Frustration

I'm having a frustrating day. I pitched a national first thing Monday morning with something very topical - just an op-ed piece worth a mere £85, but it would have helped plug my book. Three emails and 2 chase-up phone calls later, I got a polite but very firm no.

This morning, I flung an op-ed post together on my other blog about MPs' expenses and it's been picked up and run with all over Twitter, media websites and the blogosphere. It's nice that people are taking what I write seriously, to the point they are spreading it across cyberspace for me, but apart from the publicity I have earned exactly £0.

Frustrated doesn't begin to cover it. I know things are tough in journalism right now but it's infuriating that I can't get paid even a paltry sum for a piece on disability, while a throwaway piece I did purely for myself to let off steam is probably going to see my blog ratings go stratospheric.

At least I've got 2 new jobs lined up for the rest of the month, copy-editing for a couple of clients - 1 regular, 1 new. That'll take the pain away a bit as my finances are looking rather iffy just now. I'm not in a unique position - other colleagues are also struggling and it's been a trending topic today on certain hack forums. I still have to pay the bills though...

More payment woes

This seems to have been the week for payment problems among quite a few freelance friends. On quite a few of the forums/email groups I use, it has been a hot topic of late. For me, this was the week that I finally saw clearance of a payment that was due to me at the start of March. That particular client has now been dropped, even though I was offered a regular contract.

My payment terms are a bog-standard 30 days and I apply this to all clients for whom I edit, proofread or do commercial writing. It's rather different when it comes to journalism - often it's payment on publication, which might be weeks away. Some papers pay at the end of the following the month of publication, which is even worse. There are some good payers around, including a national that pays within 30 days of the date on the invoice, and some small magazines that do actually understand that freelances need to eat and pay bills.

This particular client has a policy of 42 days from commission. I agreed to these terms because it all seemed very straightforward and there was plenty of work on offer. And the publisher was what you might call an international institution. So I grafted and filed and waited. And waited. And waited. And 17 days after my money was due, I was still waiting. So I sent an email asking why I hadn't been paid as promised. Back came the reply apologising for the delaying and saying my invoices had been prioritised. This was followed by the offer of a contract.

A fortnight later I was still waiting, so I fired off a polite but angry mail saying how very disappointed I was to still be awaiting payment (and rejecting the contract). This being an overseas client, I next received notice of an e-cheque being paid into my PayPal account. The cheque took 6 days to clear, bringing my wait for payment to a grand total of 13 weeks. Worse, as well as the small fee PayPal took for allowing me to receive funds, the publisher charged me a fee to get paid, which was subtracted from the cheque. It wasn't a huge amount but I find the notion of being charged an admin fee to be paid highly objectionable. And it's not as if this international institution couldn't afford a few dollars.

You can see why I dropped this client.

Bad payment practices are rife in this industry, which is why I post about them so often. I've been fortunate in not having any clients who didn't pay at all. I'm ruthless about dropping clients who think it's fine to delay payment for as long as they can get away with it - I will never work for them again once payment has finally cleared. And I'm wary of new clients too - for commercial writing work I almost always ask for a deposit upfront.

It's awful to have to be so suspicious of clients because I want to be able to trust them. Experience shows, though, freelances need to have their radar on constantly.

Monkeys and peanuts revisited

Matthew Stibbe, over on his very interesting Bad Language blog, has written today about paying monkeys peanuts.

As regular readers are probably sick of hearing, late payment is my bete noire. The other thing that really raises my hackles is shoddy rates for the job. No point in repeating what Matthew has so eloquently said already, so I'll just expand on it.

A particular hate of mine is those wretched bid sites such as Elance, where writers are encouraged to compete against each other by offering ever lower rates to win a job. I don't wish to single Elance out - it's not the only one by a long chalk. Then there are the job boards that profess to offer "opportunities" to writers and editors - jobs that offer US$10 per article, for example, or an editing rate of £8 per hour.

Worse is the rife practice - at least in the UK - of offering desperate journalism wannabes internships that last for up to 6 months. Unpaid, of course. Quite apart from the fact that this is slavery by any other name, such openings discriminate. Most of the media is based in London, which as we all know is outrageously expensive to live in. Only those with wealthy parents who are happy to support their offspring for such a long period of unpaid "work experience" are in a position to wangle such positions. Thus eliminating at a stroke those with immense talent from poorer backgrounds, who have no possibility to take up such an internship, because they have to work to support themselves.

The unpaid internship is a hot topic of debate across my trade right now. But that aside, even if you've gained the experience you still have to find work. Which throws you straight back into the arena of shoddy rates for the job. Any wordsmith worth their salt will probably steer clear of the bid sites (unless you are seriously desperate to pay the bills this month), but it angers me that some of the sites I regularly browse to sniff out any gems of an opportunity seem to have no policy on pay when it comes to accepting ads. One site I use, Write This Moment, has a great jobs board, but does not distinguish between work offered at a reasonable rate and work offered at peanuts or nothing (except for the glory of seeing your name in print). I'm not singling them out - they are fairly typical of many job sites specialising in writer opportunities.

