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| Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2000 |
by Tabitha M. Powledge
The only gravy in the freelance life is that out-of-the-blue letter or phone call asking to reuse an article of yours. All you have to do is say yes and cash the check. It's free advertising and practically free money. Sometimes it's the only way you can eventually get a fair return on a piece that ended up taking a lot of time for too little money.
In the past this delightful surprise usually occurred only when the potential reuser is honest-and/or has a system already set up for collecting permissions and paying for reuse, like publishers of textbooks or books of readings. When a prof photocopied a piece for his course syllabus, for example, the writer would rarely see a penny.
Electronic databases have worsened our plight. Our pieces have been collected and remarketed by outfits like UnCover or EBSCO. They have pocketed a fee for each download, but none of it has gone to us.
Perhaps that is changing. Perhaps. But if so, it is also clear that reuse fees will no longer be free money. You will have to go to a bit of trouble to collect them. The trade-off for your investment of time is supposed to be that you recover royalties on a much larger percentage of reuses. Maybe.
As of mid-August, the picture was confused and confusing. That's when the National Writers Union (NWU) reached an agreement with Contentville, which offers, for a fee, searchable archives of downloadable articles from some 2000 magazines, plus legal documents, dissertations, speeches, screenplays, and writerly miscellany. The agreement provides that, once a writer has asserted ownership to an article, Contentville will either pay the writer 30 percent of the fee it gets when it sells the article-or remove it from the database. A particularly nice touch is that the agreement is supposed to be retroactive. If your article has already been sold, you can still collect your 30 percent. (The 30 percent is "minus a small administrative fee," which remains unspecified. Contentville has only been in existence a few months, so the retroactive payments aren't likely to amount to much. Another uncertainty is that, as of mid-August, the agreement had not been finally approved.)
The Contentville agreement was concluded with an organization set up by the National Writers Union (NWU), the Publications Rights Clearinghouse. (No, not the Publishers Clearinghouse; don't expect Ed McMahon show up at your place waving a huge royalty check.) PRC is supposed to operate the way similar agencies operate in the music biz, where every time a work is played, the artist and usually the composer get a little money. NWU claims, "the PRC has paid thousands of dollars in royalties to Isabel Allende, Nicholson Baker, Todd Gitlin, Erica Jong, Barbara Kingsolver, and many others." Let us hope all of us number among the last category.
In order for that to happen, you have to give PRC permission
to act as your agent in licensing secondary rights to your articles.
The NWU Web site explains: "These articles then become part
of the PRC's 'inventory.' When the PRC signs an agreement with
a secondary user, it collects the copyright fees from that publisher
and distributes the royalties to its enrollees." You don't
need to be an NWU member to sign up, and for the moment, it's
free. Moreover, this arrangement is not exclusive, so you can
license your secondary rights elsewhere, too [http://www.nwu.org].
PRC licenses rights to its inventory of articles and books to
publishers and databases. In addition to Contentville, it currently
has royalty agreements with UnCover and the Copyright Clearance
Center.
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If it can be faxed, then you can do two things that may bring in a little money. Register the article with PRC; UnCover pays PRC $3 for permission to fax an article to a customer, and PRC sends the writer $2.40.
The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) is said to be the largest licensor of photocopy reproduction rights. The PRC agreement allows writers to set their own royalty rates, which are paid (minus 9 to 15 percent) each time a licensed user photocopies a registered work. Lots of details and explanation of procedures about this on the NWU Web site; see also CCC's site at http://www.copyright.com.
Still more confusion. If you have been an NASW member for a few years, there's a good chance you are already signed up with the Authors Registry. This is a clearinghouse for royalty payments for writers too, set up in 1995 by the Authors Guild, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Association of Authors' Representatives, and the Dramatists Guild.
Many of us signed up for the Registry (through Diane McGurgan) when it was new. To find out if you are one of them, and/or if your contact information is correct, send a query to staff@authorsregistry.org. When I asked, they answered overnight. If you aren't registered and you want to be, get in touch with Diane, diane@nasw.org. There's a short form to fill out and a fee of $10 [http://www.webcom.com/registry], but they prefer you sign up via Diane so they can be sure you're an NASW member.
Although the Registry claims to have distributed over $1 million to authors, I have been able to unearth no NASW members among them. One problem may be that it appears the Registry has so far been able to persuade only a limited number of publications to participate-among them Harper's, Cooking Light, Travel & Leisure, and Food & Wine. These are not, by and large, folks we are likely to write for.
