Last week, I wrote about the importance of building your own readership and having an audience that’s interested in your work and your ideas. This is what we all know as branding and for the average writer today, branding is probably the only way to ensure a secure income that is independent from a newspaper, magazine, or book publishing market that you have no control over.
But I want to be clear. I’m not saying don’t write for newspapers or magazines. I’ll outline some very good reasons below why you not only should, but why you must. What I’m saying is that if you’re a freelance writer or journalist you need to remove that dependency that you have on publications.
I should know. I’ve spent ten years of my career writing for publications like Time and The New York Times. When Time, a publication that I wrote for regularly and was pretty loyal to, started having financial problems, it didn’t matter how good I was or how I always brought my best ideas to them first. My income took a hit. When the New York Times slashed their rates, writers who didn’t accept the lower rates could choose to write or not. It wasn’t like the Times had a dearth of freelancers willing to write for them. I chose to continue, but effectively, I was doing the same work, the same research, the same writing, for lower pay. I was the highest paid writer at Elle magazine’s Indian edition, whose former editor-in-chief offered me a contributing editor position and told me I was their best writer. Yet, since she left and the entire editorial staff changed, I have written not one story for them.
In all of these situations, my income has been cut drastically because I was loyal to these publications. If I wrote once in a while for them, it wouldn’t have had an impact on my bottom line, but because they had become a big part of my working life, when they suffered, I suffered. When they slashed rates or cut staff, I suffered. When they quit their jobs and walked away, I suffered. In theory, this is fine. It is the essence of freelancing and marketing yourself as a writer, of finding new clients, of being independent.
But in today’s media industry, where everyone is slashing budgets and letting go of staff, this dependence on and this loyalty to editors and publishers is what gets writers in trouble. It is what has gotten me into trouble. The more loyal I was to a publication, the more I suffered economically when it went out of business or when an editor quit.
So why do I still want to write for newspapers and magazines and recommend that you do the same? Why am I doing the 30 Days, 30 Queries project and why am I starting a new session of my Local Journalist, Global Journalism course that helps my students break into national publications?
Three reasons. One, the prestige matters. It matters a whole lot. Many of you signed up to this newsletter because you know I’m a widely-published writer with experience and credits. It is the same reason I was able to get multiple offers from NYC agents less than a month after I sent out my query letter and why I had the faith to refuse to work with a couple of established London agents when they wanted to brand me as an Indian writer. It is why no one ever asks me to send clips anymore. It is why writing gigs come easily to me. Names matter. They will always matter.
Two, it helps you make more money. Freelancing for the big names won’t make you more money directly, but it will help you make more money as a result of having that credit in your bio. As in, if you’ve written for the New York Times, you’ll get a bigger book advance (perhaps by thousands of dollars) than if you hadn’t. So while the NYT might only be paying you $500 for a story, saying you write for them regularly gets you pay rates of $2 a word and above from other publications and from book publishers.
Finally, and this is the most important point, so be open to questioning the way you view things, they’re going to help you build that all-important readership I talked about. When you start thinking of readership instead of assignments, you start asking different questions. Instead of asking how much a publication pays, you ask instead, how many subscribers or readers it has. You ask whether they’ll give you a bio, a photo, a link to your website. You stop feeling the need to complain about how the Huffington Post doesn’t pay its writers because it’s not that $300 a blog post you’re after. It’s their readers, who will sign up for your mailing list, buy your products, support your other work, not only now but as long as they remain interested in what you have to say.
Guest blogging is a known tactic to build your audience and drive targeted traffic to your website. But as writers and authors, we can think so much bigger. Why should you guest post for free for a blog with 50,000 readers when you could be writing or blogging for a publication with 5 million readers AND get paid for it? Plus, the $1,000 they’ll pay you is finite, the link that sits on their website for readers to discover years later is infinite. That’s ongoing targeted traffic that money can’t buy.
When you remove that dependence you have on publications to pay your monthly bills, you shift the power balance, even if it’s in your own head. You’re not working for them or writing for them, you’re using them to reach a long-term goal, while also getting paid in the short term. You can negotiate better terms because you’re no longer desperate for assignments.
This, of course, requires that you’ve figured out a way to monetize that readership or that you have a way to keep them interested in you. We’ll talk about that in the coming weeks. And as you know, I’m not quite there yet.
But I am learning to change my mindset. I am asking different questions. I’m still spending my time trying to pitch some of the biggest names in the business, but instead of simply asking how I can help them, I’m learning to ask another important question that will help me make more money and have a better career in the long term.
I’m beginning to ask how they can help me.
Should you be asking that question, too?