-Learn process of creating, rewriting, and editing. Your work represents your knowledge and abilities.

-Meet deadlines. Don't put editors in a bind.

-Be accurate. Show you know what you are talking about.

-Know copyright laws. Protect your rights.

-Develop a record system. Know what manuscripts are where and what rights you have left to resell. -Learn how to market your work. Agents are not useful or needed in every genre or writing field.

If you apply these eight steps to your work they will speed number and quality of your manuscript sales. You will build a reputation as a writer editors can depend on and readers will enjoy.

L. C. Peterson is a writer and web marketing consultant. Other articles and writer's tips can be found at http://www.salesandtales.com. A freelance writing tutorial can be requested at mailto:writingclass@sendfree.com.

A commonly followed convention, though, is to use a serif font for body text of your document and a sans-serif font for headings. My recommended fonts for general work are Georgia (a very lovely serif font) and Verdana, a very legible sans-serif. Verdana is probably already installed on your computer.

Both of these fonts (together with a number of others) are freely available from Microsoft's Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com ypography/fontpack/default.htm

Fixed-width and variable-width fonts ------------------------------------ In some fonts, every character is same width; in others, characters are of different widths. Not surprisingly, these fonts are termed fixed width and variable width respectively.

Start up you word processor. Type half a dozen lower-case "l"s and then on next line type half a dozen lower-case "w"s. In most fonts "w"s will be much wider. (Such fonts are variable width.)

Now select two lines of characters and set font to Courier or Courier New. Notice that both lines are now same length. Courier is a fixed-width font.

It should be no surprise that variable-width fonts look more natural and are thus easier to read. Fixed-width fonts such as Courier have quite limited application:

* Computer programmers use fixed-width fonts in order to neatly align their code.

* The other main use of fixed-width fonts is to produce tables that need to be neatly tabulated into fixed-width columns.

Conclusion ---------- As an exercise go through fonts on your computer and find five variable-width, serif fonts that you like look of. Choose among these for body copy of your documents.

Now find five variable-width, sans-serif fonts. Use these for your headings, captions, headers and footers.

Armed with these simple ways of classifying fonts, you should now have an easy time of choosing suitable fonts for all occasions.