by Tabitha M. Powledge
The exact numbers are in dispute, but freelances now form a large percentage of NASW membership. By some counts, we may even be in the majority among “Active” members, a loose and unsatisfactory category meant to comprise those who commit journalism, more or less. NASW began as a social club for newspaper reporters, and until recently took little notice of us. Few freelances have held NASW office or even been on the board of directors.
So how much influence should freelances wield in NASW? You may be deciding that question within a few months. A proposed new NASW constitution is likely to come up for a mail vote, and to contain provisions that will determine your voting privileges and whether you can run for office yourself.
As I write, the committee that’s proposing revisions in the NASW constitution has not yet completed drafts of its recommendations, so I have not seen the final language. By the time you read this, I hope the proposals will have been posted on the NASW web site: www.nasw.org. If not, you can get a general idea of where the committee is headed from Richard Harris’s President’s Letter on page 12 of this issue of SW.
As forecast, NASW’s annual business meeting in February also took up our immortally divisive issue of how to classify members. The committee wants to rename “Active” members “Journalists” and the “Associate” members (mostly PIOs, PR people, and teachers) “Science Communicators.” The latter term is designed to grant more dignity to members who have long chafed under the “Associate” label and the second-class citizenship they feel it implies.
This seems fine, except that we need to be clear about the fact that this proposed name change is largely cosmetic. The committee has made almost no progress in deciding who fits into each of those categories. Not that I blame committee members much; it’s very nearly an impossible problem. But they have dealt with it by punting.
For most of us that will be a Good Thing, because it appears we will get to define ourselves (on the honor system) at membership renewal time, pretty much as we do now. However, new members will be defined by the membership committee, and potential officer candidates by the nominating committee. (Officers and a majority of board members will be limited, as they are now, to “Journalist,” formerly “Active,” members.)
These committees will not be provided with much in the way of guidelines for defining which category a particular member falls into. It’s often going to be a tough call in the case of freelances, because most of us do a variety of things. I’m a Journalist when I write trade books and articles for glossy newsstand magazines. But am I still a Journalist when I write for magazines put out by nonprofit organizations? When I write for a government web site? When I write the occasional report for a nonprofit or government agency?
The constitution committee also could not decide what proportion of a freelance’s work should determine his or her membership classification. Should it be judged by percentage of time spent (as many of us think reasonable) or by percentage of income? And what percentage? Is 51% enough, or do I have to do “real” journalism—whatever that turns out to be—90% of the time, or for 90% of my income?
For freelances who want to run for office, the honor system will not be enough; they will have to provide the nominating committee with evidence that they are indeed Journalists. We were assured at the business meeting that this does NOT mean providing the committee with tax records or other financial information. But the assurance was verbal, and we don’t know what other kinds of evidence the nominating committee will require. (Richard Harris suggested that freelances might be asked to write a letter justifying their self-classification.)
These True Life examples by no means exhaust the potential for quibbling and worse; if you are avid for more, see “The Free Lance” in the Summer 1997 issue of SW, pp.17-20, or on the web site. The point is that these taxonomic decisions are being handed off to two committees whose members will be permitted—even encouraged—to indulge their own inclinations in deciding whether a specific freelance is a Journalist.
In most cases, of course, the effect of that decision will be trivial. In some cases—especially when freelances want to run for NASW office—it may not be trivial at all. It can influence their careers and their incomes. And by expanding or contracting the number of freelances among officers and board members, membership classification can also shape the future of NASW.
It will be easier to know what to think of these potential changes when we see the actual wording of the constitutional proposals. The constitution committee has descended through several circles of hell, I’m sure, in attempting their drafts. At the moment I’m on the fence—but fretful. Yes, flexibility is a virtue at a time when the working life of a freelance science writer is so, um, miscellaneous. Maybe the committees will exercise that flexibility if our taxonomic boundaries are deliberately vague. But you don’t have to be a committed Hobbesian to foresee that leaving those decisions solely to human beings on committees offers lots of opportunities for arbitrariness, backbiting, favoritism, vindictiveness, and just plain dislike. Present company, of course, excepted.
The Ides Of April: Freelance Taxes
The NASW workshops, by recent tradition held just before the AAAS meeting begins, are threatening to get as big as the meeting itself. This year they expanded to 2–1/2 days, and were so stuffed with nuggets useful to freelances that it’s going to take more than one column to cover them.
Two of the workshops were designed specifically for freelances by Kathryn S. Brown, who didn’t get a chance to revel in the fruit of this labor because she was at home awaiting the fruit of labor of a different kind.
The workshop on the business of freelancing focused, of course, on money matters. Since all of us are tangled up in Schedule C at this time of year, that’s a good place to start. (The other, on new freelance niches, will be tackled anon.)
Julian Block (no relation to H&R), a tax attorney and author of Julian Block’s Tax Avoidance Secrets, an annual guide, offered very basic tax information for the self-employed. If you have been in business for a while, you probably know the basics already (or, one hopes, your accountant does). If you’re a new freelance, you need more tax help than a brief summary here can (or should) give. Block advised the perplexed to call 1-800-TAX-HELP (“not an oxymoron”) and ask for one or more of the following free IRS publications:
#17 (line-by-line help with Form 1040)
#334 (instructions for Schedule C, a must-have tax guide for small business)
#505 (explanation of quarterly estimated payments)
#587 (covering business use of your home and equipment)
#910 (a guide to free tax services, including a summary description of all
IRS publications)
They will arrive by snailmail, he said, in about 10 days, or you can pick them up at a local IRS office. [Public libraries often have them too, along with stacks of the relevant forms. They are also on the Web, naturally; consult “Tools,” below.]
