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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.

And here’s the kicker — your commission ranges from 4% to 8.5%, which means that, depending on how many sales you achieve and what your agreement with your publisher is, you may end up making more from Amazon sales than you do from your royalties! Look:

Royalties: If you sell a book at $19.99, and get 5% of the wholesale price (usually 60% of the cover price), you’ll make .05 x .60 x $19.99 = $0.60. If you sell 100 copies, you’ll make $60 in royalties.
Amazon Associates: The same book might be marked down at Amazon to $15.99. If you sell one copy, you get 4% of 15.99, which is $0.64. If you sell 100 books, your commission is 6.5%, which nets you $1.04 per copy, or $104 for 100 books. Of course, you still get royalties on those books, too.

To create a link, you can log into your Amazon Associates account and select from dozens of “Widgets”, including ones that will scan your page and automatically create banners targeted towards the keywords on your page (it’s called Omakase). I don’t generally like their widgets, though they’re ok as ads to run in your site’s sidebar. Usually, I create links manually, by adding my associate ID to the end of the URL for a product page. Here’s how:

1. Search for a product. For illustration, we’ll use my book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War.
2. Go to the product’s main page and copy it’s URL. For my book, it’s: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203705368&sr=8–1
3. See that string of numbers after the title and before where it says “ref=pd_bbs_sr_1…”? We only need the link up to there, so cut everything after the slash.
4. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/
5. That’s enough to find the book with, but it doesn’t have my associate ID attached yet. My associate ID code is “dwax-20″, and I’ll just add it to the end — Amazon is really good at picking out your associates ID.
6. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/dwax-20. Clicking that link will take you to the exact same page, but I’ll get credit if you buy the book. In fact, I’ll get credit if you decide not to buy it and buy something else, instead, as long as you entered the site using my link.

Barnes and Noble also has an affiliate program, if you prefer working with them for whatever reason. I find Amazon’s to be far more useful (in terms of providing value to website visitors) but in the end, it’s links to books — and whichever company you feel offers the best combination of value and compensation should get your traffic. Borders recently “divorced” Amazon, launching it’s own online bookstore after several years of fulfilling orders through Amazon. Their affiliate program, then, is only just getting off the ground, but if you prefer Borders, that’s the way to go.

Use your affiliate link wherever you promote your book — on your website, in your email signature, on forums, anywhere you can paste a link. Obviously the vast majority of your sales will not come from you telling people where to find your book, but if you’re an active promoter, a significant number of sales will come from your link, which will be a nice bonus above your regular royalties — and you won’t have to wait a year to collect, either.

Sonar comes from SpaceJock Software, which also produces the yWriter novel-writing program. It runs on all Windows systems, though Vista users should pay special attention to his instructions for Vista — unless you want to fuss with permissions every time you run Sonar, you need to install it to your individual “Documents” folder. There are also instructions to get it running on Linux.

Slushomatic allows you to store documents directly in the program and create and store cover letters with them. When it comes time to send a manuscript, Slushomatic generates formatted, ready-to-print PDF files that can be opened and printed in Adobe Acrobat (or my preference, Foxit Reader), or attached to email for markets that accept electronic submissions. Because it’s written in Java, it should run on any computer that runs Java — Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Writer’s Database was written by writer Simon Kewin, and is the simplest of the three. It’s Windows only, and you most likely have to download and install the VB6 Runtime files (there’s a download link on the site).

All three work basically the same. Each offers three views: Markets, Submissions, and Manuscripts (or some variation of each). In each view, selecting “add new ___” opens a form to add information to. All three are linked, so that when you are creating a new submission, for example, the markets appear in a drop-down. Or when you’re looking at a manuscript, you can easily see which markets it’s been submitted to and what the current status is.

There is really no objective way to rank any of these over the other two. All are well-written and time-tested, so they work well. Each has its own little quirks that will appeal to some users and turn off others? Since all three are free, why not download them all and see which one works best for you?

Title of Piece | Length | Genre/Type | Query or Submission? |Market Submitted to | Market’s Address | Pay | Date Sent | Response Time | Response (Y/N) | Accepted? (Y/N) | Due date | Publish date | Pay date | Paid? (Y/N)

You could also create another sheet with market information, in which case you can skip the “Market’s Address” and “Pay” columns.

