So your article or manuscript did not find acceptance with a paper publisher.   Perhaps the world did not need another hospital romance or article about your favorite baseball player?   For one reason or another, you may not even have submitted it to any paper medium?   Fear not; there is always an e-publisher who will accept your submission.   Finding one is a piece of cake; any search-engine will give you hundreds of site-urls where your writing can be submitted.   But if you think it doesn't matter where you publish your work, then think again.

We will suppose that your work already has been developed to the best of your current skill level, and that it has a moderately satisfying quality--you have spell-checked the writing, adhered to the formatting standards and written it in at least passable language.   Now is the time to consider what you want to do with your product, and why you wrote it in the first place.   A lot will depend on how serious you take your finished work--did you spend an easy hour with it, or do those pages represent half a year's worth of painstaking writing? The rule of thumb for any serious writer is to first look for a paying customer, and if that fails, see what other options are available.

In the world of e-publishing, where can a writer hope to look for money?   There are basically three different types of serious, paying e-publishers.   The hands-down winner is the e-publisher who pays upon acceptance; you write what the e-publisher needs and submit it, and if they like what you wrote they'll pay you upon acceptance--or at least upon use.   This kind of deal is most likely if you write a short piece of non-fiction; the sites that buy such articles offer them to a core reader group--say, car engineers--and earn either upon the article or upon related ads. The fiction market can seldom offer such a sweet deal.   The next-best e-publishers, if your manuscript is book length and suitable for paper printing, will offer you a pay-per-purchase deal.   They print one to ten paper copies from your manuscript at a time, and sell your books through the Internet.   This is actually a nice deal, especially since you will have an actual paper book to show off next time you are submitting a manuscript.   Do not delude yourself into thinking a print-on-demand book will be a real money-earner, though--few if any real-life bookstores will accept it, and you will get little marketing help beyond Internet ads.   Even so, it really is the best paper-publishing deal you can get from the world of e-publishing, and you have the option of marketing and selling it yourself to the customers who prefer to buy the paper version.

The third paying option is a pay-per-download publisher.   Each time a paying customer downloads your story, the e-publisher earns a few cents and you earn a few cents, and the earnings are sent you on a monthly basis. This is certainly not a make-money-fast scheme, but you have the satisfaction of seeing how many people buy your story, and get a little tip on the side as a bonus.   This last system works best if you can keep within the 5k-word limit; works bigger than that have seriously lower download-rates than the shorter stuff.   Why?   Because the Internet is a highway for readers with a short attention span.   When your readers realize your article or story will be a long read, many will yawn and surf on.   The short and sweet story and article will attract a higher number of readers, while the long and thoughtful prose will be appreciated by a smaller audience.   And since that audience will be a more discerning one, you must write better in order to attract them to your writings next time they see your name on the top.

It is also a plus if your article is something the targeted readers are willing to pay for; a good article about stock-trade in a financial- or business-oriented magazine will fetch a lot more per download than one about bicycle maintenance on the same site.   Not just because the first article would be more appropriate, but because your customers are in a high-income area and your article could lead to further income for them so they might be willing to pay more.   Still, you never know; there are a lot of frustrated bicycle owners out there!   Find a bike magazine that will accept submissions, and make them an offer instead.

When you manage to find a paying customer, you seldom make further demands on him beyond expecting him to pay.   Yes, some e-publishers pay more than others; a good technical article can fetch you as much as a $100 up front and in cash if it is accepted by the right e-publisher.   I hardly need to tell you, though, that you will compete with many very good writers for those prizes.   In general, you should take the money and run--saying no to a modest payment is incredibly silly--until you have earned enough credibility to seriously expect more.   One exception: If you have a long-term earner--a book--you should take the time to consider which e-pulisher can give you the best percentage and do the most marketing for you.   Remember that the more marketing your e-publisher can do for your pay-per-purchase article or story, the more downloads you can hope for.

