Slow Paying Magazines

Everyone knows that all magazine publishers pay on time, exactly when they say they will. Right?  Of course not. Some publishers are great. Others react like molasses.

As we all know some publishers pay on acceptance, others including most electronic publications pay on publication--which in some cases means two or three months after publication.

In my own career I haven’t paid too much attention to which was which. I always liked to have a mix of pay on acceptance and pay on publication. Why? Because it smoothed the flow of checks.  If I sent out enough articles every month it seemed to create about the same income month after month. It got annoying however if I waited months for a check or checks that never came. I had one check that arrived six months late with no signature on it. When I brought it to the publisher’s attention, he said to send it back and he would sign it. He never did and he finally said he wasn’t going to. Another pay on publication magazine an article for a year and a half then sent it back saying they couldn’t use it. So what can you do about this?

Price the Article

Beginners can’t do this. But once you have sold the editor a few articles. Pricing your article on the query clarifies what you expect. Writer’s Market lists what the magazine pays. Over my career I worked a lot in trade journals and I used a publication called Standard Rate and Data. Advertising Agencies use it to determine the ad rates for a magazine. . I figured out over the years that a fair rate for trade journals was 1/8 to ¼ of the page rate a magazine charged their advertisers.  If they charged $2000 a page and they had a fair amount of advertising, a fair price for an article would be $500. And that is what I would put on the query. Did it work? Nearly always. This does not hold true for consumer magazines like Reader’s Digest or Family Circle. No magazine is going to pay you $15,000 for even when they take in ten to 15 times that for an article.

Ask for a Contract

If you are writing an article on speculation, you won’t get either an assignment or a contract, but after you have sold the magazine a few articles and the editor realizes you are dependable and do good work, he or she will assign the article to you and give you a contract if you ask for it (there are a lot of variations of this, especially for smaller magazines.  This contract should spell out the price, the due date and the rights you are selling. Also make sure the accounting office has your social security number. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been called for this—sometimes long after I thought the check should be there.

So you’ve waited five or six weeks and the check hasn’t arrived. Now what. I usually e- mail the editor with a polite note asking him to check on it for me. Another two or three weeks go by and no check. The publisher and editor now get a polite note detailing the history and asking for payment. Be sure and go through your history of payments the amount agreed on and who asked for the article.

Don’t give up. If you don’t get payment. E-mail and call every few weeks. With persistence you usually get your money--eventually.

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