordHustler is a more-than-worthy addition to that lineup, and goes far beyond just tracking submissions. If you’re an active writer, you will get a lot of use out of WordHustler.