If I submit an article to a local paper as a freelancer, and they wish to buy it…
is it common practice to reserve the right to submit to other publications? I believe this may be called the “copy rights”, and the common practice might be to sell for one year - after which the article may be sold elsewhere???
If this is not correct, (a) what is the common practice and (b) what are the terms to express I’d like to sell to other newspapers? Please set me straight…
Hell yeah, you want to reserve the right to resale. This is normal, but papers will prey on newbies and try to get you to sell them all sorts of rights. Now, I’m speaking as a photographer who’s dealt with a lot of papers, but the same basic rules apply to writers. It’s up to you to negotiate to whatever your comfortable with, but I would not sell them the rights to relicense my work unless I’m adequately compensated.
Normally, you’re going to want to sell them something like first-time rights. This guarantees them the first publication rights to your piece, but after that you’re free to resell. Depending on what place your dealing with and the nature of the work, you may have to go through an “embargo” period in which you will be prohibited to resell your work, or you may be asked not to resell your work to publications in direct competition with the publication your selling your work to. This is all negotiable.
Generally, you’ll be selling one-time one-publication rights. This means that they have the right to reproduce your work once in one of their publications. Any reuse, web use, use in sister publications, etc, should incur an extra fee.
But newcomers to the business are too quick to sell all their rights to a publisher, just in the excitement of getting published. Don’t let this happen to you. Whatever you do, make sure you keep the copyright on your work, and reserve the right to resell it at whatever terms are reasonable to you.
It is also considered legitimate to rewrite the article with a different slant and send it to other noncompeting publications.
So you can write, say “Swimming Pools of the Stars” and sell it to a movie magazine, and the rewrite it in a more technical manner and sell it to “Swimming Pool Industry News.”
I don’t know if I’ll get a bite, but I want to be prepared. What would be a reasonable asking price for selling one-time rights to a paper with average readership (not big city, but well known covering a wide vicinity.) The article is a “travel” story of about 1200 words, which would be cut down, I am sure. And, it included 5 color photos. What would you say? $300? $500 …or am I too high?
Thanks,
For professional publications, $0.03 per word is a good price, especially for a beginner (most places consider that bare minimum to be considered professional rates). That excludes the photo rights, however. I get paid $100 for a 600-800 word game review from one site, $100 for a 300-word review from the magazine I sometimes write for. Of course, that doesn’t add in the hours spent playing the games.
Understand, however, that I do almost all work-for-hire (all rights go to the publisher), including my current 90,000-word project (which pays royalties). The only things I’ll never give up all rights for are my novels.
With those photos, I wouldn’t go for less than $500 on your particular project, but since I write in rather odd fields, my situation is a bit unique.
A 1200-word travel piece with five color photos would be an oddity at any paper I’m familiar with. (Unless you’re really talking about a Sunday-supplement magazine or the like.) Does the one you’re thinking of ever use that many color photos on one article?
And when you say color photos, do you mean prints or slides? Do you know what the preferred format is for submissions at this paper?
It has become the practice for newspapers to include mandatory electronic rights in their contracts so they can also publish on their web sites. I’d be very surprised if you got anything extra for electronic rights.
Newspapers in general are notoriously low-paying markets. Don’t expect $500 or you’ll wind up being disappointed. Don’t even expect a chance to ask. Most likely you’ll be told what they pay, take it or leave it. First-timers don’t have much in the way of bargaining power.
Three cents a word? Holy crap that’s cheap. I would say a dime a word is the cheapest you should go. High-tier professional magazines will pay you at about $1 or more a word. This includes magazines like Parade (which comes in many Sunday papers), Business Week, Car & Driver, etc. Newspapers will be much cheaper, but I’d have difficulty understanding why anyone would ask for anything less than 10 cents a word. That’s only 50 bucks for a 500 word piece.
Maybe Deadly meant 30 cents a word???
