When my classes get to the section on contracts, I explain kill fees this way: They’re like car insurance. You don’t like it, but if your car crashes and you don’t have insurance, you’re out all the money. If you do have insurance, at least you get something for your trouble. It’s not enough to make you whole, not by a long shot, but it’s better than nothing.
Metaphor aside, here’s how a kill fee works: You write an article and do everything right. You follow instructions or your query letter, you write the agreed-on number of words, you turn it in on time, it’s the expected professional quality. The editor has no quibble with all that but kills the article for some other reason. Maybe something in the news got ahead of your story. Maybe the subject died. Maybe the story got held long enough that the season changed, and the topic (food, fashion, etc.) is no longer timely. Maybe the magazine or newspaper got sold, and the new publisher doesn’t want to run a story on your topic.
If your contract – assuming you have one – includes a kill fee, this is when it kicks in. If your story gets killed in circumstances like these, no one sees it, so you get no glory. No byline. No clip. No full payment. What you do get is 25 percent or 33 percent or some other token of “go away and don’t sue us.” I’ve seen kill fees as low as 15 percent and as high as 50 percent.
If you have no kill fee, you get nothing. No byline, no clip, no payment. Zilch. I sure dislike kill fees, but I like zilch less.
So. Here’s a note I got from the managing editor of a magazine I wrote two articles for recently:
“Hi Ellen,
“I regret to inform you that the piece on [Article 1] was cut from our May/June issue and you will be receiving a kill fee of $67.50. The [Article 2], however, turned out well. Thank you for your understanding.
“Kindest regards,”
In the cartoon of the moment I read this email, you would see narrowed eyes and a dark cloud over my head.
Thank goodness they killed the small article and not the large one. But still. I was supposed to have two articles in the March/April issue, not one in who knows when. I was supposed to get paid the full amount. And all the people I interviewed were supposed to be quoted for all to see. All the time they gave me, their expertise, and poof. No article.
The kill fee in this case was about the smallest I’ve seen. Of course, just as with car insurance, we always hope we’ll never have to use it. It’s not something writers tend to negotiate; it feels like discussing a prenup when you’re swoonily in love. Preparing for things to go wrong when you’re shaking hands on an article both of you want and expect to turn out great.
So I gambled. But at least they killed the small article and not the large one. (And they’d better not!)
Copyright 2012 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.