Cash Flow: Freelance Tactics
One of the few pecuniary pleasures of freelancing is the extremely handy tax breaks available to the self-employed; they will absolutely help you keep more of what you earn. But what we all really want to know is how to earn more to begin with. So the main profit of the session was the observations on managing—and increasing—your cash flow. They came from Ingrid Wickelgren, a savvy freelance who has written for the New York Times and Science, among others. A digest of her excellent advice [with a few bracketed annotations by me]:
Be realistic about your cash flow expectations. Even if you work constantly, a check will not appear in your mailbox every two weeks. If you write mostly features, you’ll be lucky if you get one every two months. The checks will be more frequent if you write short pieces regularly.
Different publications have different payment policies. Payment on acceptance is not necessarily preferable to payment on publication; if a publication appears frequently it may process invoices fairly fast. [This requires abandoning a sacred freelance shibboleth that payment on publication is equivalent to writing on spec and for amateurs only, but it’s quite true. If you write for weeklies or online publications, your piece will almost always appear before your check does.] Ask your editor what you should expect. How long it will take to rule on a piece? How fast is the accounting department?
Forestalling payment problems can depend partly on how professional and businesslike you are. Send an invoice, especially with new clients. [Once upon a time, invoices were for plumbers, not writers. Now they are often required. Put that on the list of things to ask a new editor. And the longer you wait to send it in, the longer it will take to get paid.]
Keep track of the process. Two weeks is plenty of time for an editor to read a piece. [Yes, indeed. But please practice not holding your breath, especially with features.] Remember that an editor has no control over the accounting department. [On the organization chart, yes. But at some pubs editors can wheedle, nag, and/or shame a sluggish accounting department, and have often done so successfully on my behalf.]
Be choosy about whom you work for. Well-known national publications generally do what they say they will. Unknowns should get more scrutiny: post a question on a writers’ listserv or chat group, get a contract, ask very specific questions.
Stick up for yourself. After you’ve written a few pieces for a client, ask for a raise. You won’t always get it; the client may have firm policies about pay. But ask. Also ask for more when it’s a rush job or last-minute rescue of someone else’s piece.
Beginners must pay their dues by getting various kinds of writing experience—internships and jobs—before they start to freelance. It’s also essential to build up a savings account to live on before you start freelancing.
The most fundamental problem is getting steady work. Wickelgren’s admirable advice:
1. Make contacts with editors—ideally, in person. Face-to-face contact will help you sell your queries. Apply for jobs even if you don’t want them. Go to meetings such as the NASW workshops and introduce yourself.
2. Be flexible about topic. Even limiting yourself to biomedicine may
be too narrow, especially if you are a new freelance.
3. Don’t overbook. Your work won’t be as good. [Yes but. The fact
is it’s often hard to know you’re overbooked until you’re
overbooked. Freelance writing is a somewhat seasonal business, busier in
the late-winter/early-spring and in the fall, slower in the summer, all
but dead in December. You take an assignment out of desperation, and then
something you dearly want to write suddenly catches the fancy of a previously
dawdling editor who now needs it last week. A piece you believed was going
to sail easily through editing—hope springs eternal—gets stuck
in the mud, and unexpected revises eat up the time you planned for another
project. Your cat gets sick. Your kid gets sick. Despite your firm policy
against it, sometimes even YOU get sick. The enduring rule is: It Always
Takes Longer Than You Think.]
4. Study the publications you’re writing for. Look at the lead. Does it employ anecdotes? Personal stories? Analogies? What words are defined? Do they like a little history or some statistics? The more you get right the first time, the more likely you are to be asked back.
5. Don’t do it your way, do it their way.
These tactics have been so successful for her that Wickelgren says she writes very few queries; editors mostly call her. She sends queries when she wants her work to appear in a particular publication or when she is excited about a particular idea.
Wickelgren’s concluding advice was cheerful and upbeat:
Web Sites: Freelance Tax Tools
If the 800-number Julian Block cited (above) doesn’t persuade you that the new IRS is striving to appear user-friendly, take a look at The Digital Daily, the agency’s new webzine. The designer studied at the School of High-School Humor (Chaste Whimsy Division), but you can bypass that by selecting the text-only version. I am always kindly disposed toward a site that offers a choice of graphic or text version. Once there, you will find honestly useful info on such topics as electronic filing, the taxpayer advocate, what help is available from the IRS, and even—should Schedule C signal that you ought to depart the freelance life—employment opportunities. Also a full list of IRS publications AND forms, plus copies of them all in several downloadable/printable formats.
But if you’re a bear for tax lore, the Tax and Accounting Sites
Directory is the bookmark for you. No graphics, no clutter, and no obvious
political axe to grind. Just an immense searchable trove of links to what
seems like every conceivable site related to these topics. All publications
and forms as above, of course, and links to IRS sites, but also tax tips,
info on federal tax law, state taxes, and international taxes, tax software,
books and articles, associations, and a divertingly eclectic list of policy/reform
groups ranging from the Flat Tax Home Page to the Brookings Institution.
Also lots of links to accounting sites that I didn’t check out, and
an enormous amount of useful miscellany: sites on employment, investments,
government, databases, law—and other directories. The depth of this
site is extraordinary. You can also get to online tax prep services from
here; they might be worth checking out, although your taxes are likely to
be too complex for such treatment. Or so I sincerely hope.