How did you feel the last time someone sent you a personalized thank you note out of the blue? It made your day, right?

But here’s the kicker. The next time you were in a position to help the person who made you feel great, you did so willingly. That’s the funny thing about a thank you. It has a habit of bringing good things back to the few people who still send them out.

Thank you notes are the simplest, cheapest, yet most powerful tool freelancers have at their disposal. Here are a few reasons to start sending more of them.

Send a thank you; win a client

When an editor rejected one of my ideas last year, I did what I always do—I sent my potential sources an email thanking them for the interesting quotes but unfortunately, the editor had rejected the story. One person responded. She told me how much she appreciated being kept in the loop because no other reporter ever did. By the way, she worked for a mid-sized, PR company looking for a part time freelancer. She’d checked out my website samples and wondered if I’d be interested in writing some press releases for her?

Um, yes?

By the end of 2011, that simple thank you note earned me $2,300. If her final project hadn’t clashed with my other year end deadlines I would have grossed even more.

Send a thank you; build a bridge

Thank you notes are also terrific bridge builders and I ought to know since I demolished quite a few in my callow youth. Here’s one every freelancer should build.

Who’s your least favorite person in your freelancing world? How about the surly clerk in Big Company X responsible for cutting your 1099 checks? Yup, definitely someone in desperate need of a few bridges and let me tell you why.

No one ever thanks the payroll clerk.

Payroll clerks are grunt workers. They are paid crappy salaries to run reports, open and close the monthly books, process company payroll and research all sorts of mind-numbing things like that one missing invoice from 2003 that’s somewhere in a haystack of dusty filing cabinets. The unluckier ones cannot take vacation at month end, quarter end or year-end, let alone between January 1 and April 15. Toss in a bunch of whiny freelancers to this thankless pressure cooker and even saint would snap.

So here’s what you do. The next time you (finally) get your check from Company X, give that clerk a call. Let her know how much you appreciate her help when she’s so busy. Make that personal connection even if it’s just a voice mail. Then follow up with a real, honest-to-God thank you note (like the old timers used to write back in the early 1990s)–card, envelope, stamps–the whole works. Not only will you make her day (maybe even her month) but chances are you’ll start getting those 1099 checks a lot faster.

Send a thank you; exit gracefully

A thank note also provides a graceful exit strategy—especially with tough clients. I know, I know, but when firing a particularly difficult client do not give in to the temptation to say how you really feel.

Instead, take the high road with a thank you note. Let the client know that while you are sorry that perhaps things didn’t quite work out the way you’d both hoped, you appreciated the opportunity to work together and wish him the best for his future endeavors.

There are three very good reasons to do this.

1. It’s a small world (three cheers for LinkedIn!) and you never know who this client is talking to.
2. Do you really want someone’s last memory of you to be a wild-eyed rant?

Perhaps all those brusque, 10:30pm-on-a-Friday-night emails were how your client cleared her desk for the weekend. Perhaps you could’ve done a better job clarifying certain project discrepancies but didn’t and are still fuming.

Blowing off steam certainly makes us feel better but what if the misperception was all in your head? Growl about it to your friends, kick the wall if you must, but do not blow your top when you fire a bad client. It’s simply not worth it.

The third reason why is simple. Saying thank you shows others that you are a professional. Regardless of what reality TV claims, class trumps crass every day of the week. You’ll be surprised at the number of good things that come from sending a thank you. At the very least, your mother would be proud. At the most, you will become someone everyone else wants to work with.

Gwynneth Anderson has small business in her bones. After watching her father build a thriving contracting company from scratch, she applied his lessons to her own business venture to help pay for college. After almost fifteen years of corporate ladder climbing, she decided to take her hard-won analytical skills and return to her entrepreneurial roots. Now her business is writing about business.

We freelancers have so much freedom—after all, it’s right there in our job title. As long as we do good work and meet our deadlines, we’re free to take a two-hour nap in the middle of the day or work late into the night and sleep in the next morning.

That freedom is one of the things we love most about our jobs, but it can—if we let it—prevent us from reaching our goals. Because we aren’t in a newsroom working closely with an editor, we may not know very much about the editors we’re pitching or about exactly what they need.