As you send pieces or queries out, you fill in a new line. When you receive a response, you go back and put a Y under “Response?” and select either “Yes or No” under “Accepted?” If your piece was accepted, you can add the date it will be published and when you’ll be paid. If it was a query, add the date the finished piece is due.

Using a spreadsheet has an advantage over paper, in that you can sort your columns. So, for instance, you could sort on the “Response?” column to find pieces that are still under consideration by their respective markets — and check the “Response time” column to see whether you should have heard back from them or not. Maybe it’s time to send a reminder?

Or you could sort on “Market” to see who you haven’t submitted anything to in a while. Or “Accepted?” to see what pieces you should be looking at resubmitting elsewhere. Or “Paid?” to see who might be just a little behind in paying their authors. I’m sure it just slipped their mind…

If you have some spreadsheet savvy, you can also add drop-down selectors or check boxes for different options — for example, a check box can replace “Yes/No” in some columns, and a drop-down could list all the different genres or formats you write in (e.g. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Fantasy Romance, Fantasy Horror, Fantasy Horror Romance, Romantic Horrific Fantasy, Fantastic Romancy Horrismcy, etc.).

Using a spreadsheet offers basic functionality, but as it gets larger and larger it’s going to get more and more unwieldy. Plus, every time you submit the same piece to a new market, you’ll need to create a new line, making tracking the history of a specific piece or query idea somewhat difficult. Next, we’ll look as specialty software that addresses some of these issues. Stay tuned!

Turns out, very hard. Indexing is not a simple exercise in any way; each entry has to be thoughtful and necessary, the best way to find a specific piece of information. You have to imagine who might use your book and what kind of information they might seek, and then predict how they might seek that information. You have to weigh every keyword — every name, theory, book title, event, place, organization, etc. — to decide whether its use in the text is significant enough to direct people to it. Like I said, it’s hard work, and much more an art than a science. (Incidentally, indexes are copyrighted works, which reflects their status as an original expression of thought.)

In the end, I did the index, and I think I did a pretty good job of it. I started by using index cards (that is their name, after all) but that got old really fast, so I developed my own system using a notepad, Excel, and Word. Here’s how:

1. Go through each chapter of proofs, writing down each word you feelcould be in the index, followed by the page(s) on which it appeared. Use a pen and paper for this, and allow plenty of latitude on whether or not a term should end up in the index –you’ll winnow later.
2. After an initial pass through the book, make a second pass to catch any terms you don’t decide to include until a later chapter.
3. One chapter at a time, copy the word lists into Excel. One column for each keyword, and another for the page numbers (multiple instances separated by paragraphs). For subheadings, put the main heading, followed by a dash, followed by the subheading, like this:
   

   Steward, Julian — as Columbia professor

4. After each page is entered, sort on the keyword column. All the subheadings sort together because they share the same first part (the heading).
5. As you enter each page, check to see if there is already an entry for each term and add the page numbers to that, or add a new entry at the bottom if this is the first time the term appears. If you make a mistake and add a duplicate, no big deal, because when you sort, the duplicates will end up next to each other and can be easily identified and combined.
6. Enter a page, sort, enter a page, sort, and on and on until done.
7. Check to see if there are any duplicate entries and combine them: cut and paste the page numbers from one into the other’s entry, and delete the now-empty row.
8. Now, edit. For any entry that has more than 5 or 6 page references, consider adding sub-headings. For any entry that has only one or two page references, check to make sure the mention is significant. Review each entry and decide whether it is the best way to find the information it points to. Add cross-references (“Anti-communism, see McCarthyism”; “see also Columbia University”). This is real editing of real writing– you have to be sure that every word adds to the value of the piece, just as you would if this were a novel, short story, or essay.
9. Once all the entries are in order and you’re satisfied that your index is both thorough and accurate, copy and paste the two columns into Word. Use “Paste Special” to paste as unformatted text (otherwise it will paste as a table).
10. Clean up the formatting, adjust the text size and font, make everything look nice, and you’re done.

The article is called “Build Your Virtual Office: Ten Great Online Tools for Writers” and lists ten types of online applications writers will find handy. I’m not going to say too much about the article, since I’d really rather people head to ByLine Magazine’s website and order it as a back issue.