For 1200 words, five pictures (would they use all five), in a mid-level circulation newspaper, I wouldn’t expect much more than $250-$300. Newspapers are notorioiusly cheap. The same article in a top-tier magazine with professional quality pictures could fetch anywhere up to $2500, possibly more. But we’re talking real creme de la creme here. Five hundred bucks is a reasonable price, too, but it’s highly doubtful you’ll get it, especially as a first timer. I suspect $250-300 is the level we’re talking here.
No, I meant 3 cents a word. That’s the bare minimum of what is considered professional rates in the freelancing world (at least the areas in which I write). Many places pay even less than that. One example is RPG writing. I wrote an article for Dragon magazine that paid $85. It was about 1,500 words, IIRC. The prestige of writing for Dragon meant more to me than the money, and it opened up more options (including this latest one, which is my first printed book). Game writing pays very well, from 10 cents a word to 50 cents a word, plus the free games we’re always getting.
SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) just raised the minimum qualification for a professional magazine from three cents a word to five cents a word. And this caused great consternation among those who thought it would be disruptive to the lower-paying magazines.
Most people just have no idea of how little writers get paid anywhere outside the glamor publications.
Well, holy shit is all I can say. Three cents a word? That’s considered professional? Umm…how can any professional survive on three cents a word?
They can’t. That’s a rate more suited toward hobby writers than professionals. (I’m not knocking your work, I’m just saying that there’s no way anyone can justify that as a professional rate.)
Even notoriously cheap newspapers will pay you at least ten to twenty cents a word. I’ve worked with writers for most my professional life, and I’ve never seen a professional writer (one who survives completely from freelancing) work on less than $150-$200 per 500 word story.
I’ve seen Writer’s Market, and I’ve seen what some publications pay their writers. It’s nothing short of highway robbery.
I’m just saying…
Ones who survive on freelancing probably do make more than 3 cents a word. But I doubt they started out making more than that. Remember that very few people make a living as a freelancer, and those that do tend to be very prolific. I usually make more than 3 cents per word (though depending on the market, as with Dragon, I’m willing to work for less). I have a friend that easily makes 50 cents or more a word writing technical articles, because he’s been a hardware editor, and it’s a subject that needs knowledgable people.
RPG writing is notoriously cheap, because the profits simply aren’t there. A huge chunk of the RPG market is in PDF documents, where selling a few hundred copies is considered a major success. If you write for those, you might not get anything but a copy of the book. I managed to snag my first fiction publication with one of the biggest RPG publishers of print products out there, and I’m still unlikely to make more than a few thousand dollars from the sale of my book.
Now, when my novels start getting published, I hope to work my way up to being able to make a living off of it, but until then, I’m happy just having my name in print writing about things I love. I mean, I write about and for games. What’s not cool about that?
BTW, if I remember correctly, one of the highest paying fiction places to sell to is Playboy.
Yeah, even a few years back Playboy was giving out $5000 for a story.
And if you didn’t sell it there, you sold it to Asimov’s at seven cents a word. 
Exapno, I didn’t see where you’d posted that pro rates went up to 5 cents a word. That’s cool. Thanks for the info.
Oh, for puke’s sake…why even write, then? I’ve seen such lame articles about places I’ve been, regarding Travel. What a crying shame. Writers get no respect, do they? The editors think they know it all, and yet how much misinformation and misquotes gets printed every single day - even in the big-name papers? (Especially science articles.) OK, maybe I exaggerate a bit, but the pros could stand to learn a lot from the amateurs. I think it is because we amateurs have a true love for what we do, but to them it is just a mundane living. - Jinx
I’m not sure I follow, Jinx. I’m a pro, and I love writing. Obviously, I’d love to make a living at it, and I’m working on it, but I don’t write just so I can be rich beyond my wildest dreams. If all I wanted was money, I’d stick to being a computer programmer.
Jinx, when - and if - you get published you’ll be entitled to talk. In the meantime, I’m a pro and I’m here to tell you that there is a huge, huge, huge, difference between the quality of the pro and the amateur. You have no idea what you’re talking about.