RESALE

posted by James Reel

    Patty Mitchell finds a “new” (not archived) article online that looks like something she read months ago, and wonders how this sort of thing happens. Here’s how it works.
    One of the best ways for a freelance writer to make money is to sell essentially the same story to more than one publication. This is not the source of unlimited bounty, of course, because publications that cover the same subject or have the same readership don’t want to print each other’s articles. If I write something for Strings, I’m not going to pitch the same idea to Strad. A feature or review I write for Fanfare will no way, nohow show up in American Record Guide. If I sold something to the New Yorker (as if), I’d be a fool to pitch it to The Atlantic, too. But if the publications cover different areas of interest, they’re fair game. You see this a lot in newspaper travel sections. Newspapers pay very little for freelance work, on the few occasions they’ll buy freelance work, but they don’t compete with one another (except in a few remaining two-paper markets, like Tucson). So a freelance travel writer is free to crank out an account of her latest vacation in Mexico and pitch it to a hundred papers around the country. Maybe a dozen will bite. That probably adds up to about $1,000 toward the writer’s bar tab.
    Sometimes a magazine will authorize reprints of articles, and some magazines even pay writers for those reprints. Strings, for example, has been doing a lot of this lately. A piece I’ve done for Strings may be condensed and re-used in the magazine’s Teen Strings spinoff, and I’ll get a whopping $25 added to the $300 to $600 I’ve already been paid for the story. Occasionally the magazine will authorize re-use in an unrelated publication. A couple of weeks ago I interviewed someone who said he’d just seen my profile of somebody or other in a Suzuki magazine. This was news to me, but apparently the fine print says “Reprinted with permission of Strings magazine.”
    Money doesn’t always change hands. In the past few months I’ve been contacted by the organizers of music festivals in England and Boston who saw something I wrote and wanted to use it in their program booklets, and I gave the go-ahead without charge. Also, once a publication buys an article, that publication rather than the author owns all rights to the work (unless there are contractural stipulations to the contrary). Strings didn’t need my permission to hand off my article to the Suzuki publication, and I’m not sure that the last contract I signed required the magazine to pay me for such extra uses. (Web rights are a completely different, contentious issue I won’t go into here.)
    But a smart writer will do the recycling himself. Different elements of interviews I conducted with border activists found their way into separately crafted articles in the Tucson Weekly, the National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners and Salon. I’ve reworked program notes I wrote 15 years ago for Arthur Weisberg’s Ensemble 21 into magazine material, and revamped stuff I did for the Arizona Daily Star in the 1990s for liner notes for a couple of CD labels and then entries for the All Music Guide. All that material, plus blurbs I wrote around 1999-2000 for Musical Heritage Society, literary essays I concocted around that time for the e-zine The Whole Wired World, and all sorts of other stuff will regularly go into the blender and come out in some new form. It sure beats original thinking.