Or, better yet, subscribe. ByLine is a strange bird in the writing magazine niche — written almost entirely by freelancers, produced by a single publisher acting on her own (that is, not as part of a corporate publishing empire), with content ranging from poetry and short stories to how-tos, markets, and thought-pieces. It’s the kind of off-beat magazine that deserves wider recognition — and the kind that, since it isn’t getting it, struggles from month-to-month to stay afloat.

Especially right now — magazine sales are hurting across the board due to the easy access to quality material on the Internet, paper prices are rising (I think due to global lumber shortages), postage prices keep going up and up (a cent increase doesn’t affect your letters to grandma much, but imagine sending out thousands of pieces of mail a month). It’s a hard time to be a “little” magazine, and I’d hate for the writing world to lose one of the few publications out there dedicated solely to our craft.

Subscriptions to ByLine are $29 US a year (but they just went from monthly to bi-monthly, so that might change the subscription rate); you can order a sample issue for $5 US. Their ordering page is here.

Meanwhile, I’m going to bask in the glow of my first magazine sale. I’ve been published in periodicals before, but never for pay — that’s the “joy” of the academic marketplace! The funny thing is, turn-around in the print world is so slow — decisions are made after weeks or months of deliberation, then production starts months before the actual publication date — that my bio includes nothing about this site, my work at Lifehack, or even the title of my book (which was still in the “working title” stage). 

Several free programs have appeared in the last couple years that take advantage of the relationship between the PDF format and printing. These programs install a virtual printer on your PC, allowing you to “print” to a PDF file instead of to a physical paper-based printer. All you have to do is select “Print”, and when the print dialog opens, select your PDF printer from the drop-down menu. A save-file box will open, allowing you to select a folder and a name for your PDF; when you hit “Save” the file will be saved as a perfectly formatted PDF file.

There are dozens of free programs to create PDFs. I recommend PDF Forge’s PDF Creator because it’s open source (meaning nobody “owns” the code and anyone can develop it further or modify it) and works well. To edit PDF files directly, you have to use commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, which costs several hundred dollars — instead, make sure you keep your source files (the original word processor file) and make any changes in them. Then, simply generate a new PDF for free.

First of all, make sure it’s featured prominently on your site. Write a post about it, making sure to use all the important keywords you think people doing a Google search might use to find information like yours. For a while, at least, it’s a good idea to put a blurb about your e-book at the bottom of every post you write, too — make sure our existing readers know about, and keep telling them about it!

Contact anyone you have any connection with on the web and ask them to link to your e-book, too. Send them a copy and ask them to review it. If it’s for sale, offer free copies for a giveaway on somebody else’s site. If you’re using e-Junkie, set up an affiliate program and give people a piece of the action in exchange for their promotional efforts.

Insert a link to your e-book into your signature block on your email and in any forums you frequent. Add a link to your profile on any social networking sites you belong to. If you’re giving it away, add it to directories of free e-books (Google “Free e-book directory” for some ideas).

If you’re selling your e-book, make sure you add it to Amazon’s Kindle store through their Digital Text Platform. You’ll have to reformat it for the Kindle’s screen (which is black-and-white and about the size of a pocketbook page), but you’ll get your title in front of thousands of Kindle users — a number that’s hopefully going to grow a lot. You can charge whatever you want for it — the average price at the moment seems to be $9.99 US — and you get 35% of the sales revenue.

Be creative with your promotions. Make up business cards or bookmarks with the URL of your e-book’s page prominently featured, and hand them out wherever you can. Put up flyers on bookstore bulletin boards. Buy Google Adwords or advertise in literary magazines. Obviously, don’t spend a fortune — and if you’re giving it away, it’s probably a good idea not to spend anything at all — but if you think you can make it back, putting a little money into promotions isn’t a bad idea.

Well, that depends on your ultimate goal. Are you planning to give your e-book away, or do you want to sell it? Let’s look at both options separately.

Giving it away

If you’re going to give your e-book away, you could just upload it to your site, add a link to the sidebar, and be done with it. We’ll talk about promoting it in the next post, but for now, make sure it’s clearly marked (the word “FREE” in all caps, bold-faced, in giant red letters never fails to attract attention!) and why people should want to read it.

