How does pay work?

One of the biggest questions I had getting started was how pay would work.

If you're established and a good writer with articles in demand, you may be able to name a price when you pitch articles. This only works, though, if you're in demand and if publications are willing to go out of their normal pay rate to get your articles.

If you name your prices with your pitches, chances are you're limiting the number of acceptances you'll get. So in getting started, where the most important thing is simply getting articles published and building up clips, naming your own price is pretty much out of the question.

So, in most cases publications have their own pay rates, and they will tell you (or you should ask) when they tell you they're interested in your article. Some pay per word; some pay per article.

It's likely that pay will increase (or that you'll have the leverage to ask for a pay-rate increase) if you've worked with a certain publication for a long time.

Furthermore, pay rates don't always work as you might expect. Some large, famous publications pay little, but still get lots of pieces thrown at them because of their fame. Other publications, particularly industry publications or publications for businesses, pay better even though your audience is smaller and the prestige of writing is lower.

Since editors are busy people who like things that cut to the chase, I've found that it's best to slim down my email pitches. Thus, I don't mention payment in my emails. If my emails are too long, most editors will just ignore them. As a result, I wait until interest is expressed in an article before I mention pay, which publications usually have a set policy on.

There have been times when I've been asked what I normally get paid, which is hard to answer when you're getting started at freelancing. This seems to me like the beginning of a bargaining situation, which makes me uncomfortable, but I've always responded with a per-word figure that is on the mid to high range.

In sum, pay rates are not a huge difficulty, since most publications have their own rate policies. This saves the headache of having to haggle and argue over pay rates.