How to Organize Your Published Magazine Article Tearsheets

Are tearsheets even a thing anymore? I checked YouTube to find out how to organize my published magazine article tearsheets and just found out how people were organizing pages they'd torn out of magazines for later reading. 🤔

Back in the olden days, you needed them to send out with queries to show that you had worked with a magazine, but these days so much is online or they don't even care what you've done before. It's rare that they even get sent out anymore. But, according to this piece, The Basics of the Magazine Tear Sheet, you should definitely still be keeping them.

Now the challenge is this: how do you organize them?

If you're like me, you keep at least one tearsheet from each article you've had published. But when you've got over 125 articles published, how do you organize them so you know which reprints to resend each year to editors in a timely manner so they can consider them for upcoming issues?

Well ... I used to file everything in a stand-up system like a milk crate or a tubs where you can store hanging file folders. I spent a lot of time creating ONE manila file folder per article. After over 100 articles, that turned into a bit of a mess—and here's why... 

I tried to organize them by topic, which got confusing and arduous for my already overtaxed brain. A birthday tearsheet easily went into the BIRTHDAY, but a tearsheet about sending teens to camp would be both a TEEN and a CAMP piece. What if your TEEN has a BIRTHDAY at CAMP? Forget about it because now your brain has just exploded with too many organizational possibilities! 😂

Now take a little dance break and 
check out Suzannah Windsor Freeman's 
piece titled 
6 Organization Tips for Disorganized Writers

Tell me about your article organization system (digital and physical paper). Or come on over to my Parenting Magazine Writers Group on Facebook and share there!

Image by Ro Ma from Pixabay