Many writers post samples of their work on the Internet hoping that an editor or agent might see them and be
interested. Editors and agents don’t have time to randomly surf the millions of Internet sites to find great writing,
so there has to be another reason for them to be visiting your home page before they'll see your creative works.
For example, you may be a regular on a discussion list that they frequent or perhaps you've posted a large collection of
your family's private Civil War photographs. Editors and agents have hobbies too. Of course, the most direct method is
to invite them to visit. Whatever it takes, samples can be a good way to possibly sell your writing if you can somehow
lure the editors to your site.
Before you begin uploading, there is a serious point to consider. Once you post your work you may have published it.
There is currently no legal consensus on how the word "publish" is defined. Some courts say
"publish" is disseminating one or more copies of a work to the public. When someone reads your online work and
a copy is created on their computer that work can be said to have been legally "published", at least according
to the strict definition. You haven’t sold your work, but it is available to anyone exactly as if it had been bought
by one of the many online magazines.
This could be a potential problem if you're trying to sell first North American serial rights since, if your work has
already been on the Internet, you may have already used up the first rights. A similar problem occurs if you post
work that you’ve sold. Most contracts these days include electronic rights as part of the sale. That is, when you sold
your short story to a magazine, you may have sold the electronic rights also, and placing a copy on your Web site may be
"publishing" without permission of the new owner.
Law simply hasn’t kept up with Internet usage. On the bright side, I’ve never heard of anyone having a work rejected
because it had been previously posted on a Web site. But the fact that it could happen is reason enough to take
precautions.
So how do you safely display your samples? For short stories or articles, you can post the first few paragraphs or
pages. For books or novels, post the first three chapters along with a brief synopsis of what the rest of the work is
like. If agents or editors ask for more details or more text, you'll send that directly to them and it won't be posted
for the world to see.
Be careful about revealing too many details in your public synopsis of fiction because, although your writing is
copyrighted, your ideas are not. The great TV monster gobbles up hundreds of plots a week and both TV and movie writers
are notorious for borrowing and imitating. Just think of the dozens of grumpy-cop-gets-a-new-partner movies. There must
be at least 40 of those by now, the only difference between them being whether the new partner is a robot, an animal, a
space alien, etc. Somewhere in the distant past there was a writer who first used the idea but who received no credit or
money for the 39 clones. If you have a clever concept or trick ending that you plan to sell, don't put it on the
Internet.
Several critique groups around the country post drafts online for their members to access and comment on. This can be
safely done with a password-protected area on their Web sites. Since the work is not available to the general public, it
is not technically published. Also, works-in-progress or drafts that you post or email to friends for critique do
not count as published work. So long as you restrict the audience that sees it and declare it as a working draft, it is
not yet a published work.
I've saved the best for last. I know of more than one writer who has actually made a sale because of posted samples.
It's not a guaranteed method, but it's definitely worth trying if you keep the above warnings in mind.