The following Guest Speaker Discussion originally took place on WRK4US in February of the year 2003. Because WRK4US has a confidentiality policy, all names and email addresses have been altered or removed, except for the moderator's and the Guest Speakers'.
The discussion can be read in two ways- by simply scrolling down and reading the whole thing, or by clicking on the topical links below, which take you to specific places within the discussion. The discussion can also be printed out in its entirety for your reading convenience.
Special thanks to Ashley Williams who volunteered her time to edit this discussion and prepare it for posting on the web. If you are interested in editing a future discussion, your help will be much appreciated; email Paula Foster, WRK4US List Manager, at pfchambers@sbcglobal.net
Journalism Training & the Ph.D.
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Courses on Freelancing & Non-Print WritingYour Storythere's another one
Pitching Your Story
The Writer's Life
The Nitty Gritty
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Pitching to Foreign Markets (Specifically, Canada)
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Libel Insurance
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Copyrights
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Contract Issues
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Introduction of Guest Speakers
Paula Foster
WRK4US list manager
Dear WRK4US subscribers,
By the time you get this, it will be Monday February 3, which means it's time to begin our Guest Speaker Discussion of "Careers in Freelance Journalism." Three Guest Speakers, all freelance journalists with PhDs or MAs in humanities, will post their self-introductions sometime today.
As soon as they begin posting their introductions, you may begin asking whatever questions you may have and the speakers will do their best to answer them. The discussion will conclude on Friday, February 7. After that, it will be edited for confidentiality and posted on the WRK4US website.
This discussion is the third in a series about "Careers in Writing." Many of you have expressed a keen interest in writing for a living. This series of three discussions has responded to your interest by presenting three ways you might do that: "Writing for Corporations" (last September), "Writing for Nonprofits" (last November), and now "Freelance Journalism."
Looking forward to a great discussion,
Paula Foster
WRK4US list manager
pfchambers@sbcglobal.net
Michael Erard
Freelance Journalist
erard@lucidwork.com
My name is Michael Erard, and I've been working as a freelance journalist since January of 2001. I finished my Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas at Austin in December of 2000 and went on the academic job market. In early January I declined an invitation for an on-campus interview and decided that I was, for the foreseeable future, going to leave academia. During the spring I taught the final semester of a two-year adjunct gig at a small liberal arts college, which was the last teaching I did.
I've been writing for newspapers since I was 14 years old, and writing short stories and essays my whole life. In graduate school I wrote for some local publications, including the Texas Observer, where I got back to more serious journalism, then did some short pieces for Salon and Lingua Franca. On the whole there were pretty personal reasons - call them demons, and you won't be far off the mark - behind the decision I made. That was a year and a half ago. I had some advice, encouragement, and good role models; some reliable information about how the whole thing worked; relationships with a few editors; some good clips; some lucky breaks. I also realized that I had a unique opportunity to strike out and devote myself to writing, which was this thing I'd done on the side my whole life. I'm not married and have no kids, and decided to defer my student loans for a year to see what happened. This isn't a condemnation of anyone who teaches, but I felt as if I'd be a hypocrite if I encouraged my writing students to take risks, play with ideas, really extend themselves into the world if I hadn't done that myself. In any case, I fully intend to go back to some sort of teaching in the future. In some ways I consider what I'm doing to be an extended postdoc that I'm inventing for myself as I go along. (An adhoc postdoc?)
Things fell into place for me as much by luck as by anything I actively did, which is to say that my path isn't really duplicable. It's as if I have combined some ingredients and inadvertently baked a cake, though I can't tell you precisely how to do the same, except that you'll need an amount of flour, of sugar, of milk. And there've been many many times when I didn't feel as if this cake was going to be an edible one. The point is, as a friend of mine said, you have to put yourself in the way of life; that's how things happen. Here are some moments on that path: a woman I was dating, a freelance writer, put me in contact with an editor of hers, and shared loads of info about her days at places like the New Yorker and the New York Observer; she, a remarkably generous person, also passed on an assignment for Nerve when she couldn't do it, which grew into an assignment for Lingua Franca, which became a Rolling Stone piece; an editor at the Atlantic contacted me out of the blue because she'd seen a Lingua Franca piece I wrote, and I eventually did a piece for her; an old editor at Texas Monthly began working as a literary agent, and now he's mine. (Or I'm his. Whatever.)
Much of what I do is to build connections with editors, other writers, sources, and agents. This is not showing off. The truth is that I've probably lost as many connections as I've made, if not more. But when people ask me what I do, making and building relationships has been an important part of the trajectory, especially if you consider that I live in Austin, Texas, which is not exactly one of the white hot media centers of the world. For instance, the piece I just finished for Wired has this genealogy: I pitched a story cold to Salon (in 1999), then wrote another, then got passed from that editor to one at Lingua Franca; after that mag closed in 2001 I was contacted by another LF freelancer asking if I knew about payment, and I asked him if he knew anyone at Wired; he didn't, but he passed me on to someone at Wired News, who recommended my current editor at Wired, who is great. I pitched her stories for five months until she took one at the end of 2002.
This kind of relationship-building isn't a finite activity I undertook in order to get into the biz, a la happy hour networking; it's an ongoing process, and it'll never end. When a story comes out, I send a photocopy or a web link to lots of people. When I travel for a story, I buy a doodad for my editor, which they always love. I check in with writer and editor friends on a regular basis. Doing all this requires a lot of attention and time. Since I've been a subscriber to this list - since the summer of 2002 - a lot of people have described how networking got them their jobs. I'd like to hear more people talk about the form that the relationship-building takes when it's integrated into their jobs.
I love developing stories and writing pitches. I take it as my research. I don't have a set of things I write about generally, but I do take what I do as a kind of research, a kind of battling with a certain learning curve, the steeper the better. I find a topic that I'm interested in, learn as much as I can in order to become fluent in the topic, then go looking for the narrative line through that body of knowledge: the conflict, the characters, the implications. In that way I've learned about disparate, fascinating bodies of knowledge: Canadian aboriginal law, gasoline distribution, abstinence culture, mental health law. I couldn't have done this work without Ph.D.-level conceptual skills (which isn't to say there aren't people without Ph.D.'s who also think up great things to write about.)
I have a unique way of conceiving of stories, and because I'm not afraid of research, I try to understand the issues more deeply before I write. I always over-report my stories; now I'm learning how to over-report my article proposals, which seems to be working. The people I interview regularly say they're impressed by my questions and care. I was writing a story for Legal Affairs about linguistic profiling, and asked a law professor, a national expert on the topic, what we gained and what we lost as a society by having this concept "racial profiling." He told me he'd never been asked that question before, and that from someone who's done hundreds of media interviews.
I have an MA in linguistics and wrote my dissertation about the rhetoric of linguistics, so one interesting development has been interviewing some of the big guns in linguistics. Each time it happens I remark to myself: If you weren't a journalist, you'd have no reason to approach these guys, none at all. Maybe there's a kind of graduate student or young professor with the guts to approach one of these guys cold, but I never did. It's only as a journalist - and there's something about being a writer that allows me to do this.
At the same time, the last two years have taken their financial and psychological toll on me. It's a crazy business, a true roller coaster of the heart and mind. One day I don't know anything at all; the next day I'm a temporary expert about therapies for stuttering. One day I feel like I'm out of the game. The next day I'm back in. On Tuesday I have nothing, nothing at all. On Thursday the editor says she wants to buy the book. On Monday she doesn't. I'm looking for a permanent staff job somewhere, so I can spend more time writing and helping others with their writing, rather than feeling like I'm spinning my wheels.
What helps most is the perspective of veterans. I bumped into a well-respected freelancer here in Austin and told him some of my hardship stories. He looked at me and said, "That's happened to me more than it hasn't." I thought, wow, and he's been at it, non-stop, for many times longer than I have. It put all that into perspective. I agree with Evan Connell, who is one of my writing heroes (his book, Son of the Morning Star, is the best non-fiction narrative ever written), that you should tell young people not to be writers, unless they absolutely have to write.
As time goes on I look back on my academic life less and less. I don't have sleeping dreams about teaching anymore. I like to go back to the classroom, though - I've done some guest lecturing for friends, which I've enjoyed immensely. I've had some hilarious interactions with members of my dissertation committee, such as the time when someone commended me on the placement of my piece in Rolling Stone, as if it were an academic article. When I get together with my professor friends, their interests and debates seem increasingly remote. And the complaints about how hard the academic life is seem more and more frivolous. Am I turning into one of those people who has nothing patient to say in response to hard ideas? I don't think so. It does make me wonder why someone would wish themselves into a box - but then, I remind myself, I'm in no less, no bigger of a box than they are. It just feels bigger.
I'm open to questions about any of this, and to questioning. If you want to see some of what I've written, you can Google me. (I don't know the chess player; the Vietnam vet is my father.) I'm happy to provide tips, or advice, or more perspective on what I'm doing.
Heather Hewett
Freelance Writer
heather.hewett@earthlink.net
Before we begin, I'd like to thank Paula Foster for organizing this session and inviting me to participate. WRK4US is a fabulous and much-needed resource. Thanks, Paula!
I left graduate school three and a half years after I started. When I left my program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I didn't know what I was going to do. I told people that I planned to write my dissertation, but deep down, I wasn't so sure.
By that point, I was deeply ambivalent about academia. On the one hand, I loved the heady intellectual atmosphere and the challenging work. I had done well in my English Ph.D. courses, had given plenty of papers at conferences, loved teaching, and had chosen a dissertation director who was highly respected in her field. On the other hand, while I was
researching subjects I cared about passionately, I couldn't help but feel that my academic papers didn't quite hit the mark. Literary theory enabled me to articulate quite a few things, but my writing never quite seemed to fully reflect my own voice. Writing, for me, had always been a creative endeavor; I had loved writing poetry and fiction since I was a
little girl. Not only was writing a form of self-expression and self-discovery, but it was also fun. But somehow, during graduate school, I had slowly stopped writing creative work, and I soon lost any sense of pleasure. I can see now that I had lost touch with my voice, but I didn't know this then. And so, without fully understanding why, I became depressed.
Two summers before I packed my bags, I had begun to take matters into my own hands. After deciding to live in Atlanta for a summer with my partner, I applied to every institution that sounded remotely interesting; quite serendipitously, I was offered an editorial internship at a small art magazine. The office was in a dusty, unpretentious building in the artsy part of town, and the people who worked there were smart and interesting. I immediately loved it. Even though I didn't know much about art (I'd taken a minor class on the history of photography, but that was about it), I began writing reviews of exhibits for them. I quickly discovered that writing about a piece of art was just as challenging as writing academic papers about books -- and even better, I got paid for it.
When I left Madison for good, I knew that I wanted to pursue writing -- any kind of writing, really, and given my summer at the art magazine, journalism seemed like a good place to begin. So in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, I moved to Jacksonville, FL, where my partner was working at the time. With the clips I'd written about art, I walked into the offices of an alternative newsweekly and got a job writing about visual art exhibits, theater and dance performances, and literary events. I loved attending events and interviewing people, and after three years spent mainly in libraries, it felt like a breath of fresh air. I couldn't believe how much fun it was.
And yet, somewhat to my surprise, I continued to write my dissertation. Over the next three and a half years, in places as different as Florida, Pennsylvania, Senegal, and New York, I doggedly worked at it every day. I liked being immersed in a long, difficult project; it was essentially teaching me how to write a book. And even though I had realized that I was first and foremost a writer, not a scholar, I couldn't imagine not finishing it. Not after all the work I'd poured into it.
I also continued to work as a freelance writer, slowly expanding my journalism repertoire. Getting my work published felt satisfying, and I developed a sense of professionalism which I hadn't had in my life as a Ph.D. student. But my doctoral training also helped me. It gave me an edge and an authority I wouldn't have had otherwise, particularly when the topic was remotely literary. In Jacksonville, I started to review books for the Florida Times-Union; and once I moved to Manhattan, I wrote for other newspapers -- The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Philadelphia Inquirer -- as well as more literary publications like The Women's Review of Books and magazines like Sports Illustrated for Women and Time Out New York, where I worked part-time for nearly two years. From there, I began to interview book authors, and this led to feature articles, many of them on literary or cultural topics. I wrote straight and not-so-straight journalism: reportage, service articles, humorous advice columns, profiles, travel articles, and personal essays. I attended countless talks, seminars, and conferences on journalism and writing. And I learned, as I went along, that I was drawn to those kinds of stories that allowed me to be creative -- ones where I could tell a story, introduce myself as a character, and speak in my own voice. I liked, in other words, nonfiction writing that most closely resembled fiction. (Journalists refer to this as "narrative" or "literary" journalism.)