Our minds are just like nature: they abhor a vacuum, so we fill up that emptiness with all sorts of ideas about how editors are going to react to our queries and letters of introduction (LOIs). For example, we may imagine that those editors are completely swamped with amazing story ideas and have a reliable stable of fantastic writers.

But the very real possibility that those editors may need a writer just this minute—and that we would be helping them out by sending an LOI—may never have crossed our minds.

I am here to tell you that there are editors out there who would be happy, even relieved, to get your pitch.

My Story

As a writer who specializes in writing for trade publications, my main marketing tool is an LOI, and I send out several LOIs every week in what is now a completely painless process.

Sending my first LOI was not at all painless, though – because I was afraid.

I had convinced myself that I was — simply by sending editors an LOI — going to irritate them and cause them to add my name to a Blacklist of Annoying People that they circulated among every other editor. Believing this totally untrue idea was my choice, and that choice helped me avoid a lot of fear, but it also 100% guaranteed I would never get an assignment.

As a result of all that fear, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to send my first LOI, but I finally did send it. You know what the editor’s response was? Here it is, copied and pasted directly from his e-mail, which arrived 26 minutes after I sent the LOI:

Elizabeth:

I’ll pass your email to the chief editor. He handles all paid freelance assignments. We don’t use a great deal, due to budget constraints, but he would like to see this for possibilities.

Thanks for thinking of us.

He had actually read the LOI and he’d found it at least valuable enough to respond with a “thanks for thinking of us.” It took me a while to figure out why he would thank me, but at the moment I received his response, I was just thrilled to realize that my name wasn’t going on that Blacklist of Annoying People after all!

Then I got to thinking about why he thanked me. I realized that sending an editor an LOI can actually help him out.

Why Editors Don’t Hate Getting Your Pitches

Reading an LOI doesn’t take much time, and I make the process even easier for the editors I contact. In the subject line of my LOI e-mail, I write, “Freelance writer introducing herself.” If I have specific expertise or work experience in the industry the editor’s publication covers, I write, “Freelance writer with X experience introducing herself.”

Then, the editors who don’t use freelancers have spent all of four seconds reading that subject line and deleting my e-mail. I’m sure there are people out there who think that my taking four seconds of their time immediately gets my name on that Blacklist of Annoying People, but I’m also sure that those people are few in number and that they wouldn’t make very good clients anyway. (By the way, there is no such list.)

I mean it about the four seconds, too. I timed myself with a stopwatch reading the subject line of my LOI. To be conservative, I read slowly, and I rounded up slightly from what the stopwatch said, and it still came out to only four seconds.

The editors who do use freelancers are probably going to open the e-mail and read it, which—yep, I timed it—will take fifty-one seconds.

From there, they may respond with a request for clips, respond and ask me to call about a possible assignment, or respond with an assignment.

Some editors don’t respond at all. Maybe they’ll come back to the LOI later when they have more time. Maybe they’ll completely forget about it. Maybe they don’t need any new writers at the moment, or maybe they prefer to use writers with a different background or more experience or whatever. Who knows.

So far, though, I’ve still only taken up about two minutes of their time, max, and that assumes they did write back to me and request clips.

So the annoyance factor for the editors is extremely low, and the payoff for them can be worth far more than the minute (or two) of time I’ve taken up.

Or: Maybe the editor has just come back from maternity leave and needs someone to take an assignment she hasn’t found anyone else to do. My LOI has come at the perfect time. She can give me the assignment, which of course is a victory for me, and her stress level has just dropped, which of course is a victory for her, too.

Maybe the editor’s regular freelancer is moving to Germany, and he is therefore in search of a new one. My LOI has helped him out: I’ve shown up in his inbox, and he doesn’t have to go looking for anyone.

Instead of taking up these editors’ time, I’ve actually saved them a great deal of time, and as long as I do a great job on the assignments, I’ve saved them the stress of finding a qualified, competent writer to add to their pool of freelancers.

Lest you think I’m making up these situations, consider this: I have gotten assignments from editors who were dealing with exactly these circumstances.

