My Syndicated Column

So, my grand plan for making a living wage while working on my novels is to publish a syndicated newspaper column. Jill Pertler wrote a very helpful book called The Do-it-Yourselfer's Guide to Self-Syndication basically explaining the ins and outs of writing a column and getting it syndicated. I'm not going to to go into all the gory details, but since I have been writing about China for 3 years on my blog Two Americans in China, I figured that would be a great basis for a column.

I have spent the last couple of months writing articles that I think would appeal to a broader American audience. I didn't want to commit to doing this and run out of ideas after a couple of weeks. Last week I finally sat down and compiled a list of all the newspapers in Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida (all states I have lived in). It came to about 250 newspapers and I sent them all queries.

I got one response. It was a good one though. My home-town newspaper, The Daily Star Journal, will start running my column. But that was the only response I got. I didn't even get a few "no thanks, please take me off your list" emails. I am wondering if there is something wrong with my email and it all went into their spam folders. So, I'm not really sure what to do about that. I mean, if they are getting the column and just aren't interested, that's OK. It can be hard to make the broad topic of China appealing to a rural mid-western audience. But what if they just aren't getting them? Anyone know how to check and see if your emails are getting marked as spam?