I never have a typical day. Some days, I'm trying to finish a piece for a deadline; others, I'm researching new markets on the Internet or at the bookstore, interviewing someone for an article, sending out pitches to editors, reading newspapers and magazines for ideas, or reading books to review. I clip tons of articles, and I keep a journal in which I record story ideas. Many freelance journalists try to send out a certain number of pitches every week, and I've done this too. I'm constantly trying to expand the number of publications I've written for and maintain the relationships with editors I've already formed. In addition, since I've started to write creative nonfiction since finishing my dissertation, I also try to balance these projects with my journalism assignments. This has proven to be quite challenging, and I still haven't figured out how to balance everything without feeling like I'm going crazy.
As a journalist, I've been able to let my intellectual curiosity roam. I've written about female athletes in Senegal and the literary scene in New York City; I've interviewed museum curators, sports psychologists, a movie director, and Olympic medalist Kerri Strug. I have the freedom to work on projects I'm interested in, and a great deal of flexibility: I can work at home or in my floating "office," one of the countless cafés around the city. With each new assignment, I've learned something new, whether it's about the craft of writing or the tricks of the trade: how to conduct better interviews, get an editor's attention, or negotiate a better contract.
What do I miss about academia? The certainty of a steady job, an income, and benefits. Freelancing is tough, it's very competitive, and I'm not self-sufficient -- yet. I'll have to get a book contract, go back to teaching, write for better-paying markets, and/or find a staff job in order to achieve this goal. But I also know that freelancing depends on building up relationships with editors and working up the ladder -- aiming for bigger topics and better publications -- and this takes time. In the end, freelancing is about selling yourself, and this has not come naturally to me. It's also, by nature, a very boom-or-bust business. While you have some control over what you work on, you have very little control over everything else, including how some editors revise (rewrite) your writing and when they set your deadlines.
I could go on for hours, but I'll stop here. I'd love to answer any questions you might have. Fire away!
Brian Lavendel
Freelance Environmental Journalist
lavendel@nasw.org
Brian Lavendel here. I'm a freelance environmental journalist and am pleased to be a part of this discussion.
I completed my PhD in English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania while teaching as an adjunct faculty member at a small liberal arts college. I wasn't offered a tenure-track position, and, wearying of the low pay and lack of job security, tried my hand at editing. Having been an avid reader and lover of language as a young person, I had good language skills that paid off in this new line of work.
After a few years of editing words on less-than-scintillating topics (one memorable example: a book on driver education!), I gradually began writing short articles for local newspapers and magazines. Eventually, I developed some clips and a little know-how, which combined with some chutzpah, made me think I could sell (or "pitch") stories to more prestigious (and better paying) publications. Eventually, I found myself in the right place at the right time--with the right story idea, and sold an article at a seemingly exorbitant $1 per word in my new niche as an "environmental journalist."
That was about six years ago. Since then, I have transitioned to full-time freelance environmental journalism--a job I love and hate. I'm a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and the National Writers Union.
One of the things I like about this work (and my life) is that there is no "typical day." But you can bet I spend a good chunk of time sending and responding to email to editors and sources, doing on-line research, and interviewing sources for stories.
Then comes the hard part--writing feature-length stories. Yes, I still have a vibrant love-hate relationship with writing. It's the hardest, most rewarding job I know.
One aspect I like is getting the chance to tell hopeful stories about people doing good work to preserve our environment. The part I don't enjoy is hearing about the bad news along the way. But in the end I wouldn't want it any other way. I care deeply about the natural environment and feel darn fortunate to get to put that caring into action in my work as an
environmental journalist.
Would I go back to the academy? I've considered taking a position as a guest lecturer at a college or university, but only on a very part-time basis. I always enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and give and take of the college classroom, but at the same time, I wouldn't want to give up writing--a job I know makes a significant difference to the people (and planet) around me.
What questions do you have about my background, my work, my profession? I look forward to getting to know you, too.
Journalism Training and the Ph.D.
Lack of Training, Resistance to the Ph.D., and Breaking In
W.K. asks:
I would like to know if you encountered any resistance to your qualifications along the way, before you had developed a portfolio of clips. Did the employers demand journalism training, or consider you too "academic" for their mainstream readers?
Michael Erard responds:
W.K. asked about resistance, which in my case has been interesting. On one hand, people don't care much if you have a Ph.D., and it's something I've learned to keep under wraps, not necessarily because it's a detriment, but because it's irrelevant. I also don't tell them how tall I am, or that I can make a mean sugar cookie, just like I don't go down to the corner store and try to spend the leftover pesos from my trip to Mexico. Those three letters don't appear on my business card or my email signature; the only time it becomes relevant is if I'm telling someone I'm interviewing that they can ramp up their explanations, because I can handle the complexity. It might also come up if I pitch a story about my teaching life. If by "employers" you mean editors, then in my experience they really only want someone who can get the story and write the piece, as far as freelance assignments go. In general, the currency of this limited economy is clips and connections. (Getting hired full-time someplace is, of course, a different story.)
On the other hand, it is a little detrimental to be considered "smart," which may or may not be linked to being "academic." Last week I sent a pitch to someone which didn't have any difficult idea or theoretical terminology to it at all -- it was a story about country western dancing -- and the response was that it was going to be a hard sell, because "it's not about a celebrity and it's very smart." Not everyone has that reaction, however, so it depends on whom you're dealing with. This person happens to know that I have a Ph.D., so perhaps that conditioned the response. In any case, that kind of reaction doesn't bum me out -- I'm writing for commercial markets, I want to write commercially, so that reaction is just another obstacle.
In general, I shouldn't think it's a problem. If you're freelancing, you're not part of an organization by definition, and you don't send a resume, so you don't have to disclose a doctorate. It's when you want to join an organization that you brave the rhetorical shoals of self-presentation, as so many great discussions on this list have mentioned.
I wonder what Heather and Brian's experiences have been.
M.D. asks:
My question is whether it's worth it to write for lower rung local newspapers to get clips. For instance, the local small town-newspaper (a weekly) needs someone to write art exhibit reviews. I have a background in art history and would ultimately like to do some freelance arts writing. However, the pay is terrible and the quality of the publication is negligible. Would writing locally be a potential stepping stone to getting into arts writing? Perhaps Heather could address the issue of where best to get started in the arts. Is competition fierce? Do newspaper clips impress arts magazines? etc. etc.
Heather Hewett responds to W.K. & M.D.'s questions:
I'm going to try to cover M.D.'s and W.K.'s question with this posting, since I think they're related.
In answer to M.D.'s question about whether it's worthwhile to write for lower-rung local newspapers, my feeling is absolutely yes. This is exactly how I started out, really -- I first wrote for a small art magazine, then an alternative newsweekly, and then slowly moved on to bigger newspapers and magazines. And no, the smaller publications don't pay a lot, but in the beginning it's all about getting clips; some people even write for free for their local community rag to get that first published piece. Those first clips I generated enabled me to pitch ideas at larger, better-paying places, who never would have given me the time of day without first seeing a few publications to my name. Editors you haven't written for before always want to see what you've written before, and it's a normal trajectory for journalists -- with or without a Ph.D. -- to move up the ladder from smaller to larger places. Plus, I think you learn so much -- at least I did -- when I was starting out, about the professional skills you need as an arts writer or a journalist. I made mistakes, too -- and better to make those mistakes at a smaller place, where it's not such a big deal. Bigger, well-known publications pay more for experienced writers for a reason: they're experienced.
I will add, though, that I would hesitate before writing for a publication whose respectability I thought was in some way questionable. After all, as a writer, all you really have is your name. Having said that, I think there are lots and lots of good but small publications, magazines and newspapers, all over this country. And another option you can think about, which also tends not to pay well but can be a great place to start, is the web.
As far as switching back and forth between magazines and newspapers, in my experience it has been far easier to break into newspapers, at least for reviewing books, though a specialty arts magazine would really value your art history background. But I've clearly switched back and forth a bit, too. In the end, I think simply writing articles about a subject you're interested in for any kind of publication will help you break into the next level.
I think some of the above speaks to W.K.'s question about professional qualifications. As far as I can tell, what editors care about are your clips. I've never encountered resistance to my having a Ph.D., and plenty of journalists have little to no formal journalism training. It really is something you can pick up through doing it. But I will confess that I use the credential wisely. A Ph.D. is going to matter more if I'm writing on a literary or intellectual subject, where it represents experience that I can draw from. If it's not relevant, I just don't mention it -- instead, I tell them what is relevant to my writing a particular piece. (When I pitched an idea to Sports Illustrated for Women, I told the editor about my own background as an athlete -- far more relevant to the topic at hand than my academic training.) When you're selling an idea, you want to convince the editor why *you* should write it -- and everyone has multiple interests and expertises; a Ph.D. is only one of them. The only concern I've ever heard from journalists is that Ph.D.s are prone to churning out bad "academic" prose, and I can instantly refute that idea with my clips. They prove that I'm a good, clear writer.
Hope this helps!
Brian Lavendel writes:
OK, so I'm the opportunist here. I freely admit to USING my PhD. It IS on my business card and it appears in my tag in my column in the Wisconsin State Journal. Hey, I earned it!
No, seriously, I feel that my doctorate earns me credibility among my readers and many of my editors. It DOESN'T mean I'm an expert at everything I write about. Heck, I wouldn't be a writer if I were. What it does mean is that I know how to earn a credential. In my case, that meant handling complex ideas, thinking creatively and originally, being a kick-ass researcher, and -- this is good -- knowing how to write.
I can't think of one instance where it has been a hindrance. And by the way, let me add an aside here. I completed my PhD knowing that I was not going to return to academia full time. But I had put in most of the work and decided I wanted the credential, even if it weren't going to be 'useful' I'm really glad I finished it.
Brian also adds:
On the subject of journalism training. For the past few years, a handful of local freelances have gotten together at a local coffee shop for scones and chit-chat. (It's important to have a group of colleagues you can complain and commiserate with!) We were reminded last week with a laugh that not ONE of us had any real journalism training. And I'm talking folks who write for SCIENCE, DISCOVER, AUDUBON. Just goes to show.
Courses on Freelancing & Non-Print Writing
R.S. asks about courses on freelancing:
Hi, I'm a former academic (Ph.D. in English from Northwestern, '98), who has since established a reasonably successful career as a professional editor. I currently work as the managing editor for the midwest office of AOL's online city guide, Digital City. I've just started thinking about focusing on freelancing (I have a few articles I've published), and I'm thinking that a course or two on freelancing could be helpful. I've identified some at www.writersdigest.com. Have any of our panelists taken these kinds of courses? Are they helpful?
W.K. asks about non-print freelancing:
Does anyone have experience with pitching in the non-print forms? I could include television and radio pieces, but I was thinking more of the on-line journals. Is it handled differently?
J.F. gives some advice on freelancing courses:
Uh, not a panelist, but take a class from someone with firepower through an accredited institution, say Northwestern's journalism department, or U Chicago continuing ed, Columbia or UCLA or UCLA Extension, someone who either brings in acquisitions editors or is one and has freelanced all sorts of things -- someone who wants to matchmake high level students.
Heather Hewett writes:
As far as classes: I think I mentioned that I've attended panels and conferences, which can teach you a lot, and I'm also in a weekly writing group, which is probably one of the best things I've done for my writing career so far. I haven't taken any classes, and I don't know about the ones offered through Writer's Digest; but I would concur with whoever said that it all depends on the teacher. You would get your money's worth, plus some valuable connections, from a professional who's really good and generous; but there are plenty of courses that won't teach you anything you can't learn by doing or by reading a book. Or reading publications like Writers Digest. (I've never subscribed to WD, but they do have lots of practical advice.)
Michael Erard adds:
About classes: I have some friends in NYC who have taken MediaBistro's Journalism Bootcamp, and they've spoken highly of it. They learned a lot, met people, and made contacts. Someone had asked about pitching to non-print sources; I have sitting here on my desk a pretty thorough MediaBistro handout about pitching to radio.
