freelancing And then – negotiate!


BOTHTHE Rate for the Job and the suggested rates in the Freelance Fees Guide can offer only a starting point for negotiating. Negotation is an art, not a science. You can learn what works for you only through trial and error. Your confidence in the value


of your work to the publication you approach is your biggest asset in getting paid properly. Almost always, it’s best to


get them to name a price. This, of course, may lead on to a little dance in which they try to get you to name your price... so,


dance. If you give in, say “OK, £400”, and they agree within 10 seconds, you know you’ve under-sold yourself. Ouch. If they name a price that’s


less than one-and-a-third times a current price for comparable work in the Rate for the Job... snort derisively, tut-tut, whimper ironically, whatever fits your personal style – and start haggling. For more on negotiating and


links to much more information, go to www. londonfreelance.org/rates/ negotiat.html


Authority or its predecessors. Officials have sternly pointed out that, in law, a rate sheet not based on an open market survey is regarded as price-fixing. Those who use it would constitute a cartel. It may seem silly to compare freelance journalists to the top-hatted, cigar-munching capitalists who ran the steel and railway cartels of yore but there it is. Indeed, until September 2017, freelance fees guides and freelance negotiations were forbidden by law in Ireland. After a long campaign by the NUJ in Ireland, alongside other unions with significant freelance memberships, the Competition Amendment Act came into force. This provides that collective bargaining and agreements covering ‘dependent freelance workers’ – with particular mention of journalists – is legal. The Rate for the Job wants to hear about rates paid in euros, too. What, though, became of Virginia Woolf’s ‘fabulous sums’?


getting more than those who do not. In future we hope to be able to check for discrimination by disability status, too. This will be possible only if many more diverse people tell us what they’ve been paid. We can compare rates for writing 1,000 words and for work paid by the day, such as sub-editing. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to compare rates for other kinds of work – photography in particular – because the jobs are so diverse. One lesson we have learned from studying the rates reported, is that if we are to get a clear picture, it is important that people being paid the highest rates report them. It is also important to tell us of derisory offers, including


those you have refused. London Freelance Branch magazine The Freelance from time to time nominates publications for the Trireme Award – named for the woe-struck report by a member of “the worst terms since I was last chained to the oars” and the image this evoked of an Ancient Greek rowing warship. These are not the only or even the largest benefits of sharing


rate data. It makes it legal for the NUJ to produce its Freelance Fees Guide. This can suggests rates only based on the Rate for the Job – as an open market survey. Every other UK organisation we know to have produced a rate sheet for media freelances has had a visit from the Competition and Markets


“


It would be remarkable if editors resisted any temptation to pay less than the going rate


Sadly, on 10 October 1937, she wrote to her sister that “We hear that Chabrun, my agent, is a suspected character. No hope of payment for my story I’m afraid.” So it seemed probable that her first instinct – do not “put pen to paper without a cheque” – was correct but somewhere she failed to follow it. Online attempts to discover more failed – until NUJ member Humphrey Evans got in touch about the Woolf rates. Not untypically, her agent’s name is mis-spelled in Woolf’s letters. Evans sent us to a 2012 article by Jessica Weisberg in the


New Yorker magazine on Jacques Chambrun’s shenanigans. It said he embezzled $30,000 from W Somerset Maugham by secretly negotiating the world rights to his books. When Ben Hecht ghost-wrote Marilyn Monroe’s memoir, published as My Story, Chambrun sold a scandalous passage to a UK tabloid for a £1,000 without Monroe or Hecht’s permission. The miscreant agent somehow managed to stay in business


into the 1950s: “In 1956, when he had no clients left, Chambrun started 16, a celebrity magazine for teenage girls…” If there had been a list calling authors’ attention to their


colleagues’ suspicions, he might not have got away with it for so long. And if only Woolf had had access to something like the Freelance Fees Guide to give her advice on collecting monies due.


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