When to pull a publication
Advice on contracts and payment for writers
My writing group has a shared Google Sheet where we aim to get 100 rejections every year. This serves as great motivation to submit more and overcome the gut wrench of rejection while also providing a natural forum to celebrate our wins when work is accepted.
Last week, I was excited to report that an essay I wrote in my MFA was accepted by West Branch. The journey to get here was long—if I dig into my Duotrope, I can see it’s been rejected 53 times since 2020. I had editors requesting rewrites they subsequently passed on, tiered rejections, and, perhaps most interestingly, it had previously been accepted by another literary journal.
In July 2021, this essay was accepted by an incredible publication for nonfiction, and I was thrilled. I’d devoted immense energy to this essay and felt that I was sharing a lot of myself in it too, which made the right placement feel even more important to me—if I was going to share so much of myself, I wanted it to find a home where that would be valued. Imagining its publication in this journal, I was thrilled by the thought that it might actually find its readers.
When I reviewed the package of paperwork the editor included in her acceptance email, though, I felt that something was off. I’d started freelancing during COVID. After listening to The Writers’ Co-op and working on an essay for Atlas Obscura that was later licensed elsewhere and paid me twice the original fee1, I knew that looking closely at contracts mattered. The journal that had accepted my essay was requesting first serial rights for print, which was customary. They retained the right to license the work with their own affiliates and split the fee with me, which I thought was fine enough. What struck me was that for this essay, to appear online, they would retain online exclusive rights with no end date. Also, they would pay $100. This was something the editor had also mentioned in her acceptance email:
Here is all your paperwork in case you would like to do a lot of work for $100, lol.
Having learned that it can’t hurt to ask for what you want (which, very importantly, should continue to be true), I followed up:
I am wondering if there’s any flexibility with payment. Would it be possible to do something closer to $200?
This was where things went sideways:
Lol, I have literally zero to do with the payment. I admire your spirit, but I myself am not paid to do this job...most of the staff isn’t...so I don’t think you’re going to get much traction there. The payment is the same for all writers across all sections irrespective of length or genre, and only a few people who work full-time or nearly full-time on [MAGAZINE] are salaried; the rest of us are part-time volunteers. That being said, I’ve worked at a lot of online publications that pay writers nothing at all: with the volume of work we publish, these payments add up and I do think the powers that be at [MAGAZINE] are doing the best they can.
When I read her response, I found it to be discouraging and somewhat dismissive. I knew well that most literary magazines don’t pay, but the attitude around not asking felt anti-writer, as opposed to a simple response about not having flexibility. I started feeling like my essay was “content,” so I decided to follow up on the rights clause that was troubling to me. With the vibe I was getting, it felt more important to protect my work, so I wrote back:
My only other question with the contract is if it’s possible to put an end-date on online exclusive rights. My contracts in the past have typically asked for exclusive rights online for 90 days, after which point I’ve been able to license the work elsewhere.
While I hope I didn’t offend you by asking for more money for this piece, I will say this essay is something I’ve worked hard on, and that difference in payment is meaningful to me as a graduate student.
After a nudge, I heard back.
Michael, I’m not offended, but again, you’re asking the wrong person. I am the creative nonfiction editor; that’s all. I acquire pieces and edit said pieces, for my section alone. I don’t do payments; I don’t do rights; I have nothing to do with the business end of the magazine. Therefore, I can’t begin to answer any of your questions. I suggest you contact our Editor-in-Chief to find out who to speak with. That being said, I am not under the impression that [MAGAZINE] changes contract terms for individual writers. The volume of work we publish likely makes this impossible, as contracts probably can’t be tailored individually due to how time-consuming that would be and there not being anyone built in for those purposes. That being said, this is just a guess. [EIC] is the person with whom you need to speak.
There are a couple things I found troublesome here. It is part of an editor’s job to liaise with writers when they’re acquiring work, and this editor could have looped in the editor-in-chief with a note of support. Additionally, it is, actually, easy to update language in a contract.
I ultimately emailed the editor-in-chief to see what was possible, and he kindly told me they were not able to make any changes to the rights, so I decided to pull the piece.
I was telling all of this to my roommate this weekend and realized there are a couple of lessons for writers in this.