How to Pitch
Y.T. asks how to pitch:
When you're "pitching" a story, should the story be written or can it be just an idea? How much of an idea is needed to sell a story?
Brian Lavendel anwers:
I love this question because I remember when I wasn't sure which to do either.
My current advice to writers is to do just enough research so you can make an intelligent pitch. But don't write the story. After all, an editor wants to feel at least somewhat useful--include your editor, get their input, ask them smart questions as things come up during the execution of the piece. They love that.
Imagine you were buying a house and you had the option of buying one that's just been built or one that was ABOUT to be built--to your specifications. And put yourself in the shoes of the builder too--why spend all your time building something when you don't know what your client wants.
Now even though you pitch the idea--not the finished story--there still needs to be a story there. You're selling the story/angle/hook--whatever, but you're not selling a finished product. You're selling your commitment to produce a finished product that satisfies your editor. This is another instance of the importance of relationships--once you've delivered for an editor, you've got a base to work from. Until then, your connections, clips, and pitches are all you've got.
Michael Erard responds with a sample pitch letter:
Answering these questions is a really good guilt-free way to procrastinate...
Y.T. asked how much of an idea is needed to sell a story. I think you should be able to tell an editor what the payoff for their readers is or will be. If you know what the readers will understand differently after reading your piece and can articulate why it's relevant to them, then I'd say to go ahead and pitch.
Of course, it never hurts to write something first. In the biz that's called writing something "on spec," which means you don't have an assignment but have an informal arrangement with an editor to look at your piece. If you're pitching a story that hasn't been written, you can always offer to write it on spec, which is a good faith way of demonstrating your seriousness about the idea and your writing.
I'm going to offer here, for the first time in public, a pitch that I wrote to Lingua Franca. It was the second time I'd pitched this editor, and he took the story. If you could see the final story (which ran in the November 2000 issue) you'd see that I lifted whole chunks of the pitch for the story itself. You'd also see that some of the ideas in the pitch (the stuff about advertising) got left behind.
Note: I'm not using this as a template for a pitch letter, I'm using it to answer Y.T.'s question about the amount of the idea that needs to be present in the pitch. (As pitches go, this one is long. A friend of mine says never to write more than 350 words if you've never written for the editor before.)
Hi C--,
When I first read a post last week to the LINGUIST list about "the butterfly problem," I thought: this is an LF Fieldnote. An anthropologist at Brown University, William O. Beeman, posted a message about the odd phenomenon in which the word for "butterfly" is different in all of the world's languages, even among languages which are historically and geographically related. (By contrast, many Indoeuropean languages' words for "cat" and other common words resemble each other very closely.) He called this "the butterfly problem."
Beeman provided a list of words for "butterfly" in about 80 languages, each word different - or so it seemed. As he pointed out, even though the words weren't obviously similar, many of them shared certain phonological and morphological features, like repetition (as in Malay "ramarama" and Senegalese "lupe lupe") and reduplication (as in Paiwan "kaidungudungul" and Welsh "pili pala"). Many of the words also contained similar consonants. "In each case," Beeman wrote, "with the many cases of reiterated b's, p's, l's, and f's (in widely separated language families), one can almost hear the gentle rustle of butterfly wings and see their repetitive motion."
Interesting, I thought: Beeman is appealing to "sound symbolism," the idea that certain sounds and combinations of sounds have universal aesthetic, semantic, and kinesthetic properties. There are numerous counterarguments to this explanation, and to sound symbolism in general, that I won't get into. But as it turns out, there's also a "frog problem" and, more playfully, a "Godzilla problem": Terence Hays has suggested that /r/ and /g/ sounds are universal in 200 names for frogs and toads in New Guinea, and John Beatty (perhaps facetiously?) asks whether the syllable /ra/ is symbolic for large size and monstrousness when used in names of Japanese TV and movie monsters.
In the twentieth century, sound symbolism has been unfashionable, even derided. Even before Ferdinand de Saussure defined the linguistic sign as conventional and arbitrary, a long tradition had made the same argument in order to break the naturalness of language. "There is no internal connexion, for example, between the idea 'sister' and the French sequences of sounds s-o-r which acts as its signal," Saussure wrote in the Course in General Linguistics. As for onomatopoeia, Saussure writes, the mimetic quality of animal calls and other sounds does not detract from the arbitrariness of these signs or make them more natural. After all, the cuckoo, unlike most birds, happens to be named after its call; it doesn't have to have the name it does.
But Beeman's post (and other sources he draws from, including an unpublished paper by linguist and former Chomsky protégé Haj Ross, as well as a 1994 Cambridge UP book by linguists Leanne Hinton, Suzanne Romaine, and John Ohala) points to a current zest among academics for sound symbolism, and the enthusiasm extends past animal names towards other aspects of the linguistic system. (Interestingly, Beeman sang with a German opera company for 18 months to explore the physical and psychological effects of singing on the singer, from which his butterfly argument seems to follow.)
The question I'd like to investigate in my piece: To what do we owe this resurgence? Did Saussure overstate the case? Are we just getting out of an arbitrarianist funk?
Or -- and here's another interesting possibility -- how responsible is the linguistics of brand naming and logo invention for making academics rethink the explanatory value of sound symbolism?
I hope this is a piece you're interested in. If I can send you clips to make you more familiar with my writing, please let know.
Best,
Michael
M.D. has further questions about pitching story ideas:
As per Brian's remarks, can all of you provide more information on queries and calls to an editor. First, questions about queries: 1.) Will an editor read queries from an unknown writer? 2.) Should they be in letter-form (formal?) and include a resume if one has done previous writing?, 3.) When should one follow up? etc., etc. About phone calls to an editor: 1.) Will an editor take calls from an unknown? 2.) Are there any rules or guidelines on what to say or not to say? How persistent to be, etc. I know this last question is vague, however, how does one learn to "play the game"? Through intuition and trial and error? And is it played the same way for a top-notch magazine vs. a small press publication? Finally, does one approach freelance newspaper writing the same way? For say, the New York Times? Or would the Times be a reach for someone with no connections and/or experience even if the story idea is riveting. These are just some of my many questions.
Great discussion! Thanks so much for all the information and insight!
Heather Hewett responds to both Y.T. and M.D.'s questions:
Ah, how to pitch. I'm sure we'll all have different theories and ways of working. Here are mine.
Ideally, you should have an idea of how the editor you need to contact likes to receive pitches: email? fax? phone? mail? In my experience, and especially, I think, over the past few years, email has supplanted mail as the mode of communication, but it really varies by editor.
Which leads to the next question... if you don't know the editor, how in the world do you find this out?
Again, in a perfect world, you'd know someone who knows this editor, and you'd use this name in the email or however you're contacting him/her. Now, I have sent out cold pitches, and sometimes the editor has gotten back to me, and sometimes not. But it always helps to have a name. Once you get going, you'll find this gets a little easier. Once you've written for editor A, you can ask for suggestions of other places to send your work, and get some names there, and so on. This is also what conferences are good for. And befriending other writers. When I was starting out, I even got a couple of names from professors who had written for some mainstream publications, or who just knew an editor. Never underestimate the fabled seven degrees of separation.
As far as the pitch itself, I think both Brian and Michael have covered much of what you want to do, but you want to strike the right tone for the publication you're writing for. That is, your tone and style will be completely different if you're pitching to Rolling Stone (less formal, more hip) than if you're pitching to The New York Review of Books or Parenting magazine... you basically want to show that you can write in their style, and the pitch is their first exposure to your writing. So more than anything, you want it to be good. Email pitches should be just as carefully written and rewritten as a letter pitch.
Some people love to pitch on the phone. I don't. I've heard too many editors shrink in horror at the very notion of a writer calling, and I get pretty nervous. I have done it, though, on occasion. Some newspapers are more open to it than magazines.
No to the resume; just mention your experience in a brief paragraph at the end, focusing on what's relevant to the topic at hand (and if you have relevant personal experience, that's great, you should mention it: I'm a teacher, a Middle East expert, a frazzled parent, a soccer fan, etc.).
As far as the question of following up, you want to strike the right balance. You want to be persistent (enough to get a reply) but you absolutely don't want to hound an editor; they won't want to work with you. I give it a couple of weeks, get in touch via email or phone, if I don't hear again, let them know I'm moving on. And then I try to pitch it elsewhere.
As far as the level of publication, my philosophy is to shoot high, but be ready with a backup list. If you want to see your piece in print, you may not get it in the Times for a while. But then again, you may. It's impossible to know without going for it. But you should try to find out things like which sections take freelance work and which don't. You can learn a lot of this from reading and noticing the bylines.
How did I learn all this? By doing it, making mistakes, having successes, and asking questions. There are also some decent books out there on how to write pitches. Or a good journalism class should cover this.
Michael Erard answers M.D.'s questions:
These are good questions that I hope Heather and Brian will pitch in on too, because their approach might differ. Let me answer your questions in order.
1.) Will an editor read queries from an unknown writer?
Sure.
2.) Should they be in letter-form (formal?) and include a resume if one has done previous writing?
I don't think a resume is necessary; a short bio paragraph is all I've ever used and seen other people
use.
3.) When should one follow up? etc., etc. About phone calls to an editor:
1.) Will an editor take calls from an unknown?
2.) Are there any rules or guidelines on what to say or not to say? How persistent to
be, etc.
I think everybody develops different intuitions about this, as Heather just noted. I think it's a good thing not to expect detailed feedback on a pitch, so don't ask for it, unless you have a really good relationship. I always give an editor two weeks, then I shoot an email politely asking what the status of my pitch is, then if another week goes by, I call. It helps if you send some piece of information in the email. "Since I pitched that story to you, I've gotten an assignment from Magazine X" or "Have you seen the article in Magazine X that's related to my story?" Editors are kind of like brains in vats -- not to be unkind to editors -- in the sense that they're not mobile in the world like writers are, so it's easy to catch their eye with meaningful information that their dendritic tentacles have missed. Which is difficult, because they have lots of dendritic tentacles.
I know this last question is vague, however, how does one learn to "play the game"? Through intuition and trial and error?
It's tough, really, really tough, to figure out the game on your own, so any resources you can use to become more informed on your own, the better you are. Readerville.com has forums where writers post, though I don't know why they're posting so much and not writing. I prefer www.poynter.org/medianews, which is a well-respected media blog; if you spend six months visiting that every morning, you'll have a clear sense of what's changing in the industry, as well as what editors like and don't. James Stewart's book Follow the Story is a comprehensive intro to pitching and writing features. As for the biz side, a book called This Business Called Writing is very useful.
In fact, that book was passed to me by my friend, Pableaux Johnson, inveterate freelancer entrepreneur and devil in my ear. I learned a lot, and was encouraged a lot, by him. I also learned a lot through some personal relationships with writers and journalists, and I'm fortunate to live in a city where the publications I sometimes write for will have happy hours.
Mentorship! I've not done this, but it might come in handy to contact your career services office or alumni office to find out if there's anyone in the type of media you want to get into.
For say, the New York Times? Or would the Times be a reach for someone with no connections and/or experience even if the story idea is riveting.
I'm sending a packet of materials today to an editor at the Times Magazine. She asked to see some of my writing, and to explain what sort of experience I'd had; if she likes my writing, she'll be in touch, she said. I have an agent who has contacts at the NYT, but I've found it more satisfying, not to mention efficient, to try to make my own. As they say in the hills around here, there's more than one way to get published in the Times.
Good Topics for Breaking into Freelancing
E.V. wonders about what topics are good for breaking in to freelancing:
Hello panelists. Thanks so much for your time to answer questions.
I'm wondering if in the freelance writing world there are known subject areas or topics that are easier to use as a way to break in to the field. (Like in academia, everyone knows that there are many more people with Ph.Ds in 20th Century US History than there are jobs, whereas if you specialize in something more unusual, like Latin America or Medieval, finding an academic job is much less challenging).
Beyond the obvious, "write about what you know" are there some broader fields or subject areas where it is easier to get published as a relative newcomer (or perhaps that also pay better), and some where it's all but impossible to break in?
For example, having travelled to some unusual places, I've investigated doing freelance travel writing and have found that everyone fancies themselves a travel writer, so there is lots of competition. Moreover, from talking to established travel writers I have learned that most travel editors have their usual writers and rarely consider unsolicited manuscripts or proposals. Therefore, travel writing seems a challenging place to try to establish one's freelance-writing credentials.