Sometimes editors respond with, “Thank you, but we already have enough writers. I’ll keep you in mind for future assignments.” I’m free to make up all sorts of ideas about what these editors are really going to do. Or, I can choose to be grateful that at least they took the time to read my LOI (and possibly my clips, if they asked for them).

At some point in the future, those editors may need a writer and may come to me with an assignment. Again, I’ve saved them the time of trying to find somebody else.

In the end, the most I’ve asked of the editors I contact is to spend less than one minute reading my LOI, which, when you think about it, isn’t really much time at all. If the editors need someone to take on an assignment, I’ve saved them time, and I get an assignment. The editors win, and so do I. Not bad for a one-minute investment.

Elizabeth Whalen is a freelance writer and editor based in Berkeley, CA who serves clients all over the country. In addition to writing and editing, she loves skiing, ice skating, practicing yoga, watching movies, and enjoying everything the sometimes strange but mostly wonderful Bay Area has to offer.

Whether you’re a new writer who’s staring at her first feature in a newsstand publication or a jaded professional who’s finally hit a career high with a 2,500-word feature in Esquire, beyond sending the clip with new story pitches there’s the question of “What else can I do with this shiny piece of paper I hold in my hands?”

I’ve given the question a lot of thought while wearing my jet-powered marketing/self-promotion hat; here are some of my ideas about how writers can work their clips more effectively.

1. Send a link to the published story to editors who rejected your idea.

Before you jab your burning torches and sharpened pitchforks at me, hear me out. You have to be thoughtful about this. If you’re sending the link to editors just to rub it in their faces — “Nah, nah, look what the NYT bought, you dumb-ass idiots — next time, be on the ball, okay?” — that’s not so cool and these editors will be thrilled they avoided working with such a reject rejected your idea … thrilled!

Tone is everything. If your motive is to get more work with the editors who rejected your idea, send them a new idea, then say something like, “Remember the story I pitched to you last summer about the snake hunters in Florida’s Everglades? X Magazine finally bought it and it ran last month. Here’s a link; I thought you’d like to see how it turned out.” This can be especially effective if the editor liked the idea, but it was nixed at a story meeting.

Even if he didn’t seem to love your idea, send him the link anyway. Your clip shows persistence — you believed in your idea and you continued to market it — and it gives him a little glimpse of how you turned your initial idea into a full-fledged story. It also shows you can toot your horn professionally with no hard feelings. Everyone wins.

2. Send the link to editors you work with regularly.

I aim to develop collegial relationships with my editors, so I occasionally do this with clips I’m exceptionally proud of. When I wrote a piece about British cookbooks for The Atlantic‘s food blog, I sent the link to a couple food editors I worked with; one had no idea I was such an Anglophile and she assigned me a piece about British food, and another editor added the clip to my resume package, which eventually landed me a lucrative short-term writing project.

I know two other writers who send out quarterly e-mails to editors that include links to recent clips. This is a brilliant idea, one that an established freelancer can steal for her marketing arsenal.

3. Tweet ‘em/Facebook ‘em. And ask your friends to retweet/repost.

I know a lot of writers are iffy about Twitter and wonder who the heck would be interested in their 140-character blurps about their morning coffee. Forget tweeting the cuppa Joe — tweet links to your clips and add relevant #hashtags to get other people to notice your story and retweet. Same thing with Facebook; post a link, write a little about why you’re happy with the story, and see what happens. The key is to get as many eyeballs reading your article — and with luck, some of those eyeballs will belong to people who hire awesome writers.

4. Alert the media!

A friend of mine wrote a thinky-piece for Reason that producers at NPR happened to read, and the next thing she knew, she was on a public television news program (or the radio, I forget) to talk about her research. She wasn’t paid for the NPR appearance, but it was certainly something worth crowing about in her credentials.And less impressive, but last year when I blogged about Sarah Ferguson and her latest scandal involving the British royal family, I got calls from the British media, including the BBC, to talk via satellite about Americans’ perception of Ferguson.

OK, great, you’re thinking — these media outlets came to you guys. But there’s no law that says you can’t reach out to the media. If you’ve written a story that’s controversial, timely, and/or challenges commonly held beliefs, start by calling the story desks of local news stations.

