bête noire for freelancers even when they have a job. Let’s say you write an article for a magazine in June. You do the research, the interviews, transcribe the interviews (which takes forever), write it all up and do a second, possibly a third, draft or more. This sometimes means re-writing the entire piece because the editor who signed off on the original angle had a mercurial change of heart. Suddenly the piece about a celebrity’s English rose garden becomes a piece about their collection of mid-century modern American furniture. Already the ratio of time spent versus fee to be paid means you’re working for lower than minimum wage and the editor never offers to kick in a few more bucks for her incessant second thoughts. Yet, without complaining, you do all the work required and meet your deadline—which the magazine treats as so crucial it’s as if the consequences of not doing so will be cataclysmic for the entire planet.
Then you send in an invoice, and you wait. And wait. Days, weeks pass. Finally, you email and you’re informed that they don’t pay invoices for articles until the issue you wrote for is on the newsstand, which generally means a two-to-three month lag time. That’s their policy—no exceptions. So you grumble about it to a couple of friends and let it go. Right after Labor Day, you start checking your mailbox. Weeks pass, no check. You email the business office of the magazine and they get back to you a week later to tell you the check is in the system. They say this as if there’s nothing any mere mortal can do to hurry the process along. More waiting ensures and more disappointment.
Often what’s going on here is that the magazine has cash flow problems and are waiting for advertising dollars to flow in, but that shouldn’t be your problem. You don’t go into a restaurant, order a meal, then tell them you’ll pay the bill when your cash flow situation improves. The magazine ate the verbal soufflé you prepared, and now they need to pay up. Of course that argument will only guarantee you’ll never get hired again.
The typical outcome is that the check eventually shows up, and when it does you become acutely aware of just how little you’re being paid for so much work and aggravation. It could lead you to reconsider your career choice or conclude that writing for magazines is a job only rich kids can afford.
There are also money issues on the higher end of the payment scale. Writing for Hollywood can seem like nirvana in comparison to freelancing for magazines but there are glitches that can create havoc…or worse.
Take the case of a writer, who got a deal to write a television movie, an adaptation based on a nonfiction book. Her agent closed the deal, then gave her the green light to start working on a detailed outline. These kinds of outlines can run up to twenty pages, or more. It can takes weeks, months, to complete—even longer if your producer (or network executive) keeps changing the show’s direction. Re-writing is part of the gig. Continually taking apart a twenty-page outline is a life sentence.
In this case, the writer worked for months without receiving any financial compensation. When she called her agent to ask what was holding up her commencement check (due on signing the deal) plus the check for finally turning in the revised outline, she was told that the network was waiting for the author of the book—the source material for the script—to close her deal.
This is the moment when screaming “WTF” is definitely understandable.
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