Business and career writing seems like it would be a little easier (particularly covering a local business scene) -- at least I would assume this from the poor quality of writing and reporting I often see, which suggests the competition to get published is lighter.
So, are there some subject areas where people might not normally look? Are there subjects or topics that generally pay better? Any other tips along these lines?
Michael Erard writes in response:
Good question, E.V., about topics, and I'll admit that I don't usually think in those terms. Rather than "what I know about" I think of "what I can learn about" as well as "what I like to read."
What might be more useful is to think in terms of A: sections of the publication and B: angles on the topic. After all, you were pitching to the editor of the travel section, not to the editor of the subject of travel (I'm thinking in terms of a newspaper here), so you could pitch a story to, say, the education editor to write about your experiences studying Spanish for a month in Guatemala. It would be easier to get a piece in a special supplement (the NYT has them on Education and Travel from time to time), then work your way into a regular section; it's my sense that it would be easier to get a piece in on a Sunday, when there's more pages to fill, which is important because some papers have weekend staff distinct from the weekday staff.
If you're pitching to a magazine, the front of the book is easier to get stuff into. That's where you'll find the Q&A's, the odd bits of stories or anecdotes, and sometimes product reviews. This is where knowing the publication very very well pays off, so that you can say in your pitch, "When I saw this topic X, I thought immediately of Column Y, because I admire how it approaches topics with A and B."
I don't think you should give up on travel writing, if that's what you want to do! You could write for the same publication a couple times, then ask that editor, after you've wowed him or her, to give your name to the travel editor, because you have some ideas there.
Another way to pitch is to offer an angle that hasn't been done on a particular topic, or hasn't been done in a while. Probably the easiest to pitch is the "I was there" angle; of course the section of the publication you're pitching to matters a lot. The hardest to pitch is the "insider knowledge," because that takes a lot of reportorial resources and access. A middling angle is "there's this strange person who...," which is related to the "there's this strange situation that..."
However, I do think in terms of topics when it comes to stories that I don't want to do; in general, I don't want to write about celebrities, and I don't want to write about how to improve one's sex life, though I suppose that if I were offered such a gig and given
license to write whatever I wanted, I might consider it. For instance, Selma Hayek apparently has never sought to alter her accent, which I find very fascinating; I'd love to write about that.
Other Kinds of Freelance Writing
R.S. asks:
Hi -- so far, we've mainly referred to freelance writing gigs that consist of querying stories for publications. I'm curious to know if any of the panelists have freelanced under other circumstances -- i.e. long-term, ongoing assignments.
For example, my company hires freelancers to submit 100-150 word descriptions of events and venues for our city guide. Our freelancers tend to be assigned long term, and usually submit 10 descriptions per week. Similarly, I recently heard about a copyediting gig where freelancers are called upon to fine tune class courses for an online education site.
Have you seen/done any of these kinds of jobs? Where would find out about them?
J.F. also asks, and responds to R.S.:
How do they find freelancers? Do they advertise periodically (on site or off), do they just respond to blind queries? How can I apply for Los Angeles?
Are there some tried and true ways to move away from this sort of freelancing, and book reviewing, and the occasional unpaid essay, to something actually lucrative? What about syndication (I had a non-syndicated column which was recently cancelled; my friends who were syndicated at various places actually had jobs at the wire services first; is there another way in?).
Rewriting courses for some of the online education sites is union-busting. If they are phrasing it as copywriters to fine tune rather than courseware development, are they paying market rates? Which range: the amount they would pay you to develop a course as an online adjunct (from nothing, but you get to teach the course ad infinitum for a regular teaching rate to an extra $3-5,000 on top of the regular rate for delivering the course), as a courseware developer ($45-150/hr., with a minimum of four person days allocated), as a writer (either a per-use fee or ? but never less than $20/hr.), or as an editor making the same amounts of money that editor would make in another publishing field (say, freelance editing, copyediting, proofing, $35-65/hr.).
In my experience, there is no rhyme or reason to the hiring, either. It used to be much easier to get a courseware development job at a Fortune 500 company than to write a course on spec for onlinelearning.net.
There are so many adjuncts looking for this sort of course or courseware development that private companies (as opposed to institutions) sometimes don't even pay at all! The Adjunct Advocate has loads of ads for this sort of work; if you want the real stuff, I use DICE, computerjobs, and the web site job lists for the online institutions, low res programs, colleges, universities, etc. Also, sometimes though these are not technical jobs, they are advertised as though they want developers, so Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus Notes, Embanet / First Class, etc.; the various delivery mechanisms are important to know about as you read the ads.
F.C. writes:
Dear Panelists, I probably should not be on this list because my experience and situation is so different. I hold a tenure track position and also free lance.
After I joined the faculty at a liberal arts college, realized that publishing targets for tenure were not very demanding. Fortunately I am a good teacher and so do not have to work at getting good teaching reviews. this gave me the opportunity to do what I always wanted, to break into the Op-Ed market.
I started writing and the rejects began to pile up, too academic, to esoteric, already covered were the standard responses. Being a Muslim writing on American foreign policy I thought that perhaps my "posture" rather than my writing was the problem. So I decided to hell with the media and set up my own websites. I have two. The first website is a sort of monthly column on Islamic Affairs which is my life a Muslim intellectual Washington Post and Newsday have done stories on this website now in it fourth year. I average over 15,000 visitors a month and in 2001 I received over half a million visitors from over 70 countries. This website costs me about $500 a year and I do manage to make about $1500 a month from occasional republications of my articles on the web and print media. But this website has given me a global presence and I have received speaking invitations frequently.
But after getting rejects from op-Ed editors, I decided to have my own op-ed website to use these articles which after rejects were wasted. I average about 10,000 visitors a month and last year I made enough to pay my son's Montessori tuition. I have managed to break into mainstream media and more than 2/3 of my articles do get published papers worldwide but I get paid for only a few. I also publish on the web.
My objective is not to become "a writer" but to disseminate my ideas and also make some extra money. My only problem is with my regular research which also helps my op-ed writing I have no time to market my own articles. I have an email list of some 20 editors and I email it to them and then wait a week and then post it on my website.
Thank You for your time.
Writing Time, Life, and the Future
I.W. asks about jumping into the writing life:
As a current graduate student at the University of Washington, I am terrified of how my daylight hours will be spent after I step onto that podium and accept a PhD for the first and only time.
While I have always considered a career in writing and ascribe to, as Michael referenced, Evan Connell's theory that one should not become a writer unless they absolutely have to write, I haven't had time to write (well, really write) since I began my advanced degree and accepted a TAship. Rather than trying to figure out if I want (can?) write novels, work as a journalist, or create screenplays for a living, I am often forced to negotiate my free time between writing an academic paper on "momism" in the Manchurian Candidate and/or creating new classroom activities for my students. While I love to write...I sometimes feel as if I have forgotten how to do so.
So my question is threefold:
1) Just out of mere curiosity, were you able to find time to write creatively in college, and if so, did your academic scholarship suffer?
2) Having jumped from an academic job to a non-academic setting, I can understand how the need to network is imperative...so where did you begin and how did you sell yourself?
3) It seems that there is a lot of instability working as a freelance journalist...if I were in your position, I think I would spend an inordinate amount time working to secure new jobs...almost at the expense of living a life. For clarification, I define "living a life" to not only include a career that I am impassioned about, but the ability to spend time with one's family and friends. So, keeping the nature of your current career in mind, how much of your time is wrapped solely in work?
That is all the questions I have for the moment, but I am sure there will be more :-) Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions on this listserv and I look forward to reading each of your thoughts over this coming week.
And D.M. wonders about risk-taking and writing:
What a great panel! What I hear is the need to be willing to "stretch", take a chance/risk and put yourself out there with the desire for writing and the challenge of breaking new (for the neophyte journalist) ground. Do you have any suggestions for moving slowly from the "need to be anchored" to something concrete, secure, and reliable job format to a more risk-amenable posture? What safety nets did you put in place? Or not? Did you branch out in stages - or go cold turkey into the full time freelance journalism field?
Michael Erard responds to I.W.:
This is a response to I.W.'s questions, which are really good ones. I'll always take up an invitation to talk about my writing demons. :)
I didn't write much in the first two years of grad school, but it picked up when I moved to a small town in West Texas and devoted myself to writing for a summer. I found writing creatively and/or for publication very helpful when I was writing the dissertation, because typically I needed to see a short project finished. So when I turned in a draft of a chapter, I'd have two or three weeks to work on something else. I don't think the scholarship suffered, and no one ever told me to watch out; at the same time, I knew I wasn't fully committed to the academic track, so as my graduation approached I scaled back on academic writing.
When I first began freelancing, it was the middle of grad school, so I sold myself as someone who was available to write and review books, someone who had some expertise in a particular area (in my case, politics and grad student labor issues at the University of Texas at Austin), and someone who'd work for cheap. This goes back to M.D.'s question. I also began by asking people to lunch. Some editors are more willing to do this than others, but it's always refreshing to sit down and talk face to face about whatever. In my case, one of the first editors I ever did this with was himself an English Ph.D. and a former professor, so we talked a lot about that. A lot of how the networking happens depends on where you live. Austin is a fairly small city, so if you're social you meet people as a matter of course.
A lot of my life is wrapped up in work right now, but I don't feel that it's detrimental. Part of it is that writing and life are indistinguishable in some ways. I find that since I'm writing about things that are supposed to appeal to a wider audience, I talk with my family and friends a lot about what I'm working on, and really benefit from their questions. At the same time, topics come up in the course of socializing, recreating, etc., so it's good to stay tapped into the Zeitgeist. A lot of freelancing involves waiting around, which are usually the moments when I decide it would be good to have coffee with a friend or go for a bike ride. A cell phone and Google are your best friends at this job.
I hope this answers your questions. Feel free to ask follow-up questions if I've been too vague.
Heather Hewett adds her thoughts on writing and risk-taking:
I.W. posted her question a while ago, but as I was out all afternoon, I wanted to go back to it and take it in a slightly different direction...
I think I've mentioned how difficult it was for me to write creatively while I was in grad school; it wasn't until I cut out teaching that I really had time to do other kinds of writing, freelance or creative. So I really made the decision to try it out on faith. I had very little to
show for my deep-down conviction that I could write, besides some fairly awful poems, a handful of reviews of art exhibits, and a fair amount of chutzpah. What's interesting is that it really took me a few years of writing nonacademic prose -- journalism and personal essays -- to shake off some bad writing habits I'd developed in graduate school: overusing
the passive voice, making up words that aren't in the dictionary, taking a distant stance to my material, and so on. Stuff you pick up from reading lots of literary theory.
Anyway, here's a story: a few months ago, I went back to a personal essay I began during graduate school, right after I'd gotten back from a stint teaching in Senegal, almost four years ago. Anyway, at the time what I was writing was so new to me, so exciting... but when I read it this time around, I realized that it *stunk*. Really, really stunk! And I was suddenly grateful for two things: one, that the people in my writing group didn't tell me how bad it was, but gave me helpful advice on how to make it better; and two, that I myself didn't know how bad it was, because I probably would have given up right then and there. The point, of course, is that I didn't give up; I built on what I'd learned doing my Ph.D. (those complex thinking and research skills), jettisoned what wasn't helpful for me as a nonfiction writer, and learned (or re-learned, perhaps) how to tell a story. All this takes time and practice, like anything else. But you can't focus on what you don't know or haven't done, but rather on what you'd like to try or where you'd like to go. You have to take risks.
U.B. asks about the future:
It sounds like enormously hard and insecure work. What is it that you love about it? Can you see yourselves doing this in five years? Ten years? If not, how might writing be a foundation for further growth?
Thanks for such an interesting discussion.
Heather Hewett responds:
As far as present pleasures and future plans... I recently saw a writer quoted saying that writing, for her, was really an addiction, kind of like cocaine. I've never been addicted to coke, but it's true that I write mostly because I'm compelled. Perhaps you could call them inner demons. Anyway, I've never been more happy or more frustrated than the time right
now, when I'm devoting myself to writing. But it also doesn't feel like the kind of thing I could do full-time for the rest of my life. Down the road, I can see myself teaching, or getting a staff job -- and I think I'm building towards those things. I feel like I will have opportunities that I can't know about now, or really even plan for, but as long as I'm building my skills, creating a body of work, and satisfying my writerly curiosity about the world, that's already taking me somewhere.