It would improve things in the industry enormously if job sites were to have some kind of policy on rates for the job and thus uphold a standard. To say, "you can't advertise here unless you offer a minimum rare of X". Because it would teach a lesson to every company that if you want skilled work you have to bloody well pay for it.

Otherwise you will indeed get monkeys.

Or desperate wannabes...

Late payment (revisited) and the NUJ

Late payment is a real bug bear of mine but I honestly hadn't expected to be kicking off about it yet again so early into 2008.

The following true story would be funny if it wasn't so bloody tragic and ironic.

A freelance colleague was commissioned by the National Union of Journalists to write an article on the issue of late payment for The Journalist, the union's magazine. The hack duly submitted an invoice and waited out the terms of payment, in this case 30 days. By the end of the payment period, no payment had been made by the NUJ. There then ensued a number of calls and emails, in which the journalist concerned was fobbed off with excuses about the Christmas period. And when they requested the statutory compensation and interest for late payment, as is their right, the response by The Journalist's editor was, apparently, laughter.

Now bear in mind that the NUJ prides itself on campaigning for better payment practice pretty much across the entire industry. Not to mention campaigning for better rates, ie above NUJ minimum (our journo in question had taken the NUJ's own advice on accepting this commission and asked for more money, only to be told the fee would be NUJ minimum!). The irony of a campaigning union failing to adhere to its own policy on this very issue is staggering. Not to mention the hypocrisy.

As freelances, we run businesses. And like all small businesses, we want to be paid on time so that we in turn can pay others, and our bills. Picture this scenario - you go to a supermarket, fill your trolley with groceries, queue at the till and are told "that'll be £100, please". Do you a) say "sorry, I'll pay you in 45 days' time, and then only if you chase me for payment" or b) pay up? It's not like we have a choice, is it? If you want to eat, you better be able to pay on the spot (unless you are the Queen, in which case you probably have a nice line of credit at Fortnum and Mason). Picture the same scenario when it comes to paying your mortgage, the gas bill, the phone bill, your plumber, the car mechanic who serviced your Skoda... Not one of these businesses will allow you not to pay until you feel like it. If you haven't shelled out within 30 days, you can expect a red bill, followed by legal action. And probably being cut off, in the case of your utilities.

Yet, for some reason, us freelances are expected to wait for payment until it's convenient. In some cases, this can be several months after publication. It is rife across the entire industry and only a very few publications pay promptly (such as The Guardian, which usually pays within a week). It's even worse when it's your own union that asks you to write about the problem then fails to cough up within the payment period and, to rub salt into the proverbial, refuses to pay up the statutory compensation and interest.

I'm not currently a member of the NUJ, for a number of reasons. Every time I'm on the verge of rejoining, an incident occurs that puts me right off again. This is one of them. And the NUJ wonders why it is so hard to recruit new members...

Times have changed. We are no longer in the world of the closed shop and 99% of members being in-house staff with a father of the chapel. Far more journalists work freelance these days and the NUJ needs to start looking after them seriously, rather than just paying lip service. And that includes paying on time when rank and file members write for its publications.

Late payment

I finally got paid by my late-paying client (client no. 2). The money turned up in my bank account sometime yesterday morning, a mere 21 days after the expiry of my 15-day payment terms. Four hours later, I was most amused to receive an email from my ex-client saying they no longer required my services. Hello? Did you not notice I failed to send you any copy last week? Obviously they did but it didn't occur to them that it was deliberate on my part.

Late payment is one of the hazards of being freelance. It ain't funny and it ain't clever but it goes with the territory. Some magazines or papers only pay on publication - that can be months away if your article is held over for any reason. Some publications over-commission as well, and never publish your article (this has not happened to me yet, touch wood) - I sometimes hear horror stories of hacks who filed copy 9 months earlier and are wondering, timidly, if they should ask for a kill fee. Hell, yes. If a journalist keeps their side of the deal and files the commissioned copy on time, they should absolutely invoice for it, even if it is not used.

One reason why us freelances love The Guardian so much is not because its rates are quite low, or even because of its woolly left-liberal middle-class politics. No, we love it because it pays promptly and efficiently. Get published in the Guardian and you can expect to see quids in your bank account within about 4 days of publication. If only all other publications were so considerate and took into account the fact that we have bills to pay and mouths to feed.

I dislike late payment as much as any other freelance does. I tend to be proactive, though, when it comes to getting my money. In the above case, it was a simple decision - to continue earning a regular few hundred pounds every month but deal with all the aggro of chasing invoices and - worst of all - being lied to as to why I hadn't yet been paid. Or find another client. I chose the latter.