Q: If a newspaper pays you less for a recurring column but gives you the rights to handle your own syndication, then what? How do you go about shopping a piece that has already run one place to others?

A: "The short answer is: not easily," says an agent I spoke with. "As with magazines, it's about cold-calling, and it's hard to get editors' attention. The best way is for another newspaper, or a syndicate, to contact you after reading the article. It's actually probably in an unagented writer's best interest to let the paper have syndication rights, b/c it would be more likely for something to happen then. Otherwise, the writer could call Featurewell, which does individual pieces."

"I guess the first thing to do would be to make sure that you have the rights to the piece to shop it around," says Tribune Media Services syndicated columnist Mark Bazer. "It seems in this case that the writer does. After that, I don't really have any experience with this, but I'd guess you'd just say, "I write a column for such and such a publication, and now I'm selling secondary rights to it, or if there's more than one paper, I'm self-syndicating a column that originally runs in such and such a paper. It might help if the original paper doesn't run the column online, though you may want to be online. But then, you could confidently tell an editor that none of his or her readers have read the piece. I'd also think it'd depend on what the column is about: if it's, say, a column about poker, then editors probably wouldn't care if it'd run elsewhere; but if it's breaking news of some sort, then editors might be more weary."