Michael Erard also responds:
Just like Heather, I don't see myself doing this for the rest of my life, where "this" is making most of a living off of freelancing. I do want to look for ways to scale up the business, so that I'm not just making a living by writing, but also speaking, consulting, and/or writing books. I've also looked for a staff job, but so far the refrain has been o so familiar: yes, you have lots of writing and reporting experience, but you've never been an editor. I had a close brush with a book deal last summer, which taught me a lot, and afterwards a friend of mine offered good counsel about how to turn the writing of the book itself into a business and escape the labyrinth of trying to get published in the traditional ways.
For me this process has been slow, just as my transition from teaching and full-time graduate studenting to freelancing was. The timeline of my transition went something like this: I graduated in December 2000; in the spring semester of 2001 I finished teaching two classes and lined up assignments; by the time June rolled around, I'd worked on five stories and had other assignments lined up. Looking back, I wish I'd been able to take more time, but I was in a rush; consequently, I wrote too much, I think, and it wasn't my best work; I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform and produce, when I should have been clearing my head after 8 years of grad school and a grueling fall preparing to defend and for the job market. While it's good to put yourself in a situation where you make yourself steadily hungrier, or in increasingly higher-stake situations, it's also good to make sure you're mentally prepared for all that.
I'd also recommend having a Plan B. That plan doesn't have to be going back to academia; it might be a day job. In some ways, you might be better off securing a Plan B before you begin the transition -- and this is advice I'd give to anyone who's transitioning from academia to anything. It's almost as if you're making yourself a tripod with three points of contact on the ground: where you've come from, where you're going, and what you have to do, psychologically and economically, to get yourself there. I didn't have a Plan B, but I did have a semi-automatic trigger to put Plan B into action. Give yourself a year, I told myself, and see what happens. After a year I evaluated, then kept going. I didn't have a Plan B because when I left academia, it was still the dot-com boom, though on the low side of it, and nobody seemed to have a Plan B, so I played my switch bullishly. Now I'd say to anyone, be a bear.
Michael Erard asks how Heather and Brian deal with the daily grind at home:
Here's a question for Heather and Brian: How do you manage the daily grind of working at home? I've never had a problem, but just recently I met a freelance graphic artist and we were fantasizing about pooling resources to get an office and an office manager/sales rep.
Heather Hewett answers:
Michael pointed out one of the downsides about freelancing: the daily grind of working at home.
The main issue for me is the isolation, and I pretty much do all I can to avoid spending days on end by myself. When I do spend a lot of time at home, I try to get out -- to run errands, meet a friend for coffee, exchange work with someone, go for a run or a yoga class, whatever, in order to mix things up. And I also cheat a lot: that is, I make a lot of "writing dates" with other friends. We meet in the morning at a cafe or in one of our apartments, and we work together all day. On our own projects, of course. The temptation, of course, is to talk the whole time; but I only do this with friends who are also pretty serious about getting a full day's worth of writing in. It's great to have someone to talk to when you need a break, or a little boost of morale, or want to bounce ideas off of someone else.
I know that a number of writers in NYC share offices, and there are some organizations where you can pay for an office, month-by-month. I figure that buying grande mochas is cheaper than rent, though sometimes I wish I had an office. Much more so, an office manager/tech person, to help me with all the tiny tasks that take forever. I fantasize about hiring a personal assistant someday.
Michael Erard writes about freelancing, academia, 'inreaching', & what matters:
Here's a happy story about a grad student-turned-journalist that you might be interested in seeing, also because it gives an account of how to do journalism that really matters.
http://sfweekly.com/issues/2003-02-05/smith.html/1/index.html
And while I'm at it, let me add one thing. I really admire what Paula Foster has done with this listserv, for the opportunities it gives ex-academics to teach, mentor, and consult with their academic colleagues. So many universities and colleges are focused now on "outreach," trying to connect with communities, or marketplaces, beyond the ivory tower. For lots of reasons, I think most of these efforts are elitist and doomed to fail, not least of which is that they fail to admit that communities outside (or "outside," if you don't buy the inside/outside language that governs and polices that imaginary boundary between academia and everything else) have something to teach them. What WRK4US is, I think, is a great example of university "inreach," and I think it's necessary to do more of this work. I've gone back to my university and guest-lectured on writing and writing consulting, and I plan to do more, and I'd encourage anyone who's ever done any of this work to share your experiences with your dissertation committees, grad students in your department, career services, grad student governance groups, unions, or anyone who'll listen.
In my case, there are strong personal reasons for doing this inreach work, and it's about keeping all the parts of myself integrated with each other. I don't want to, have never wanted to, lop off my years in academia, abjure what I learned or who I became. At the same time, I didn't want to affiliate with a department, and particularly not with a single discipline. Talking to academic audiences, talking to you all, is enormously personally satisfying, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to do it.
Part of what I like about this list and all the conversations that happen on it is that they all grapple, at some level or another, with the problem of how you integrate your self Then with your self Now, even though you no longer have the institutional affiliations to signal, to yourself and to others, that you are continuous through time. Beyond the economic questions, I think that's the fundamental existential problem facing the transitional academic. Once you've been outside of academia for a while, you see that those affiliations are a fairly passive, unexamined and fragile way of keeping one's self together. Once you've been any kind of a freelancer you see how relatively thin any identity based on institutional affiliations is.
So more broadly, I think of myself as part of a larger movement that's putting many areas of human endeavor in conversation with each other. What kind of university, what kind of graduate education, what kind of intellectual activity results from all of that, I don't know. But I hope there's room for talking about that as we go --
H.Q. writes in response:
Well said, Michael. I'm sure that's how many of us feel, but we haven't been able to believe that it's legitimate! As a newcomer to the list, I'm grateful to know that it's okay to want to preserve one's identity in both camps, so to speak, and to pursue many different interests without feeling judged as a "dilletante."
Thanks, all!
Heather Hewett responds with another link:
Well said, Michael. I could not agree more with what you say about the role of this listserv, the value of sharing what we know, and the importance of creating a continuous identity apart from relying solely on institutional affiliations. In my own case, I know that I would not be the writer I am now had I not spent the time I had in graduate school defining my interests and developing my conceptual and research skills. Since I began writing journalism and nonfiction, I've really just been building on that experience with new skills and knowledge.
I hate to switch the topic to more mundane matters, but I did want to share one more really good website I just remembered. It's run by a young journalism prof at Columbia, and it's a good starting point for those interested in freelance journalism: www.sree.net/tips/freelancing.html .
Good luck to all with this and all other endeavors.
W.K.. writes:
Thank you for that link.
Writing on 'Bigger' Topics and the Academic Edge
In response to Michael, E.V. asks about 'bigger topics' and the academic edge:
I enjoyed reading this story. Thanks for sharing the link with the list, Michael. It also led me to a further question for our panelists:
This story describes how Robin Stein's familiarity with digging for information and experience at pursuing a topic for months and years, rather than mere hours (like so many journalists), helped her to uncover an incredible tale of deception and law breaking by that Texas company.
Questions: As former graduate students, do our panelists find themselves pursuing bigger topic stories that might take more time to write than what a typical freelance writer invests?
Do you find that your academic experience and the skills you honed there have helped give you a unique niche or an edge in the writing business?
Brian Lavendel responds:
Bigger topic stories? This is one instance in which I'm jealous of staff writers. Those "enterprise reporter teams" for example at some of the big dailies who get to spend months on a single assignments. Plus they get travel monies and a photographer, etc. Then their five part series on XYZ gets some national award.
Fact is, there's no way I can compete with that. I'm not salaried--but paid only for the words I write. If a story takes months of digging, I have to take a pass on it. The only consolation there--and I'm not sure it is a consolation--is that there will ALWAYS be about a zillion worthy stories that don't get reported.
At the same time, I have found it useful and efficient to carve out a niche. As I mentioned previously, I am an environmental journalist. Some of the topics I've done LOTS of research and writing on include wildlife, agriculture & food, global climate change, green living. So even though I haven't had the luxury of spending tons of time on any one particular assignment, I have developed the background, sources, style, and intuition related to these specialties.
The result is that I don't have to start from scratch each time I take on an assignment around, say, endangered species conservation. I know what questions to ask about species population, distribution, habitat loss, reproduction, prognosis, etc. This has helped me cut to the heart of the matter in pitching stories, interviewing sources, and writing.
As for whether my academic experience in the humanities has given me an edge, I think the answer is yes. Mostly around my language skills, but also in terms of knowing what questions to ask, how to get them answered, and then communicating that in a story.
O.L. contributes with a story:
The beginning of Brian's reply reminded me of Dennis Covington, who wrote "Salvation on Sand Mountain", among other things, and his entry into journalism. I heard him talk about it several times a few years ago. I just looked at his bioblurb. It says: "Covington currently heads the creative writing program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a journalist for a number of years, covering such divergent topics as the South and the war in El Salvador."
To deconstruct that tidy summary, if I recall correctly, he was sort of at the icky sticky point in his career where he'd been adjuncting for a long time but didn't think he'd be getting moved to a tenure track job or something , and he was going to El Salvador because he... er. I think it was kind of because it seemed like a good idea at the time... not for any grand journalistic or humane reasons. He went over to the better local paper and offered to send them some essays for the Sunday ideas section. They said ok, which probably meant he did it for free. Those were good stories. The New York Times had a sudden need, as things heated up, for someone who knew what was going on there, and they'd seen the quality of this work. So he moved up to their niche on the food chain, and did some big war pieces, and maybe a couple of crazy-dictator pieces, after that covered things that came up in his region-- the southern Appalachians-- (AL, TN) for them.
Sometimes you just follow your nose, I guess.
Michael Erard adds his thoughts:
I've never pursued anything as huge as Stein; that tale just amazes me. Like Brian, I've had to reconcile that there are lots of unreported, unwritten stories, and if I come across something I can't do I try to give it away. There are a couple other things, though, that I peck at from time to time; they're not huge investigative projects, but longer narratives, and they're things I hope to write as books someday.
"Journalism" is really a big framework, and I thought maybe we'd have talked some about what "journalism" actually is -- whether it's writing for publications that aren't "academic," or that don't count for tenure or academic status, or whether it's full-blown practice of skills and ethics as defined by a professional tradition. I think at this point we've touched on all of them, and that's fine. As for myself, in a lot of ways I consider myself a nonfiction writer and less of a journalist, even though I fact-check, edit, report, interview, etc. By that I mean that I want to keep writing in other genres, also that whatever genre I'm working in, I want to push at its edges, and also that I'm interested in characters and emotional dynamics, not just the news.
L.G. asks about freelancing and health insurance:
Thank you for the interesting stories about freelancing. I have often thought about being self-employed, but I worry about health insurance, since the only time I applied for private health insurance I was rejected.
What do you guys do for health insurance or health care?
Heather Hewett answers:
L.G. asked about health insurance, a topic about which I can only be of limited use. I'm lucky to have my health insurance through my husband; and before we got married, I extended my graduate school plan (because Wisconsin was unionized, all Teaching Assistants had health insurance) through the COBRA plan; but I have plenty of freelance friends who have dealt with this tricky issue. Many of them get their insurance through national organizations such as the National Writer's Union ( www.nwu.org/ ) or the American Society of Journalists and Authors ( www.asja.org/ ); since I'm in New York, I happen to know that other New Yorkers can do the same through an organization called Mediabistro ( www.mediabistro.com/ ), though there may be local equivalents in other states. Some of my friends have taken part-time jobs simply for the health insurance; and I have one close friend who, frustrated at being rejected by insurance companies because of a pre existing condition, took a full-time job, worked for a while, quit, and now extends her insurance through COBRA.
It seems to me that there are increasing numbers of people who work for themselves and need health insurance -- not only writers but actors, artists, musicians, consultants, entrepreneurs, and so on -- and I don't know whether there are other umbrella organizations that help freelancers of any stripe. I'd be curious to hear what Brian and Michael, or other freelancers in the WRK4US community, have to say about this difficult issue.
Brian Lavendel adds:
Bennies is (are?) a bugaboo of the freelance world. I recommend marrying into health benefits. That worked well until my wife joined me at home! Now we work very hard to stay healthy (hey, yoga and organic food ain't a bad prescription!) and signed up for a Medical Savings Account through Golden Rule. Don't ask me for details but it's a way to cover major medical through insurance as well as the less major stuff by paying into a pre-tax account for your medical expenses.
