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How to Make Significantly More Money From Each Online Sale

By Anthony Tedesco

Welcome to the most potentially profitable time for writers in history. Nearly every traditional media venue, whether rooted in print or radio or television, has also launched a companion online magazine. Many of those venues not only pay for online use of your work, they also purchase original material geared specifically for the Internet medium. Add those markets to the throng of new Internet-only magazines, custom corporate online publications, and e-mail newsletters, and you can begin to see the potential for online income. Like many of my fellow writers, I started writing for online markets as an explorative foray, but soon found that what I thought might be a novel supplement to my print income soon surpassed my print income altogether.

My freelancer's e-boon, however, hasn't been solely rooted in churning out more articles for more markets. I've also been selling more electronic uses of the same articles, and securing more money for each of those sales. With help from the National Writers Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the tight-knit community of writers pioneering this field, I've learned to navigate the legally binding hieroglyphics of electronic rights clauses and negotiate top online rights and rates. You can too. For a downloadable text file of the NWU's "Standard Journalism Contract for Online Markets," go to www.nwu.org/journ/jsjcweb.txt. Writers worldwide are hoping you do. The most potentially profitable time in history is also the most precarious time. Future standards in this new medium are being negotiated by writers today. Better-informed negotiators are better for all of us.

PRINT BASICS APPLY

Don't go shredding your notes from print negotiations. Many of those basic skills and principles still apply to electronic rights and rates. Always read your contract carefully; don't lose your professionalism by getting personal or taking things personally. Before you start negotiating, know what you want, know what you're willing to accept, and know what you're willing to walk away from. Do your market research, figure out what you deserve for your article, and then ask for what you deserve. If necessary, politely insist on what you deserve, and explain why you deserve it. Build trust, foster good relationships. Leave bad ones.

E-CLAUSES IN PRINT CONTRACTS

You can start negotiating money for electronic uses before you've even sold a piece to an electronic market. Most print contracts include clauses for future electronic uses and sales, usually within two categories.

  • Database sales. Whether the database is online or on CD-ROM or Lexis-Nexis-style, print publications usually offer writers a not-so-glorious 25 percent of any fees they receive from these sales. The ASJA reports that 50/50 is becoming the standard split, similar to the standard 50/50 split of subsidiary rights for print books and periodicals, but you need to decide on your own standard, based mostly on how much you could get elsewhere. Personally, I often ask for a 50/50 split, but I rarely push for it. The concession is almost built-in for me, a peace offering made mostly because, as of this minute in my career, these sales aren't my specialty.
  • Online publication sales. AKA, my specialty. I rarely - like, two steps from never - accept the ubiquitous, boilerplate clause of print contracts, which offers 25 percent of the print fee for online use. NWU recommends that writers be compensated 100 percent of the print fee for online use because "licensing to a World Wide Web site is similar to first print rights in different geographic regions, i.e., first U.K., first French." I agree. But I also justify the 100 percent by humbly explaining that I have online markets that will pay me that equivalent.

    Actually, I've found this immediate, tangible case of "what I could get elsewhere" to be one of my most effective bargaining chips. "What writers should be getting" is an important cause to advocate toward as an industry, but it often falls on deaf editorial ears. Even the most benevolent, hearing-abled editors are often, unfortunately, too deadline-riddled and policy-restricted to stage an industry coup in the name of fair treatment for writers. So, I work hard to keep apprised of current online market rates.

    KNOW YOUR ONLINE MARKET RATES

    Even if online publication sales aren't your specialty, you can still negotiate specialty-worthy rates. Negotiation is done with what money you could get elsewhere, not necessarily what you are getting elsewhere.

    Keep researching and stockpiling specific market rates for your negotiations. It's the same strategy that applies in print. You just have to seek pay-and-policy info for online markets in different places. Don't forget to cite market rates delicately. It's hard for editors to hear you're not happy with their offer, and even harder to hear their competitors are able to pay writers better. Consider putting something like this into your own voice: "I completely understand your budget restrictions, but you've got to understand that it's really hard for me to accept YourMarket.com's $1,000 fee, when I know I could get $1,500 for the article from ThisOtherMarket.com. But I'd really like to work with you (if you do). Is there any way you could possibly get $500 more for the piece?" Give the editor some quiet time to consider your offer. If he still can't get the extra $500, but you really want to work with this market, consider reiterating the fact that you want to write for this publication, then add that you'd be willing to do the article for only another $250, as long as after the editor saw the professionalism of your work, he might agree to pay you the market rate for your next article.

    BULK E-SALES

    Online publications need more writing than print publications because Net readers have come to expect daily, if not hourly, updates. Fortunately for online publishers, more content doesn't mean more printing costs or more delivery costs. Fortunately for writers, more content demand means more online editors looking to buy your writing in bulk. Instead of selling one 5,000-word piece, serialize and sell it as 10 much more Web-friendly and money-worthy 500-word articles that are intertwined but able to stand alone, or find themes in your past writing and present your work as a year's worth of a column. Present, for example, 12 evergreen career-related articles as a year's worth of monthly career columns. The articles will have the added bonus of being delivered up front, easing the production process not just for the editor but for the programmers who can often just crib columns to be updated automatically on a certain day of the month.

