Clips are copies of your published work “clipped” from the newspaper or magazine. You need to get clips to get published and you can’t get published until you have clips. It’s a vicious cycle. That’s why many beginning writers are willing to write for free.
Some clips are more valuable than others, based on the publication’s reputation. When evaluating the value of your clip, consider the editorial process it went though. If it was your friend’s web site, and no one edited anything, it’s not a very valuable clip. If it’s from a national magazine, it went through several layers of editing, making it valuable as a clip. In general, a clip from a daily newspaper is more valuable than a clip from an unknown online publication. As you get more clips, weed through and keep the best ones.
No mater how prestigious the publication, “Letters to the editor” aren’t clips! Even if that’s all you have, don’t use them!
Once you have clips, you want to present them in a way that is neat and clean that you can share with editors. Clips don’t always cooperate. When published, some clips snake around ads and just look really bad. Editors don’t care about the ads, but if you cut them out you end up with a long skinny article.
What I do is cut the article out, lay it out neatly on a clean 8×11 sheet of paper. Often, I’ll reduce the publication’s tombstone (their nameplate on the front cover) and place it along the top of the blank page. I’ll then lay my article out underneath it in column format using rubber cement to hold it all in place.
Once the article looks nice, I’ll note the day it was published and the page it appeared on. You can do this by pasting the folio line (the line on every page giving the page number and date and publication’s name) or by just neatly printing it on the page. I store my clips in a three-ring binder. Each clip is slid into a plastic sleeve inside the binder. I place the original in front, and store extra copies behind the original.
When I need to send a clip, I flip through my portfolio and pull out copies of clips I need. I try to send clips that are relevant to the article I’m pitching. For instance, a query about a parenting topic includes two parenting clips. A query about health includes health clips, and so on.
Online Clips
There are a lot of questions about how to handle online clips. The best thing to do is to keep it simple. If you have an article published online, you will want to save the clip. Web sites change, and your clip might not always be on the publisher’s site. To save your clip, you can save the web page as a .pdf file or save it as an .html file. You can also save it as an image by selecting your “print screen” button.
There are other options that are a bit more involved. You can set up a web site and offer samples of your work there, and you can use URLs to link to online clips. If you set up a web site, you want to make sure your website looks professional.
If you are e-mailing editors, do not send an attachment unless you ask the editor how he or she would prefer to receive clips. You may need to paste it into the body of an e-mail, or you might need to attach a Word file or .pdf file. Practice sending your work to friends or to yourself before you try to send it to editors.