Short of that, I recommend a new presidential administration.
Michael Erand continues:
The benefits of benefits are more obvious, but right now I'm uninsured and not at all happy about it. I have some options -- a partner benefit through my girlfriend, one of the ones that Heather mentioned, or a part-time job.
J.F. lists some sources for health insurance:
I have insurance through PEN and TEIGIT.
http://www.pen.org/
http://www.teigit.com/
Don't forget the WGA, you screenwriters. http://www.wga.org/ You can register your scripts online now (this is a free service and even if you've written a desk drawer script, you really should register it).
OK, I'll shut up now. I desperately want to learn how to make freelancing pay.
A.Z., quoting Brian Lavendel, asks:
>Now we work very hard to stay healthy (hey, yoga and organic food ain't a bad
>prescription!) and signed up for a Medical Savings Account through Golden
>Rule.
What exactly is the Golden Rule Medical Savings Account? How does one go about signing up for the same?
Heather Hewett lists some more insurance sources:
Someone pointed out to me an article in today's Wall Street Journal which lists different resources to use when researching private health insurance plans ("Tips for Going It Alone on Insurance"). I'll copy down some of the web sites here:
Provides instant quotes, based on your age, sex, and location:
www.quotesmith.com
www.ehealthinsurance.com
Sends a request to a sales agent:
mostchoice.com
www.localinsurance.com
www.1stushealthquotes.com
Provides list of some insurers by state:
www.nasro-co-op.com
Texas high-risk health pool (apparently other states have similar
programs):
www.txhealthpool.com
Nonprofits with advice for the uninsured:
www.familiesusa.org
www.kff.org
U.B. asks about negotiating and renumeration:
How do you know what is a reasonable price per word? Does the editor set it for you or do you haggle?
How many hours a week do you have to work in order to be self-sufficient at this? How much money is self-sufficient to you? (I think it was Heather who said that she is not yet there)
Heather Hewett responds:
As far as negotiating, I've found that it's not something you can really do when you're starting out, but you do gain more power with experience. When I've negotiated, I've always kept in mind that I ultimately want an ongoing relationship with an editor -- I don't want to be adversarial. This also goes for payment. While the dream is $1 per word, most places don't pay this -- not by a long shot -- and you also have to work up to it. After you've written for someone a few times, it's good to ask for more. Of course, they may say no. Most publications are pretty tight these days. But you also won't get more without asking for it.
P.H. asks about money and freelancing:
I hate to seem materialistic, but:
1. How much $ can a freelancer expect to make in a year?
2. How much writing does one have to do to make this amount?
I suspect many variables will affect your answer which, of course, I'd be glad to read, all caveats aside. Many thanks
Paula Foster responds, quoting P.H.:
P.H> wrote:
> I hate to seem materialistic, but:
P.H., if asking about money makes you materialistic, then you have my official blessing to be materialistic. But truthfully, I don't think it IS materialistic simply to take a pragmatic interest in the financial workability of a given career. One has to look before one leaps, n'est-ce pas?
As I have said before in other ways, it is absolutely fine to ask financial questions, and by the same token, the speakers already understand that they only have to reveal what they want to reveal.
Paula Foster
WRK4US list manager
Brian Lavendel answers:
I was wondering when someone was going to ask point blank. Way to go, P.H.
I just pulled out my Schedule C from 2001. I grossed just over 31K from freelancing. I'm guessing that's about 40 or 45 stories. (Some earn me $200, others $3000.) I deducted about half that for advertising, tons of travel, supplies, professional insurance (I carried libel insurance that year), home office plus utilities, various gadgets, software, professional help (I won't offer details on that!), yada, yada. You get the idea.
My hunch is I'm pretty much in the middle of the freelance pack in terms of income. I know some colleagues (you can hear them at ASJA this spring) pull down 100K. Granted, to be doing this full-time, you have to look long at hard at how much you need and how you want to live.
During that year, I traveled to Florida, San Fran, Phoenix, Boston, the Northwoods of WI, New York, Texas, the Dominican Republic, New York again, New England, and Florida again. (Only a couple of those trips were directly work-related, but I managed to do a story or research for a story on most of the trips.) Did a one week bike tour. Attended about a dozen weekend-long Re-Evaluation Counseling workshops and weekly classes, met friends for lunch or tea or a walk in the park, biked and exercised any and every time of day (I was serious about doing yoga every day), helped start a citywide fathers group, led a men's group, participated in about a dozen different community and neighborhood groups, gardened..... Whew.
So how much writing did I do? A lot. But not so much as to keep me from a life of my own work on my own time. (That's the thing about being self-employed--the boss can be a demanding jerk but at least you know how to make him happy. I buy MY boss doodads too!)
W.K. asks in response:
Since we've tackled the topic of income head on..... I'd like to know a little more about that range of $200 to $3000. May I assume that it has more to do with venue than wordiness? Or is it that your rate is going up with experience, or are you just learning to ask for more? And are expenses, particularly travel, picked up by the publisher?
Thanks, and BTW you're a lively and entertaining writer!!
Heather Hewett answers, and wonders about the recession & freelancing:
OK, I'm inspired by Brian's example, so I'll take this bullet head on.
I have figures for 2000 and 2001, the first two years I was freelancing. Working part-time, both years I made half of what Brian made, writing about half of what he wrote. Less than half, actually, because some of that income came from working anywhere from half a day to two days a week in the books section of Time Out NY magazine. During both years, I was also writing my dissertation, which I finished in August of 2001 -- timing it quite nicely, I should add, with 9-11 and then the recession, something we haven't talked about, but I'll mention now.... Since 9-11, in my experience, freelancing has been harder and more competitive for a variety of reasons: a number of staff people lost their jobs and began to freelance; companies bought fewer ads, which is what funds content, so there were fewer pages and therefore articles to be written; and then more work went to staff writers instead of freelancers (staff writers are cheaper, since they're already being paid a salary). There's been some upswing since then, but also, obviously, a lot more economic uncertainty. I just had one editor tell me he has been asked to reduce what he pays freelancers (his section, books, also just got quite a bit smaller. Which tells you where books fall in the scheme of things). I'd be curious to know whether Brian and Michael think that 9-11 and the recession has affected their work.
Moving on from this cheery topic to the questions W.K. asked about:
As far as the range I've been paid for articles ($75-1500), it varies by the things W.K. mentioned -- venue (glossy magazines pay much more than newspapers) as well as experience -- plus the kind of article you're talking about. Front-of-the-book and shorter "department" pieces (a great way to break in, as Michael pointed out) obviously pay less than longer features and interviews, etc. As far as costs, I've had things like phone calls, lunches, drinks, entry fees, etc. that are incurred during research paid for. I've never traveled for my articles, except for the travel writing I've done -- for newspapers -- and they don't pay for travel. In fact, it's my understanding that a lot of travel magazines don't pay for an entire trip, unless you're a big name. They might pay for portions of it, but not all. And they're often not interested if you had your trip paid for by those PR junkets that offer free trips to travel writers.
Hope this answers some of your questions.
In response to Heather Hewett, Michael Erard writes about the recession & writing:
Heather just asked whether 9/11 and the recession affected me. Oh, yes.
First, several magazines I planned on doing lots of writing for folded. Fortunately some of those editors landed other places, which turned into some work, but not for nearly a year. Then other places cut back their number of pages, because their ad sales were down. Then other magazines reorganized their sections, giving priority to stories of national importance by writers of national importance.
When 9/11 happened, I was finishing a feature and looking forward to getting into some ideas I'd jotted in a long list that was taped to my wall. In the week that followed I looked at that list and realized that in the new context they were frivolous, depressingly so. I ripped down the list and moved on.
That's one major difference between the journalism and academic worlds. In academia, the topics (or as my training in rhetoric would have me say, which I will, since I know I'm not in mixed company, the topoi) don't shift very quickly, if at all. In journalism, they can shift overnight. Another way to put this is that if you apply the So What Rule to academic writing, you get a more consistent answer over time than you do with journalism. Staying on top of the topoi, and even predicting where they'd be, took some getting used to when I first got started, and after 9/11 they became nearly impossible to predict. I wish I'd kept a journal of that time, because I do think it helped me strengthen my inferential thinking skills, or at least look for inferences instinctively.
Yep, I make great lemonade, and a heck of a lot of it.
U.B. continues about the economy & writing:
In an earlier post, I referred to a woman I met with a background in science who does ghost writing and writes under her own by-line, and has done so for years.
She calls the economy now a "scramble economy" referring to what happens in ecological settings where extreme scarcity exists and animals must compete desperately for their survival. They "scramble" after whatever they can find. And she claims that writing is a career that is strongly tied to the economy. She doesn't need to look at economic indicators, but rather at how hard it is to create work. And she claims that this is one of the toughest periods she has worked in.
So, hope that helps. She also said that ghost writing for book publication can be much more remunerative, but the problem is that one has to first have written and published a book. And she really prefers the variety and short-term intensity of writing articles.
T.T. adds:
A word from one of the resident career counselors here. I have been following the Freelance discussion with some interest. I have stayed out of the fray largely because I felt I had nothing to add. However, questions about the job market and the economy are (sort of) my area of expertise.
I generally advise students and clients that the state of the economy is largely a statistical entity which has little bearing on career choice, even though it may affect job choice from time to time. I maintained a private practice as a psychotherapist for quite a few years. In this regard, I guess I was a "freelance head-shrinker." What I found was that during the recession of the early nineties I had to be more flexible. I saw clients later in the day. (On a rare occasion much earlier in the day...like 6:30am!) I sometimes took HMO contract work that paid a bit less, but was guaranteed. I was more conscious about networking and sometimes provided pro bono seminars or workshop as a means of keeping some sort of profile. As the recession waned, I was able to be a bit more picky about what I would and wouldn't do. My eventual evacuation from independent practice was made possible largely by the contacts and work that I had done during pretty tight financial times.
One huge advantage was that during my PhD program during the late eighties and early nineties, I was able to put together a work situation that helped support me, while not interfering with my fellowships and assistantships. I was able to schedule clients around classes and research. Many of my classmates were stuck with simply starving. I came out of my graduate program with no debt and work history that landed me an academic job prior to completing my dissertation.
I will save for another time the horrors of working in the academy, but for now I would suggest that the Chinese well understood the nature of 'crisis' as is evidenced by the fact that the kanji representation of the word is actually the combination of the characters for 'danger' and 'opportunity.'
E.V. writes:
Seeing talk of recession on this list, I had to kick myself as a reminder that the United States is in recession. Here in Canada, that has been over for some time (and never really happened, just a slow down), and the country continues to have the fastest growing economy of the G8.
Australia's economy is also doing well as is the case in other English-speaking markets.
(Adding to T.T.'s thought that with some creativity and flexibility, succeeding during hard economic times is possible)
T.T. continues:
I'm not sure, but I don't think that the Bush administration ever uses the "R" word to describe our current economic situation. I believe that the politically correct term is "slowdown" or "economic downturn."
You say tomato, I say tomahto.....
Tongue in cheek.
E.B. has more on the economy:
To be correct most economists believe that the US recession lasted only three or four quarters and was over by the end of 2001. But what many of us (people on the list) are feeling is the slow job growth and high unemployment rates. Which are, as a point of fact, fairly bad across the entire English speaking world (including Canada). The unemployment rates just for reference are Canada 7.1, UK 5.4, US 6.0, Aus 6.7, EU 7.9, and NZ 5.5. Not good if you are looking for a job. While they are only statistics, they do indicate that there is a lot more competition for the jobs and positions for which we are applying. Personally I think that we should all get used to it, because it is not likely to end for a while.
E.V. responds to E.B.:
Keep in mind that these numbers are relative. For Canada, 7.1 percent unemployment rate is low. For the US, this number would be intolerable. Compared to past years and decades, to Canadians our number looks good. This has consumer confidence up and spending at companies including publishing companies is up as well.
Given how low, historically, the US unemployment figure has been compared with other industrialized countries, perhaps E.B. is right -- it may be something US residents will have to get used to.
In fact, most observers and analysts of the economy and its impact on careers throughout North America (and probably the industrialized world) believe that an increasingly large percentage of people during the course of their careers will spend time free lancing (or consulting, or contracting -- whatever word you want), as the economy shifts and shifts again.
