June 20, 2005
Well, there are a couple other blogs I check up on regularly. One is by Eric Mayer and the other is Lee Goldberg. I guess you could also say I periodically check up on Jane Boursall's (Reel Life with Jane), but I tend to check her website more than her blog.

Anyway, today I popped onto Eric's blog and he was talking about pdfs and almost never using them, and I started off a response with: Eric, shame on you!

Okay, boys and girls of the 21st century. I'm really not the best person to be lecturing anyone on the advantages of keeping up with technology, since I generally find it to be a treadmill set a few miles per hour faster than I can comfortably go. Still, I have lately embraced Adobe Elements and the creation of PDFs, or the Portable Document Format. When I bought my latest computer I picked up Adobe Elements with it. It was reasonable, probably $70 or $80, and if there's a reader out there who wants to take me to task for wasting money on something I could have gotten for free over the 'net, well, stick it, buddy, the computer died because of viruses I picked up from freeware.

Creating a PDF file from a Word doc using Adobe Elements couldn't be easier. You click the button that says: Create PDF. It brings up a window asking what file. You click on the a or c drive depending on what file you want, and click: Create PDF, or something along those lines. Then it asks you where you want to save it.

Okay, but why?

Guess what? The vast majority, nearly 100% of the magazines I wrote for and most of them out there now, accept e-mail queries. Most of the magazines and other publications I write for also post my articles on their websites. When they do, I cut-and-paste it into a Word doc, save the file, then create a pdf. Voila! A pdf version of a published clip. When I query, I put a message in the body of my e-mail, etc., then attach a Word doc of my resume and several pdfs of relevant clips.

If you're a freelance writer you're presumably using some verson of the Writer's Market. I got both the print version and the online version, initially being reluctant to use the online version. But I haven't pulled out the print version in months. I pop onto the online version almost every day, check out the market news, the spotlight market, then when I'm querying, I often just do a search in, say, trade journals, looking at all markets that pay intermediary and up. If I have an idea for something, I can pop onto their website to see what types of articles they've handled over the last few months or year or so, and if I have an idea, I can do a bit of online research, click on their e-mail link, write my query letter, attach my resume and relevant clips, and move on.

It's the only way to go. Sure, snail mail queries have their place, but all in all, I've had a far better return on time and effort using e-mail queries almost exclusively. And I think editors are starting to get the idea that they can whip off a one-sentence rejection and delete a hell of a lot faster and cheaper than stuffing a form rejection in an SASE. And if they like the idea and the writer has potential, they get much faster turn-arounds.

So that's what I was lecturing Eric about, and he's been making a living as a writer far longer than I have, but man, this is the way to go.

Best,
Mark Terry