Please note that you can claim reuse fees only if you own the article. If you never signed a contract, you almost certainly do-even if you never registered it with the Copyright Office. If you did sign one, check it. If you agreed to anything other than first serial rights, you may not be entitled to royalties for reuse. If this is Greek to you, Joel Shurkin explained copyright ins and outs succinctly and amusingly in the last issue of ScienceWriters (First Commandment: Thou Shalt Hold On to Thy Copyright, SW, Spring 2000, p. 30)
Please note too that, as far as I can determine, these agreements and databases seem to cover only stuff that is printed on paper. Maybe that's just because Web-based publishing is too new. Or maybe because of the highly restrictive contracts most Web sites offer-and decline to negotiate. Or maybe because nobody's gotten around to collecting them. Or maybe I'm wrong; if so, please apprise me.
Please note also that, delicious as your pieces are, the demand for them may be, how shall I put this, modest. Jeff Hecht is among our most prolific and widely published members. Here's his reality check: "Another reason we aren't seeing any reprint fees may be that reprints aren't selling very well. I found something like 67 of my articles offered on the UnCover service, some 60 of which were not theirs to offer. When I filled out the claim form, I found they had sold only five articles, four of which were illegitimate. So we're talking something like 7 percent sales for what is a pretty comprehensive service. Maybe there isn't really all that much market out there for this sort of one-at-a-time reprint service."
So, while you should probably take the time to fill out the forms and pay your various fees, the bottom line is that there may be no bottom line.
You could have found out about the above and gotten rich off your royalties months ago if you subscribed to NASW's freelance listserv, the permanent floating must-have e-mail chat list. Calling it chat is a canard. There's occasional frivolity, but lots and lots of the good stuff-fabulous, hard-won advice on contracts, disputes with editors and clients, what to charge, what ISP, tape recorder, headset and everything else to buy. An essential for running your business. I mention this because I've recently gotten a couple of e-mails asking me about the listserv. Which made me realize that not all NASW freelances had signed up already. What a shock.
Also check out the all-new NASW Freelance Web site, http://www.nasw.org/mem-maint/freelance. It is slowly acquiring content provided by us content providers. Some of it is amusing. All of it is highly recommended. And your contributions are warmly invited. Drop a note to me, tam@nasw.org, or the Webmaster, fredpowledge@nasw.org.
Freelance ListservHow to Subscribe The nasw-freelance mailing list is for discussion of anything related to free-lance science writing. To subscribe, send e-mail to majordomo@nasw.org with the message: subscribe nasw-freelance. To send a message so that everyone subscribed to the list will see it, send it to nasw-freelance@nasw.org. Your post will be bounced automatically if you're not subscribed to nasw-freelance or if you attempt to post from a different address than the one that's subscribed. All past posts to nasw-freelance are available through the hypermail archive. Although anyone in the world may subscribe to or post to nasw-freelance, only NASW members with an nasw.org username and password may access the hypermail archive. If you do not wish each message from the list to land in your mailbox individually, a digest form of the list is available that combines all the day's postings into a single message. To subscribe to the digest, send e-mail to majordomo@nasw.org with the following message: subscribe nasw-freelance-digest. |
Much buzz about Alta Vista's new search engine, Raging Search, and its own claims are anything but modest: "Raging Search is the premier search site on the Web . . . That means the most relevant results, the fastest search, and the easiest site to use." RS is said to make use of a pared-down group of sites, which is supposed to improve the relevance of results. So I finally gave it a whirl [http://www.ragingsearch.com]. Came away baffled. Yes, it is lots faster than Alta Vista [http://www.altavista.com]. But as far as I can see, it shares that venerable search engine's main disadvantage, too. It returns lots and lots of hits, but in no particular order.
Just for fun, I entered "Raging Search." Up came many links to comments about Raging Search, but in the first two pages of hits, no link to the RS main page itself. In fact, no links even to Alta Vista until page two, where it was number 13. Seems to me the claim "most relevant" doesn't stand up if RS can't even return its own main page among the first group of hits.
Google, by contrast, listed the RS main page first among its hits, which is exactly as it should be. Google remains my favorite search engine, although it seems to me its performance has fallen off a little in relevance since it added the option of searching categories directory-style (like Yahoo). That's a subjective assessment, and could well simply reflect the fact that I've used it a lot more since writing about it last. It's still my first choice [http://www.google.com].
Write about genetics? Excuse me, genomics? These days, who doesn't? Herewith, two little-known treasure maps to the genomics world, both free.
First, the New York Times has assembled a free archive of selected genetics coverage dating back more than a decade. It emphasizes the Human Genome Project, but covers other subjects too, such as social uses of genetics. Consult http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/genome-index.html for a collection of pieces from the year 2000. A text index of articles from 1990-1999 is at http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/genome-text-index.html.
Second, Nature has put together something it's calling its Genomics Gateway, a swell free collection of its own material. It is said to include all genome-related papers (plus many of the very valuable News and Views) from Nature and Nature Genetics-plus links to other major publications, plus a news service from both journals that covers research progress, policy issues, funding and ethical implications of genome sequencing, plus special sections it has published on topics like gene chips and proteomics, plus the inevitable links to other sites [http://www.nature.com/genomics].
Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org.