It’s really important to read your contracts.
Look out for rights grabs
I’m obviously not a lawyer, but I think there are some basic things you can look out for in a contract and understand whether they’re unusual. In my freelance work, I’ll sometimes decide that signing away rights throughout the universe in perpetuity is fine. Publish my service journalism piece aboard Blue Origin! However, I think about this decision along an axis of personal and financial value. For less personal work I’m just doing for a paycheck, I might not mind a restrictive contract. With this essay, I felt that I was bearing it all (quite literally—it’s about gay bathhouse culture). While I retained some rights, it felt important to me to have online rights revert to me at some point. If another opportunity arose once it published, I didn’t want to have to go back to an editor who responded in a way that I was finding unsupportive, and the contract language wasn’t written to give me a strong position in asking for any changes.
Also, two things to be careful of, especially if you’re writing nonfiction, are warranties and indemnity clauses. Should anyone ever sue you over something you write, is the publisher asking you to shoulder all of that legal burden?
Consider what payment is worth to you
It’s generally a good idea to negotiate fees. This usually doesn’t apply to literary journals, but the journal I was talking to exists astride the worlds of lit mag and glossy magazine. With literary journals, I never negotiate fees. As an editor at The Rejoinder, I make it abundantly clear that we’re unable to pay, both in our submission guidelines and when we accept the work. Literary magazines are working in a different ecosystem. When I think about compensation for work in a literary magazine, it’s less about financial gain and more about building a literary career. On its face, this is the sort of rationale you’re supposed to not subscribe to generally, but to build a career as a literary writer, you do typically have to seek publications to showcase your work. They also tend to be less restrictive in their contracts, giving you more control of the work’s later life.
In a climate that undervalues writing, the core question I tend to consider is this: is the career or personal gain strong enough to outweigh financial compensation? Sometimes, an author interview is so exciting that I don’t spend as much time thinking about payment. I think working in both literary magazines and glossies, it’s not unusual to expect different forms of payment, to decide in one case a $50 honorarium for a story you spent untold hours on is okay and in another, you won’t work for $0.50/word. The way I silo my freelance work from my separate career as a writer, I can make this distinction fairly instinctually, knowing what the opportunity cost of a magazine assignment would be during my work day.
What I would have done differently
Reading back through my emails, I wouldn’t have included the note about hoping I didn’t offend the editor. I think it was intended apologetically but probably made the situation worse. I think either dropping the payment question at that point or omitting the first clause would have been more effective. Also, I have effectively renegotiated rates, and I’ve also asked for increases that have not been accommodated, and it was fine in both cases and did not cause any relationship damage. Editors usually want to pay writers more and can keep discussion factual.
I also would have included a specific revision to the contract so that if they’d been open to it, they could have just copy and pasted the new language into the document and been done with it.
I don’t regret pulling the essay. The intervening five (!) years made the essay better as the pandemic evolved and my thinking on the subject continued to mature. I think interactions with editors can provide a lot of insight about what the editorial relationship will be like, too. Feeling like our dialogue was adversarial, I didn’t have faith that editing the essay itself would be fruitful for us. In other circumstances, discussing the business can be factual and cooperative, even if it doesn’t yield the results you want, and that could be a good sign for the editorial relationship you’re establishing.
Would you have responded differently? Or do you have questions about contracts? Let me know in the comments below.
Reference Section
If you freelance or are thinking about it, I can’t recommend The Writers’ Co-op enough. I listened to the first two seasons at least twice as I got my start freelancing. This episode of The Writers’ Co-op goes into contract language in greater depth.
And this episode really framed my thinking about money before I started freelancing full time.
In other news, I wrote about Heights House Hotel and Raleigh in my first for Hotels Above Par .
For some background on this: I wrote an essay for Atlas Obscura about ice cream in Japan. After it was published, someone from Reader’s Digest’s international affiliates reached out to me with interest in licensing it so they could run it in their publications overseas. I actually almost missed this email—it came to an account on my website that I wasn’t frequently checking—but saying yes to this was easy with my editor’s support at Atlas Obscura and a contract that allowed for it, and it put money in my pocket for a story I’d already written. All this to say, if you’re publishing, make sure readers and editors can find and contact you online.