Car insurance

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.

The joy of teaching

I teach amateurs. That’s the point: “Getting Published” is a course for beginners, and most people who take it have never been published, at least not for pay. Maybe they’ve had just a short item in a company newsletter or a letter to the editor in the newspaper, but they have dreams and ambitions and questions, and they bring those to class to explore the options.

In the very first minutes, I tell them that some writers have an abundance of talent but never get published because they lack confidence or the basic knowledge and skills to connect with an editor correctly to sell an idea to the right market. On the other hand, some writers don’t have talent but get published regularly because they do have confidence and know just how to get the right editors’ attention with the right information. My aim, I say, is to draw out of these students their natural talent and add to it the nuts-and-bolts skills they need to research a story idea, write a terrific query letter, find and connect with the right editor at the right market, and construct an article that works so well that the clip helps win the next assignment in an even better market and for a bigger paycheck.

As you might expect, in addition to dreams and questions, students bring a range of talent. Most, frankly, aren’t very good. They can’t write, or they don’t grasp the concept of a query, or their style clashes with the markets they choose to pursue. Maybe they’ll develop after finishing the class. Many or most won’t stick with it, which is okay; I’ve taken enough classes (ballet and pottery come to mind) that were interesting and worthwhile but for which my modicum of talent wasn’t enough to propel me to continue. Taking classes pushes our boundaries a bit, tests our abilities and inclinations, makes us a little better at something, and that’s all to the good.

Every once in a while, through – every couple of years – a student comes along who’s a natural. Reading the first paper by such a student, a teacher’s eyebrows go up: Two paragraphs in, and I’ve used the red pen only to fix punctuation! The lead is a grabber, one sentence follows from another, use of similes and metaphors is sophisticated, vocabulary is a match for the market, quotes are appropriate, and attention does not wander from beginning to end. Wow, I think, we’ve got a live one.

One of my first classes at Montgomery College had such a student. He wrote about motorcycles. I know nothing about motorcycles, but his query and article were so good that I found them riveting. Something similar happened this semester. My only male student wrote about the pros and cons of a particular model of boat, then about a dangerous sailing adventure. I know nothing about boats, either, but these were so well written that I wanted to read more. The only red marks I made were to fix spelling, subject-verb agreement, and the occasional run-on sentence.

On the last day, I tell students I’ll look for their bylines. I always hope to see them, and sometimes I have. I never saw the motorcycle guy’s byline, but surely that’s only because I wasn’t looking in the right magazines; I have no doubt he’s been published somewhere. Same with the sailor: An editor will say yes soon, and he’ll know the joy of a bylined article. To a writer and editor, that is part of the joy of teaching.

Copyright 2011 Ellen M. Ryan. All rights reserved.