Consider the value of your finished work once more, before we progress to the non-paying markets.   Several rights are associated with this product of which, at the moment, you are the sole owner.   There is the copyright, which you earned the moment you put it down on paper or file.   In addition, you have the right to the first serial rights in your country and/or beyond, the reprint rights, the right to have it published with a number of other works, and--if it is fiction--the rights to the characters you have created within.   All those properties are theoretically worth money.   What an e-publisher is usually interested in purchasing is the right to the first serial rights, for a period of between three months and a year.   Some e-publishers will ask for more, reprinting in an anthology or a collection on a cd, or selling the work to a third party (another publisher).   Some speculative e-publishers will demand ALL rights to your work, and you should consider the long-term value of your work before you sign on to such a deal.   The moment your work has been published--made available for download from the Internet in one way or another--the first serial rights have been in most case been spent forever, and it will be more difficult to earn anything on it again, since most publishers prefer original, unpublished work.

After you have been rejected enough times to dismiss the thought of being paid in money, you can consider giving away your work.   The advice from serious writers is that work too lousy to be paid for should not be published at all, and especially not under your own name.   But professional writers have already honed their skills to the point where they can confidently expect to earn at least a token payment, and a writer who does not depend on the income from his writing can allow himself other motives than money.   Acceptable motives for publishing something without getting payment are, in unsorted sequence: special interest; peerage; feedback; pride; marketing; generosity; and editing.   If you have a site with a strong focus on something in which you are very interested--collecting Greenland stamps, for instance--then you might be willing to tell the story of how you found a rare and expensive stamp in a soiled vest you bought on a second-hand market in a back street.   There are highly renowned science magazines where it is rightly considered an honor to be published, and where no writers are ever paid.   Likewise, a poetry site with a good feedback forum could be the perfect place for your poem, even if no one will ever pay to read it.   In some cases, it makes sense to write a short article about something you earn money on in other ways; you might get no money for the five-point list of how to repair Beetle brakes, but you get to refer to your Beetle maintenance manual in the heading.   Or you can help out a friend with a homepage and give him a short funny tale, or just put up your joke on a newsgroup.   Those two last places are public too!

Quality editing is a special feature you can be willing to give away your work for, especially if you wrote it as an excercise in the first place.   Here and there are sites run by people who have genuine literary interest and skills, and who set pride in publishing only quality.   They not only keep the trash out, but will read your work and tell you what weaknesses and strengths there are, and what should be rewritten.   They may not give you money, but their professional time is valuable to you.   It is a fair deal.

A few words of caution at the end.   You might, after a round of unsuccessful submissions, believe that your work was worthless.   But, everything has value to somebody.   There are countless sites out there which are looking for content, any content as long as they can draw surfers to their sites--which are choked full with ads which generate income only the site owners earn.   The writers can mostly be assured of getting no editing, no reader feedback, and of never being read by a real agent or editor.   Feeding these freeloaders is like watering weeds; they draw readers away from the serious sites and saturate the market with their mediocre offerings.   There is one more weed among the e-publishers, though, a real parasite: the e-publisher who wants YOU to pay for publishing at his site.   Only newcomers and fools take up these offers.   A variant is the "writing contest," with purportedly decent prizes--but you have to pay an admission fee.   It is a rip-off, and you are wasting both your work and your money if you submit to these "e-publishers".

The cost of e-publishing is significantly lower than traditional publishing, and with the advent of the World Wide Web there are many new players in the publishing business.   As yet the income potentional per article for writers is lower than on paper, but that difference is slowly becoming smaller as the bad writers and e-publishers are weeded out.   Value your work; it cost you time, effort and creativity.   Finding the best possible publishing frame for it is part of that work.

Terje Johansen never thought seriously of himself as a writer, before he replied to an ad from a game company.   They needed someone to do storyline writing for a computer game.   For incomprehensible reasons he was given the project, and--wonder upon wonder--they actually signed a handsome check for the result.   After that, it was a lot harder to take the long-time writing hobby as a hobby, and now the erstwhile computer science engineer cranks out fiction and non-fiction where he can find a square deal for it.   The day job as a network administrator will be retained until writing pays more. No hurry. These days the Norwegian can be found through Net Author, or at the newsgroup misc.writing.

Terje's writing motto? "Begin to write something. Complete it. Submit it. Go back to the beginning of this line."