So this week's freelancing discussion is quite topical and relevant in some way to almost everyone!
E.B. writes in response:
I agree with almost every thing that E.V. said, except that I do not put much weight on unemployment trends when trying to determine the tightness of the labor market. After all 7%, whether it is considered historically high or low, is still 7%. It still is suggestive that the labor market is fairly loose and that there are a lot of people looking for work.
As to the idea that many people in the work force will be forced to work as an independent sometime in their career, I think that this is even more true for graduate students. Contrary to the belief of the dot-goners, graduate educated workers are the prototype for the future workforce of the industrialized world. Across the globe industrialized countries are increasing the relative size of their business services labor forces. No lifetime employment because there is declining manufacturing employment. Unfortunately, service jobs are transitory. We have to be able to learn and apply lessons across sectors and companies. Fortunately, what graduate students are especially good at is learning and being able to apply past learning to new situations.
I works as an independent economist, but what I really do is provide context for the current decision makers (and of course communicate it.) This skill has very little to do with my economics training and everything to do with the way that graduate students are trained to apply abstract concepts (theory) to the data at hand. From my experience social science and humanities graduate students do this better than anyone else.
The tricky part is being able to learn the language of the sector you want to work in, at the time you want to work in it. In general we do not have on point experience so we need some other signal that we can do both the transactional and strategic portions of the jobs we seek. Knowing the specific language is the first step to signaling that we have the skills.
Ramblings sorry.
G.M. continues:
Just a brief comment on unemployment rates: the U.S. only counts unemployed people actively seeking employment, whereas in Europe the practice is to include a much wider unemployed population (including people who receive welfare benefits and those living in poverty who are not trying to join or rejoin the workforce). So U.S. figures have always looked a lot lower, but that is deceptive. It would be helpful to know how Canada arrives at its unemployment rate before comparing it to the U.S. rate.
T.T. writes:
My suggestion that recession was a "statistical entity" should not be interpreted as a lack of belief on my part that our economy is in a recession (slowdown, downturn, etc.). Rather, I was suggesting that individuals are still compelled to make decisions about the world of work and those decisions do not change qualitatively because of the economy. Quantitatively, however, these decisions will be affected. E.V.'s observation about the paradigm shift for careers is to the point here. More and more professionals will find themselves freelancing more and more often.
The great skill that I learned as a freelance shrink was HOW TO FREELANCE, not how to shrink. It has dramatically reconfigured my sense of personal optimism even when all others about me are watching the market in a panic. I am reasonably confident that I can put together work and maintain a general career path. I continue to freelance, but as E.V. has pointed out, I now call it "consulting."
The real trick is to understand work activities as both jobs and components of career development. We often take on jobs because we need to eat. Once we have bitten the bullet in this regard, we should try to understand the role that these "involuntary" jobs place in our development as professionals.
Pitching to Foreign Markets (Specifically, Canada)
Thinking about the recession, E.V. asks about writing for foreign markets:
What thoughts do our panelists think about the idea of marketing one's to publications based in other countries ? Especially if the recession in the United States is limiting opportunities for publication and/or payment.
Michael Erand answers:
It's a good idea to hit foreign media. I've tried Canadian newspapers only a few times and plan to pitch more. I like Canadian papers much more than ones in the States, actually -- there's a kind of earnest pretension to them, a trust in the intelligence of the readership, and a sincerity, so the writing doesn't get tarted up or dumbed down. They might be a good source for academic types who want to write academicky pieces for non-academic audiences. I've also tried to interest the big Canadian papers in hiring me as a Texas-based stringer, which is work I've done from time to time for other papers.
I've also thought about trying to publish in the UK, and perhaps even elsewhere in Europe. My impression is that it's easier to publish local color-type Americana over there than it's become here. And you know, E.V., if you wanted to publish in American papers you might, even travel sections. I bet a newspaper in Texas would take a piece on Winnipeg, where a lot of movies that supposedly take place in Texas are being filmed (though you might have to know something about Texas in order to make the inevitable comparison).
On the other hand, why should I see the need to publish in Canada if the positive state of the economy there is largely a statistical entity which has no basis in reality?
Heather Hewett asks about Canadian papers:
For someone who has the misfortune of not having read any of the major Canadian newspapers, what are they?
E.V. suggests:
Pitching into Canada
The major "national" daily newspapers are The Globe and Mail and the National Post. Both have quite large Saturday papers with special "ideas" sections, which tend to use freelancers from what I can tell, and often ones with academic backgrounds.
The major cities all have 1 or 2 daily papers (unfortunately, often owned by the same publisher): Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, to name a few.
The Canadian media has recently become quite concentrated in the hands of a few owners. If you go to canada.com, it is the home page for most of the papers named above (along with a television network - Global). www.globeandmail.com is a better organized news site. These should allow you to obtain addresses etc. In most major US cities specialty news stands will carry the Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail (although sometimes 1-3 weeks late), if you want to read it. Some other Canadian dailies may also be available near you, depending upon how relevant Canada is to your region.
Before you launch your services North of the border, keep in mind that the Canadian dollar is low compared to the US dollar (as is the case with most world currencies), $0.66. Payments for your work would be in Canadian dollars. For example, $500 Canadian becomes $330 USD.
Enjoy!
W.K. also suggests:
May I add the names of a few local magazines?
Maclean's
Canadian Living
Canadian Business
Chatelaine
Elm St. (I hope they still publish!)
And our TV networks: CBC, CTV, Global
Cheers and good luck!
Libel Insurance
S.N., quoting Brian Lavendel, asks about libel insurance:
>I deducted about half that for advertising, tons of travel, supplies, professional insurance (I >carried libel insurance that year), home office plus utilities, various gadgets, software, >professional help (I won't offer details on that!), yada, yada. You get the idea.
I'm interested in the libel insurance. Just finished the dissertation and not sure that my homeowner's insurance will cover me now that my writing is not just for school. A lawyer found me publisher's insurance at $2500/year which is a lot for me since it has a $5000 deductible and doesn't cover injunctions. Any suggestions of agents? costs? options?
P.D. also asks:
Thanks everyone for a fantastic discussion. I have a question for Michael--just what is this "libel insurance" you mentioned, casually, in passing? That sounds potentially important....
Brian Lavendel responds:
I'm not following this issue quite as closely as I was, but last I heard, the National Writers Union (NWU) was looking for a new underwriter for their group libel coverage. (If that story sounds familiar, it is--same issue in health insurance for many freelances.) When they DID have it, I think it was around $200 or $250 per year.
I'll bet you can find an update on that at nwu.org
My recommendation is that unless you're really writing about the sex lives of Hollywood stars or are in some other high risk niche, it's a luxury more than a necessity to have the coverage.
Heather Hewett adds:
I would second Brian's observation about libel insurance. I've never had it and would only buy it if I knew I was embarking on a high-risk topic, which just doesn't seem too likely.
I do fact-check myself, if the publication doesn't fact-check me -- that is, I verify facts, I have verification of any quotations on tape or in my notes, and I'm pretty scrupulous about making sure I'm clear on what someone says in an interview. If I have any doubts, I always double-check. In fact, I've almost always followed up lengthy interviews with more questions, either to clarify or to expand. If I were to interview a very large group of people for a piece, or run a focus group, I might do something with consent forms, though I haven't done this yet -- maybe someone else can speak to this topic. None of this is insurance, of course, but it's careful, professional practice.
S.N. writes back, quoting Brian:
> I'm not following this issue quite as closely as I was, but last I heard,
> the National Writers Union (NWU) was looking for a new underwriter for their
> group libel coverage. (If that story sounds familiar, it is--same issue in
> health insurance for many freelances.) When they DID have it, I think it was
> around $200 or $250 per year.
Right, as far as I know, NWU has not found a new alternative and doesn't offer group libel insurance (I'm not a member but a friend checked for me).
For me, it's not a luxury at the moment but a highly recommended move. So if you have any other suggestions, I do need to go forward on this in the near future. I've done the professional, fact-checking, etc. work, and still, am in a very vulnerable position.
Copyrights
U.B. asks about copyrights:
This may be a foolish question. I spoke with one writer recently who does both ghost writing (primarily for corporations) and writing under her own name in a wide range of popular and technical arenas.
The writer mentioned that there is no copyright for one's own work in either instance, as also occurs in academic journals.
Is this true in your experiences as writers, as well? Under what circumstances, if any, does a writer today reasonably expect to have a copyright? Is it even an issue?
Heather Hewett responds:
I'm no expert on copyright, but I'll share what I do know... The rights that you keep over your work varies according to the contract you sign. Some publications will buy "First North American Rights," which is one of the best scenarios for a writer -- it means the publication is buying the exclusive right to be the first to publish your piece in North America. After they publish it (often with some kind of time limit, like after 90 days), the copyright reverts to you -- and you can sell it again (to someone who doesn't mind that you've already published it). Most places also stipulate that they will continue to retain the right to use your work in other venues -- electronic databases, the Internet, broadcast radio, etc -- which is somewhat of a bugaboo (who used that word earlier? it's a great one) for writers, since in a more fair world, we would make money each time our piece appears again. But usually this is in the contract, and it's pretty standard.
There are many other versions of what called the "Contributing Rights Agreement" in which someone buys various levels of rights (such as worldwide). However, if you signed what's known as a "Work for Hire" contract, you would no longer own your copyright -- you wouldn't even own the MATERIAL you gathered in order to write this. I don't like to sign these as a rule, though I have, occasionally (and once before I even knew what I was signing). They're becoming increasingly popular among publications, and it's worth negotiating to produce another, more fair contract. They usually have one.
Contract Issues
Q.Z. asks about specific contract issues:
Greetings! My questions are a bit specific, since I have already made the plunge, trying now to make a go of free-lancing as a career...but here goes...
While studying for an MFA in creative writing from Penn State, I wrote a lot of articles for the local paper---book reviews, theater and concert previews, local artist profiles, etc. After finishing my degree, I moved back to Michigan and tried to establish professional ties in journalism here. I sent my clips to all the major (and some minor) newspapers, and
soon, a features editor from the Detroit Free Press called to set up a meeting with me. The meeting went well, and she told me that she'd send out a book for me to review within the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, they asked me to sign a "free-lancer's agreement," which states that I can't write for ANY other publication that might be perceived as competition for the Free Press. (First of all, doesn't this go against the very nature of free-lancing? And how common is this?)
You can probably guess that by virtue of my writing this, things didn't go as planned. I read through and thought about this "agreement" and ended up signing it, deciding that this publication would be the best for me, career-wise, to pursue a relationship with, as it is the major newspaper with the biggest circulation in the state. Of course, as fate would have it, the Ann Arbor paper contacted me that week with an assignment, but I turned it down, explaining about the agreement I signed, feeling ethically obligated to do so.
Of course, the book didn't come, and I contacted the editor, who said she was busy with a convention, and it would be another three weeks; I waited three weeks, at which point she said that she hadn't had the time to work out the budget, but they still wanted me. It's now been four months, and I have yet to get an assignment, in spite of this "agreement." The editor has since told me that I can take other jobs, as long as I let them know, but of course, I feel as though I've already burned the other possible bridge by turning down an assignment elsewhere. Should I have just taken the assignment anyway? Should I keep pestering the DFP editor until she lives up to her end, or should I approach it another way and barrage them with story ideas? Needless to say, this has made what initially appeared to be an exciting opportunity into a nightmare...
Thanks for any advice you can offer, and thanks for providing this useful discussion.
Heather Hewett responds:
I'm so sorry, Q.Z., to hear about your experience. I'm not an attorney, of course, so please take everything I saw with a (large) grain of salt. But it seems to me that the agreement you signed should stipulate some kind of time period. (I signed a similar agreement when I worked for Time Out NY, but this was a condition for working on staff, not for freelancing). Even if it doesn't, it seems more than reasonable to me that you have the right to terminate the agreement. (As a practical matter, the FP would have a difficult case proving damages, and I can't imagine they would try.)
You need to talk to someone with expertise about this. Ask them whether breaking the contract would signify a breech or not. I'd recommend the NWU, which I've mentioned several times before; if you don't already belong, I consider a membership a valuable investment. They have grievance counselors who can help you out. They're not lawyers, but they're trained to deal with situations exactly like this one. Check them out online.
