Gather Your Material:

Depending on what kind of work you are looking for, you should see if you can get hard copies or PDFs of all of the publications in which your work has appeared. Having a version of your work as it appeared in the publication is better by a long stretch than sending a Word version or something similar, as it clearly shows when and where your work was published.

If you have hard copy versions of your work, you will need to scan them. In general, it is expected that you will include only the first page of multi-page works. After the documents are scanned you'll need to make PDFs of them. There are a few different ways to do this. Adobe Professional is the easiest, but MS Word may be able to help you as well (refer to online help). There also a few free PDF creation products as well. Just take a good look online, and read some reviews before you commit to one or the other.

Distributing Your Tear Sheet:

Have enough copies of this work on hand so that you can include as many as two or three of them in any snail-mail queries or submission calls. Be sure to include in your query letter any details about when and where the work you are including has appeared in print.

If you are sticking to an electronic version of your tear sheet, all you need to do at this point is to attach the PDF to the query email you are sending. If you can place the PDF in the body of the email, all the better, as some people are still reluctant to open email attachments. Refer to your email help to see how to do this.

For a physical version of your tear sheet or for a larger portfolio, make nice color copies of all of your work. You will want to make sure that your work can be easily read, so do not skimp on this part of the procedure. You want your writing skills on full display here, along with clear proof that your work has been published before.

Putting Together A Portfolio:

As your work appears in more publications, you will want to have your writing samples all together in one place. Here is where you start to consider putting together a physical portfolio. Portfolios are great to take to meetings with editors, publishers, and prospective employers (you would do well to keep an up-to-date online version that you can point people to as well.)

There are many ways to bind your portfolio from hardcover to three ring binders. You should take a good look around online at the different binding styles to find the one that suits you best. It is important, as we stated above, that your copies be clear, readable, and attractively presented. A hardcover portfolio is always impressive, and as it turns out, fairly cheap and easy to put together even by yourself. Take a look around online, or discuss your options with your local printer. If you are going to be doing a lot of updates, or perhaps even self-publishing in the future, purchasing a thermal binding machine might be an option to consider.