Atlas' job (merely physical) is easy compared with the mental strain and worry the managing editor of a big daily paper is subjected to these days.
You'll find him feeling the need of something—it's travel dope.
Don't be too arbitrary with him when he inquires in a tentative, anxious way, as he is about to affix his signature on the dotted line in your contract: "Of course no other paper in our town gets these letters?"
Assure him he will have exclusive use in his town. One paper in a town is enough, if you select the biggest and best one.
If (an almost impossible contingency) there should be any hesitancy on the part of the editor in grabbing your offer, if it seems to you that the price may be giving him pause, don't make the mistake of cutting the price. Tell him you may (don't promise for sure,—it won't be necessary,—a hint will be enough), tell him you may run a little poetry into your letters—that poetry comes easy for you to write—a sort of a fambly gift.
Don't stall, for fear you can't write poetry. You can do it if you think you can. It's dead easy.
Newspapers are just crazy for poetry—so crazy for it that lots of them will buy it when every line don't begin with a capital—where the poet ends a sentence right in the middle of a line, puts a period there, and just to beat the compositor out of a little fat starts a new verse after that period.
Why, they will buy poetry where the reader will get half through the piece before he discovers that it is poetry, and after he has caught the swing he will start at the top and begin over, and go clear to the end every time, and feel good over it.
This is where this kind of poetry differs from patent medicine advertisements.
In the latter, when the poet begins to advise the use of a new brand of pills, when the poet's ulterior motive begins to crop out, you stop reading, get mad, and want to swat the poet.