    The multiple pieces don't even have to run as niche columns. Again, without the limitations of printing or distribution costs, many online publications are open to mass surges in content related to their entire magazine as opposed to individual sections or themes. When asked to write a short, $250 career-related article for a post-college website, I instead negotiated the sale of 15 reprints on life after college in general-career-related articles, dating-related articles, travel-related articles, etc. The site got an instant content boost for their publication, and I got $3,750 for 500-word articles that I had already written and already sold to print markets. (I had retained electronic rights for most of them. The others were under older contracts that didn't include electronic clauses. Thanks to a recent, NWU-lead Supreme Court victory, writers own electronic rights to their work unless a contract clause specifically gives up those rights.) In addition to the money, I also saved time by negotiating 15 sales all at once. The Web is conducive enough to bulk buys that I've opted not to work with online syndicates, instead making (and keeping) the sales myself.

    WORD COUNTS COUNT LESS

    One of the most important differences between online writing and print writing is that online writing, which is of course read on small computer screens, needs to be effective in far fewer words. Consequently, one of the most important differences in negotiating online rates is making certain to get paid for your time and not for your word count. "You have to work harder to write shorter," advises Lisa Price, author of Hot Text: Web Writing that Works (New Riders Publishing). "So add up your hours per piece, set a reasonable hourly rate, given your budget, and calculate how much, total, the piece ought to earn."

    YOUR ONLINE TIME IS MONEY

    Online publications also differ from print publications in that they can give their readers dramatically greater access to their writers, often at the expense of writers' schedules. I usually agree to have my e-mail address published with my articles, and I always, eventually, answer my e-mails. But when a high-profile online magazine put a clause into my contract binding me to being online during certain hours to discuss my article and the magazine in a live online chat-without compensating me, I politely said that I'd prefer to provide just my writing services and not my PR services. I politely didn't say, "You're supposed to be my publisher, not my pimp." They were quick to let me scratch out the clause. You'll find that often the most odious contract points are masterminded by the publication's lawyers and loathed by the publication's editors, who have to deliver them but are happy to remove them - if you ask.

    ADD-ONS FOR ADDITIONAL MONEY

    Similar to print, the more value-added elements you can include with your online article, the more valuables you can request from the editor. Only the online medium provides you with far more options for supplementary materials than print's staple photos and illustrations. An article about the best restaurants in Rome could include audio clips so readers actually hear how to order the local specialties in Italian. Fashion articles could include short video clips so readers see how the clothing moves on the body. Even links can be packaged as a comprehensive sidebar of resources, warranting comprehensive side money for your supplementary work.

    LIMIT THE GENRE OF USE

    I've always tried to resell my print articles to publications with noncompeting readerships, but it took a while before I thought of doing it with my online articles. I had mistakenly assumed that every online publication shared the same readership: "People using the Internet." Then I read an article on negotiating by Todd Pitock, a print and online writer who formerly served as the chairperson of the NWU's Journalism Division. He explained the importance of defining the specific online market in your contract. "For instance," he wrote, "you might give TodaysAngler.com a three-month license that's exclusive to all fishing-related websites only." I finally realized that online readerships are as distinct as print readerships, and that I could negotiate genre limitations into my online market contracts - and bring in extra freelance money from multiple e-sales to noncompeting publications.

    LIMIT THE DURATION OF USE

    Another way to bump up your online income is by restricting the duration of the rights you grant. A disturbing number of online market contracts ask for rights to use your article online "in perpetuity." That's forever and that's a mighty long time. They often refer to this use as "archiving" your article on their website. I often refer to this use as "unfair," and instead suggest a use limited to three months, six months, nine months or, at most, one year, with the option to renew each subsequent year at a certain price, if they still want the article. I've found most publications extremely flexible about this clause. They recognize the inequity of making a lifetime of money on your article when you got paid for it once, the same way you would've been paid for a one-time print article. Worst-case scenario, you can always diffuse the situation and secure your rights with the catch phrase "on terms to be negotiated." No one's bound to anything, and you get to negotiate with an editor who has later decided that he really wants to use your work.

    The annual renewal fee for subsequent online use is usually lower than the original fee. For example, after the agreed-upon one year of use expired on the bulk sale I had made to that post-college website, I then secured an additional $125 each for eight of the 15 short reprints I had originally sold for $250 a piece.

    What happened to the other seven pieces? I chose to have their electronic rights revert back to me. I knew the marketplace well enough to know that I could sell the online use of them for more than $125 each to other online publications. And who knows what I might make from negotiating the sale of each additional use after that?

    Negotiating electronic rights and rates isn't easy. But it gets easy. Whether you're advocating for fair compensation in your next print contract's e-clause or your next online market contract, your future of better money and fairer treatment will make it far worth your while.


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