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To Pay or Not to Pay--
Who Pays Whom? Remember the days when you battled away alone at your typewriter, or maybe it was in the early days of the computer? Either way, writing was a pretty lonely business, and finding a market for what you had written was even more lonely. There was no easy route to finding out who wanted what. No matter whether you were a novelist trying to find a home for your 100,000 word epic, or a freelancer looking for a magazine to run your 500 word article, the only thing you could be sure of was getting so many rejection slips you never needed to buy wallpaper. But, of course, that’s all history. Now we have the Internet, where we can look up names of publishers, even get onto their websites and, bless their souls, they will often have submission requirements that we can download. As you start to find your way around, you uncover a host of sites just waiting to help you to sell your work. Some of them even claim that you will soon become a millionaire. You start going through them, one after the other, and at first it looks great; you can post your resume, or maybe an example of your work, and they assure you that you just have to sit back and demands for work will come pouring in. There are so very many of them that there just has to be a lot of work for you out there. Or is there? When you get to look at the small print, you find they want to you to pay them a monthly fee to let you look at whatever assignments listings (some call them "gigs," but exactly who is dancing is uncertain) that they happen to have. Again, that tantalizing offer of making lots of money is always hung out there somewhere, everywhere! Then you sit back and start to think. If I find a recognized literary agent to handle my novel, I don’t pay him. He gets commission when he has found me a publisher, a buyer. That’s how agents operate; you don’t pay them until they have sold something. And that makes sense because your agent has to work hard for you, and publishers know that he won’t try to sell rubbish, so it is a win-win situation (assuming, of course, that you can find an agent and persuade him that your work his worth his time and effort!). But these people who want you to pay them just to let you know who MIGHT buy something from you, are telling us something. They are hanging out a big flag that says, “I am going to make my money by offering to show these writers what’s out there, because there are a hell of a lot more writers looking for places to sell their work, than there are places wanting to buy them.” They can’t go wrong; they are selling only one thing-- HOPE-- because they know by selling hope, they will make a lot more cash than by selling reality. Selling reality means doing what an agent, someone acting upon your behalf, is supposed to do. He knows there are very many more wanting writing work than there is writing work to go around, so he has to operate on a very different basis. He only gets paid by commission-- remember, that’s after he has sold your stuff. So he is not running an advertising campaign, he is running first of all a selection campaign, because he has to make sure he doesn’t waste too much time trying to sell junk. He has to assess his clients and be discriminating or he won’t stay in business. So why would he want to do the job at all if it is so difficult? He knows there ARE very worthwhile opportunities out there for good writers, and as we have found, he will only try to sell work from the better end of the selling market. That means he will be selling to the better end of the buying market, because those publishers, magazine editors etc., will know that he won’t try to sell them junk, as his operation is not simply a set of on-line ‘situations vacant’ ads, or a sort of writers' coven, hoping something will turn up, high on solace but low on success. There are so many of these on-line situations vacant people that we know there isn’t THAT much work around. So what we writers need is a skilled dot-com company acting as our agent; one who knows where the better end of the buying market is, and as important, knows who buys what in that market. They will have built a stable of proven writers, with samples of their work available to would-be purchasers, and their work and relevant C.V. details will be listed and cross-referenced by the type of work they do, and the type of assignments they seek. After that, it should be easy; all we have to do is to sit back and write. Perhaps those guys who sell hope had at least one good point-- maybe this way we really could become millionaires!
Malcolm Birkin is a published author of management/ business books and has
wide international business and consulting experience. He is a freelance
writer and consultant specializing in company growth, and in achieving
high levels of people commitment and contribution, often in multi cultural
situations in, for example, cross border mergers and acquisitions.
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