Good luck with all this.
J.P. asks about membership in writing associations:
I was wondering how much membership in organizations such as the National Association of Science Writers or the National Writers Union, mentioned by Brian Lavendel, helps in getting more jobs, networking, or just in raising credibility with editors.
Brian Lavendel responds:
I'm glad you asked about this J.P., because I think networking via professional organization is key. In fact, they've been a gold-mine. Not just financially, in terms of the contacts I've developed, but also for support and in recreating for me some of the water-cooler talk and camaraderie I lack as a freelance working at home.
A story: About five years ago, I attended a meeting of the Society of Environmental in Chattanooga. I was really gung-ho about the group and friends with a lot of the members, etc. As part of my SEJ cheerleading I thought it would be nice to share some of what was going on with members who weren't there via our member listserve. I wrote up a couple paragraphs about a keynote speaker and sent it out.
Some time later, I got an email from an editor at ANIMALS magazine. She saw my email about our speaker, said liked the tone of my post and asked if I would do a profile of the speaker (at the fabled $1/word) for the magazine. Boy would I!
That first assignment started a relationship with my editor--and her successor--so that today I am a contributing editor and write several stories a year for ANIMALS on topics of the editor's and my own suggestion.
I want to echo what Michael and Heather have said about the importance of RELATIONSHIPS. Yes! And professional organizations are a good way to make them.
Heather Hewett adds:
In answer to J.P.'s question about professional organizations:
My sense is that people belong to them for different reasons. I belong to the National Writer's Union and a New York-based group called Mediabistro (both of which I mentioned in my last post in reference to health insurance), primarily for networking purposes and professional training. Mediabistro holds a lot of seminars and panels, which I've attended, as well as networking events, which I try to force myself to go to, once in a while. Like the NWU, it posts jobs; and while I've cruised the board for jobs, I've never made use of it for this purpose -- at least not yet. The NWU is a solid organization which helps writers out with legal issues (negotiating contracts, protecting your rights, getting paid by delinquent editors, and other grievances). They represent the interests of freelance writers in court (Tasini vs New York Times) and provide a little muscle for individual writers. The reality is that you're really out there on your own as a freelance writer, so it's nice to have someone to turn to if you need help.
I would never join an organization in order to raise my credibility among editors; after all, anyone can join the NWU -- it doesn't show or prove anything. It's not something I mention in pitches (and some editors might even shy away if I mentioned the NWU, which is better left in the shadows until needed). The way you establish yourself is through networking and writing. However, I have gone to the ASJA's (Association of Journalists and Authors) annual convention so that I can network with the editors who show up (as do the hundreds of other writers who go to conferences like that for exactly the same reason), but it's not necessary to join the ASJA in order to attend its convention. Other journalism
organizations hold equivalent events.
Michael Erard writes:
I should belong to the NWU, and if MediaBistro had those swanky cocktail parties where I live I'd probably join. Thanks, Heather and Brian, for pointing out the benefits.
M.D. asks about the benefits of joining Mediabistro:
I just wanted to urge those prospective freelancers who haven't been to the Mediabistro website (mediabistro.com) to check it out. As one (or more) of our freelancers mentioned, mediabistro covers a wide range of topics including course offerings, jobs, "how to pitch," "find health insurance," etc. I hadn't been to the site for eons and I just discovered there is a wealth of information here that I was previously unaware of.
I DID want to ask our panel if any of them are members of Mediabistro's AvantGuild? & is it worth the price? Without the $49 (?) membership, one can't access stories on the website. I believe Heather mentioned how useful Mediabistro is for freelancers. Then Heather, would you recommend the "boot camp courses" which seem to specialize in specific areas of journalism, like doing book reviews, writing for women's mags, etc. ???
However, there's seems to be an overwhelming # of courses and information at the site. For a novice, would it make sense to attempt to specialize in one or two areas of freelancing or plunge in as a generalist (obviously based on one's interests and abilities)?
Heather Hewett responds:
I'm a big fan of Mediabistro, and I'm really glad that M.D. pointed out how much information is on their website, most of which anyone can access.
I did ante up for the AvantGuild membership this past year, mainly because I was attending a lot of their panels and seminars... and as M.D. pointed out, it enables you to access the restricted stories on the website. Plus, you can set up your own website, which I've done (for me, it was more of a temporary measure than anything else; in the not-so-distant future, I hope to have a better and more thorough website. But it's really easy to do through MB -- you don't need to know anything about it).
I've never taken one of their courses, though I've really been waiting for one that seemed worth the money. I do have a friend who took one of the Bootcamp courses (Writing for Women's Magazines), and had a mostly positive experience. I suspect that, as with any course, it all depends on who's teaching it. (That's what I would do when investigating any class: find out which teachers are the best, and see if they're teaching anything you're interested in.) But all of the seminars and panels I've attended have been good, some of them excellent (the one that comes to mind was "How to Pitch"). They're a great source of solid, professional information. I believe that Mediabistro has also expanded to other major cities -- in addition to NYC, where it started, Boston, DC, LA, and Chicago, and maybe some other places too.
Boy, do I sound like a walking advertisement for them! I swear I'm not on their payroll, though maybe I should be.
E.V. asks about pseudonyms:
I'm wondering if our panelists have any experience with using pseudonyms.
More specifically, I'm wondering how one structures it with the editor of a publication. Do you use the pseudonym for all correspondence? (basically assume another identity) Or is the more typical course of action to pitch under your real name and negotiate the use of a pseudonym once they've agreed to publish your work?
Any other thoughts you have on this issue would also be welcome.
Brian Lavendel answers:
I've never used a pseudonym (though have fantasized about it!). I do journalism under my byline and when I want to send a vocal letter to the editor on some local issue that's nagging, I'll ask my wife if I can use her name. An underappreciated bennie of marriage.
If you DO use a pseudonym, I think you need to let your editor know--and be prepared to explain your rationale. If you've got a good reason, there's no reason not to. Otherwise, assuming another identity could be taken the wrong way and you could potentially set yourself up for trouble--or at least complications--down the road.
Michael Erard responds with a story:
Here's a story about pseudonyms. I have a friend who sent an essay on a sensitive family topic to the Lives section of the NYT, a topic that had never actually been broached in the family. What the heck, she figured; the Times won't take it. But guess what. So my friend had to contact her family in a very short amount of time to vet the piece, some of whom responded, saying, This isn't for the New York Times. She was faced with a conundrum. On one hand, first piece in the Times, and $750. On the other hand, permanently pissing off, and/or embarrassing, members of her family. She asked the Times if she could publish under a pseudonym, and they hemmed and hawed, and ultimately said no. Maybe if her name started with K, ended with Y, and had two N's in it they would have let her, but unfortunately it starts with an S, ends with N, and has two O's. It was as if part of the appeal of the piece for the NYT lay in the willingness of an ordinary person, whose identity required no protection, to reveal sensitive family secrets in public. Eventually my friend did the right thing, which was to pull the piece.
E.V. asks, quoting Brian Lavendel:
>If you DO use a pseudonym, I think you need to let your editor know--and be prepared to >explain your rationale. If you've got a good reason, there's no reason not to. Otherwise, >assuming another identity could be taken the wrong way and you could potentially set >yourself up for trouble--or at least complications--down the road.
What sort of complications are you thinking?
The reason I'd like to use one is that I have a "regular job / career" that is working out well. As part of my job (along with my life experience) I have some unique perspectives on the local business / political / career/ economic scene that I would like to write about outside of my writing obligations on similar (but not the same, by any means) topics at work.
Two reasons for a pseudonym: At least initially, publishing articles along these lines would likely raise some questions at work since my name is attached to the research / writing I do for them. Second, I might want to express a thought or opinion that wouldn't benefit the company, our industry, or that of a client (since many of our clients' interests actually contradict each other, this is a constant issue -- what is favourable to one group will harm another).
Does my thinking that a pseudonym would be a good idea make sense to you?
Thanks for your thoughts!
W.K. wonders about the connection between editors & journalists:
Before all this wonderful freefall of information stops, may I ask about editors and assignment people? Are they always outside journalists who've come indoors? How? And are any of you interested in such positions? I have work right now on a research contract for a university (outside my discipline of course!), but I was recently turned down by Harlequin to be a contract reader of unsolicited manuscripts. I thought it might be an entry rung into non-fiction publishing and editing, but they deemed me unqualified..... even though I have a graduate English degree and experience as a published researcher, writer, and consultant in business (though it was a few years ago). I could not get an explanation other than to be told that the market was flooded with experienced fiction editors who competed intensely for the 3-4 positions that were open, and that decades of journalism was the traditional route to editing anything.... including romance novels. In your estimation, is this true? I guess I would've considered journalists more writerly and editors more readerly. I don't mean to start a philosophical sidebar here, but rather a pragmatic glimpse into your knowledge of editors and assignment people.
Thank you again and again. This discussion has been very helpful to me, and the listserv of course, is perfect!!
Heather Hewett responds:
As far as W.K.'s question about editors: I don't know much about book publishing or book editors, other than the conversations I've had with friends in publishing, most of whom started out in publishing right after college. (Though we do have some academics-turned-book editors on this list, I believe, so maybe they can better answer your question and give you advice on how to proceed.) So I haven't really noticed any journalists becoming book editors (though I have noticed quite a few journalists becoming book authors or novelists), but the freelance book editing market may be totally different from the in-house one. On the other hand, I'm not surprised to hear there are a lot of fiction editors out there, though I would think that a fair number of them have come up through literary magazines and creative writing programs.
I can say a little something about newspaper and magazine editors: like journalists, they come from many different backgrounds, but most of the editors I've worked for have put in time as journalists, usually on staff somewhere, and then they moved up the rung. Occasionally you hear of a freelance writer becoming an editor (one of the side benefits of developing a long-term relationship with an editor is that you can learn about what's going on at his/her publication, when jobs are opening up, etc.). I also know of quite a few editors who spent time in graduate programs, as have a number of journalists.
W.K. makes an interesting distinction between writerly and readerly, and that might be right. I've always thought of editing and writing as two different yet complementary skills, two muscles which pull your mind in different directions. Each needs to be developed, as you would build up any muscle with exercise; and I've always thought that reading can teach you a great deal about both.
As far as how this plays out in people's careers, I've always seen a lot of crossover. Some people seem to enjoy doing both, at different points in their careers, or at the same time; others find they're better at one or the other. And W.K., seeing that you've already successfully transitioned from academia to business research and consulting, I wouldn't give up hope about making another change; it sounds like you just need to connect with the right person and/or the right situation.
Specialty Writing -- Making the Leap to Lay Science Writing
X.M. asks:
This is all very helpful information. Any suggestions on good ways to make the leap from research-based scientific writing for medical journals to more lay-oriented vehicles such as self-help journals, etc.? I feel stuck in the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion model that requires precision but is a good soporific. Also, would being a Ph.D. instead of a M.D. dilute my credibility? Thank you.
Brian Lavendel responds:
Some of the best science and medical writers hold doctorates in science and/or medicine. It's not easy to make the transition, but it's very do-able--especially if you can write. The biggest obstacle I've noticed is not actually trying. As D.M. wrote in a post yesterday, "What I hear is the need to be willing to "stretch", take a chance/risk and put yourself out there." Yes.
Why not put together a query (aka pitch, aka story proposal) for a pub you'd like to write for? Or give an editor a call? It can be very rewarding to translate science and medical news for the lay reader--making it all real to someone on the street.
As for diluting credibility, I can see a few instances where an M.D. would be looked upon with favor. But even with "only" a PhD, you're still better credentialed than a lot of folks doing the writing you aspire to.
Paula Foster writes:
Dear WRK4US,
It being Friday February 7, this Guest Speaker Discussion must now come to a close. On behalf of the entire subscribership, I would like say a very grateful "Thank You!" to our three Guest Speakers, Heather, Brian and Michael. They shared very generously of their time, knowledge and experience, for which we are much in their debt. Thanks as well to those of you who asked questions and kept the discussion going.
The next Guest Speaker Discussion will take place in April, exact dates TBA, and will address the subject "Careers in University Development." Until then, you are free to use the list in whatever manner you choose as long as it is consistent with the list's purpose: to share information and encouragement regarding nonacademic careers for humanities, education and social science PhDs.
Happy exploring,
Paula Foster
WRK4US list manager