Spotted a great article on how to land more freelance gigs–check out this FreelanceSwitch entry which talks about using Gmail to its’ fullest potential, taking advantage of RSS feeds, and paying attention to volume and the law of averages when it comes to submissions.

I myself have advised people to do many of these things, but there’s one caution I’ve been remiss in pointing out an important issue when using volume submissions to increase your responses. If you query multiple publications in the same market, don’t query the same article or the exact same topic to multiple sources–unless you are prepared to give each publication something unique. Running the same story in multiple magazines or websites (without telling them up front) is not only considered bad form, it can also get you in hot water when the editor at magazine A finds out you ran an identical piece in magazine B.

This is known as a simultaneous submission, and it’s only fair to let editors know in advance if that’s what you’re doing. Some pubs don’t mind simultaneous submissions but others are very particular about them–know before you submit! It’s never good to pitch the same story with the same interviews and quotes to two competing mags unless you’re sure having them both run at the same time (always a possibility) won’t come back to haunt you (or the editors of your respective magazines) for any reason.

Kudos to FreelanceSwitch.com for an excellent post!