Here’s an example: you just wrote a feature for Parents about a grade-schooler who was bullied and successfully sued her school system. The week your story comes out, you notice a story about one school system’s flawed anti-bullying stance. Call your local news station and tell them who you are and what you’ve written and offer to speak to them on air if they’re doing a story on this. Even if they weren’t planning on covering the story, knowing that there’s an expert (that’s YOU) they can call upon may make them think, “Hmm, maybe we SHOULD do a story on this.”

5. And of course, add links to the clip on your website, blog about it (if you have a blog), and make copies to send to editors who want to see hard copies.

Because if I don’t mention all this, some Sherlock will point it out.

Any other ideas about how to work a clip? Add your comments below. [db]

The editor said I should turn in outline, but I’m not sure what exactly she wants.

The editor asked me to write up the article, but didn’t offer a contract. Is this an assignment or does he want it on spec?

One of my key sources went AWOL and I’m wondering if I can replace her with a different one.

Do I have to use my real-people sources’ real names or can I give them pseudonyms?

I got an assignment but the editor didn’t mention pay. How do I know if the magazine pays?

I had to go over word count by 300 words to fit in all the info my editor wanted. Is this okay?

You get the idea. I could keep adding more questions, but I’ll stop here.

And I always give the same answer: Call or e-mail the editor and ask.

When you ask anyone other than the editor these questions, you’re asking the other person to either guess or to read the editor’s mind. There’s only one person who knows the answer: The editor.

I know that this throws many writers for a loop, because they don’t want to admit to their editors that they don’t have everything perfectly under control. But editors are human, too. They breathe oxygen, eat food, snap at their kids, and get parking tickets. In the vast majority of cases, they’re happy to answer your questions if anything is unclear.

And consider this: If you guess at what the editor wants, chances are good that you’ll get it wrong. So you’ll slice off those 300 words of information the editor asked for when she really would rather that you left them in. You’ll give your sources pseudonyms when the magazine’s policy is to use real names. You’ll turn in an article hoping blindly that you’ll get paid when the editor had no intention of cutting you a check.

So just ask.

Have you ever asked an editor a question you were afraid to ask? What happened? [lf]

I usually address an editor by first name, but I decided to go right to the source and ask some of my editors what they thought. Here’s what they had to say:

I prefer my first name–Ms. Jones makes me feel old. What might be worse, though, is that I think it makes the writer seems a little too old-school. I still absolutely need e-mails to be professional (as in, no, “Hey Kate, got an idea for you. Let’s do a story on kids!”), but I think using my first name helps a writer balance that professionalism with the conversational, reader-friendly sort of writing I’m looking for even in pitches.
—Editor at a national parenting magazine

Personally I really don’t have a preference. I go through much the same quandary when I have to approach a source for the first time to ask their permission to schedule an interview. Usually I will go with the first name, but on occasion (just by some instinct), I will address my query to Mr. or Ms. Not sure why, but it usually works out just fine.
—Editor at a custom publisher

Safest thing is to use first name. It’s definitely more informal, but so is email. There are plenty of people like me with a first name that can belong to a man or woman. And I get completely turned off by an email addressed to Mr. Smith! Going with first name erases that problem.
— Editor at a health clinic’s magazine

I prefer “Ms.” plus last name because we’re not friends and we don’t have a relationship, but you don’t get deleted for using Dara. But if you use no salutation at all (in order to avoid the whole thing) that’s just weird and I probably will delete you.
—Editor at a magazine for a sporting association

First name, for sure. Salutations are ridiculously formal.
—Editor at a national health magazine

I think first name is appropriate.
—Editor at a restaurant organization’s magazine

So the consensus is that most editors (at least from my small sample) prefer to be addressed by their first name, but even if they don’t, they won’t trash your query if you do so. And if you can’t figure out an editor’s gender, don’t guess…either look up the editor on Google, use the editor’s first name, or use the editor’s first and last name.

Any other editors reading this: How do you feel about being addressed by your first name in a query? And writers: Have you ever made a name snafu in a query? [lf]