Writing fir nothing or next to nothing for a magazine whose editor et al are all being paid is not my idea of good business. As Marcus Berkmann says in his book How To Be A Writer (review coming soon), if you write for nothing and the people you’re writing for are being paid, you’re a mug.
Having said that, I do believe there is (or could be) mileage in writing for relatively low returns, in some circumstances. I’ve outlined those circumstances below, and updated the list a bit since I first wrote this in 2021.
£10 note, by Terry Freedman
Back in the late 80s and early 90s I wrote regularly for a weekly computing magazine. It didn’t pay very much by the standards of other (monthly) computer mags, and a friend of mine kept on trying to encourage me to stop writing for it on the grounds that (a) I could earn more from the other mags and (b) I was worth more than what they were paying me.
Nevertheless, I continued to write for the weekly mag despite the relatively low pay. Why?
Writing for the weekly mag and writing for monthly mags were not mutually exclusive. It wasn’t as if writing for the weekly one used up the time I could have been spending writing for the monthly ones.
The editors of the weekly mag liked to have series. Thus if I proposed, and had accepted, a 10 part series on, say, how to use Microsoft Access, it meant I had a more or less guaranteed income for the next couple of months. That is quite important for a freelance writer.
Writing a series also meant that I could plan the “episodes” right at the outset, rather than having to start afresh each week with a new topic and a new proposal.
Writing frequently for the same outlet means that you become very familiar with their house style, so the writing is easier and quicker. You don’t have to keep double-checking that you used an abbreviation correctly or adopted the preferred spelling.
I’ve never tested this, but I suspect that if you are relying on a magazine article to raise your profile, it’s probably more effective to have readers seeing your name every week than every month or two.
Writing book reviews is unlikely to make you rich beyond measure. But I find that writing reviews of books in my areas, which are education, literature, writing, culture, has benefits quite apart from the pecuniary ones:
I am able to keep up with developments in those areas.
It’s good for keeping my name in people’s minds.
Even one-off or very sporadic commissions for a low-paying outlet can be worthwhile, as long as they have a good-sized readership and let you put your signature (a very short bio) in the article.
So the next time you’re offered the opportunity to write for a periodical that doesn’t pay as much as you’d like, don’t just dismiss it out of hand.
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