A better bet might be to give it its own page. Write up a short description, add some testimonials if you have them (and update the page if you get any), and add the page to your site’s main menu.

Or maybe you want to give it away but still get something in return. You could offer the e-book as an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, if you have one — attach the file to the automatic reply they get when they sign up. Or you could use it to drive subscriptions to your RSS feed — Remarkablogger shows you how to add a link to your e-book that only shows up in your RSS feed. Tell them they’ll get the link once they’ve subscribed.

Selling your e-book

Selling an e-book takes a little more work — it is, after all, a business endeavor — but, of course, you get paid for it. If you already have a shopping cart on your site (we’ll talk about that in a future post), you could sell it directly. That’s probably more than most writers are willing to deal with, though, so here are a couple of third-party services that can handle some or all of the details of the sale for you.

• PayPal: If you don’t mind doing the order fulfillment yourself, you could add a Paypal “Buy Now” button to your site. Every day, log in, see what new orders have been placed, and email them a copy of your e-book.
• Lulu: If you expect to sell more than a few copies a day, you’ll want order fulfillment along with payment processing. Lulu is a print-on-demand service that also offers e-books; you’ll need to create an account, upload your e-book, and charge enough to cover Lulu’s per-book fee and commission. Your buyers will receive their e-book directly from Lulu. Lulu does paper copies, too, so you can offer your work in both formats if you like.
• e-Junkie: It’s not free, but for $5 US a month, e-Junkie will host a shopping cart for you and handle the order fulfillment, providing your buyers with a download link to get the e-book from after they’ve paid. E-Junkie offers other useful services for that $5/month, including the ability to create affiliate links so other sites can sell your e-book — for a cut, of course.

I’m sure there are other services I don’t know about, but beware, too — for some reason writers have always been seen as likely targets for scams. Make sure that a) you don’t have to pay for services you don’t need (like editing or layout), b) you aren’t turning over any copyrights and you retain full ownership of your e-book, and c) you aren’t required to pay for a certain number of sales until they’re actually made. Thoroughly research any e-book publisher or distributor; Googling their name plus “scam”, “fraud”, and similar words will likely turn up what you need to know about any shady dealers.

Instead, I suggest saving your file as a plain-jane pdf file. While you could use professional layout software like Adobe’s InDesign and Acrobat to produce your final text, these programs cost hundreds of dollars and are difficult to learn. Instead, I recommend using your word processor of choice and a free pdf creator(I recommend PDF Forge’s PDF Creator; some word processors, like Word 2007 (using the “Save as pdf” addon) and OpenOffice.org can save pdfs themselves.

You’ll need to set up your pages with the end result in mind. Wide text columns can be harder to read, especially on screen, so set your page sizes to something more book-like. I set my pages at 6″ wide by 9″ tall, with a 1-inch margin all around. This allows me to easily use the files with print-on-demand publishers like Lulu, and allows my readers who’d like to print the e-book to print 2 pages per side in landscape mode without hurting the layout — saving paper and retaining readability.

You’ll probably also want to put page numbers, chapter headings, the title, and your name into the headers and footers. Since this is a full book and not just a manuscript, you’ll need a title page, copyright announcement, and table of contents at the front. If you have any graphic design skills, you could also add a nice cover, though that’s not essential — your e-book will never be sitting on anyone’s shelf in need of a cover to attract attention. You can also sprinkle graphic elements throughout your text to give it a professional look and make it nicer to read.

When your text looks the way you want it, do yourself, me, and the world a favor and proofread it. Remember, you don’t have an editor — this is a one-person show you’re putting on. It’s a good idea to have a few people read it and give you their opinion, and take their feedback seriously.

Finally, save the file as a PDF. If you have the option, add thumbnails so your reader can easily select specific pages. Make sure you say “yes” if you’re asked to embed fonts, to be certain your e-book looks the same way on your reader’s screen as it does on yours. You can choose to password-protect your file, but I think that only adds complexity for the reader without adding any real security to protect your content. Accept that some copies will get copied and sent to people who didn’t pay you; learn to find satisfaction in the fact that people are reading your stuff.