Career Strategies of $30,000+ Writers

by Marcia Yudkin

In 1995, the National Writers Union released the findings of a national survey of writers, which included the news that only 16 percent of all full-time freelance writers made more than $30,000 a year. As part of my research for a new book on freelance writing published in March 1998 by Writers Digest Books, I went looking on CompuServe for those $30,000+ a year writers. A number of successful journalists and authors questioned the NWU statistic, whose accuracy I have no independent way of attacking or defending.

More to the point, close to three dozen writers who identified themselves as falling into that top 16 percent had adopted at least one of three strategies. Many had cultivated good relationships with a limited number of editors who gave them a steady stream of assignments on a regular basis. That way, they could spend less time, money and effort on obtaining assignments, dispensing with query letters altogether in favor of discussing article possibilities via informal phone calls or E-mails. Or, they specialized in one or perhaps two topics, thereby gaining a reputation or an edge over other writers. Others concentrated on writing books, a more lucrative path than penning magazine articles.

The advantages and hazards of the first strategy come through loud and clear in this admission by Texan Richard Marini: "Every year when I do my taxes, I'm equally thrilled and alarmed at the fact that I get 40 to 50 percent of my income from Boardroom Reports, publishers of Bottom Line/Personal and other newsletters. But what should I do about it? Turn them down when they want me to take on another project? Or when they start a new publication and want me to start writing for it? They supply the story ideas and they pay every two weeks, like clockwork. So I keep doing it."

Developing profitable bonds with a small set of editors involves a few factors within your control, and others beyond it. Persistence helps you keep on trying to win the editor's attention for your first assignment, and however many subsequent ones it takes to win admission to his or her inner circle of trusted writers. Turning in topnotch work on time that needs no major revisions also helps you climb onto the editor's short list.

But luck has an impact on whether or not your efforts at cultivating editorial relationships bear fruit. In the mid-1980's, I could never manage more than two assignments for one editor before the magazine got sold or an internal overhaul tossed my contact out onto the street. And magazines differ in the extent to which they feel comfortable depending on a small pool of writers. Regardless of the writers' reliability and skills, some publications prefer to feature a varied array of voices rather than the same writers again and again.

Fifty-four-year-old Los Angeles-based writer Lydia Boyle said that the second strategy - specializing - enables her to overcome age discrimination. "Those giving out the work appreciate your specialization," she says. Her current concentration on entertainment journalism developed after the markets dried up for her previous specialties of first fashion and beauty, then handicrafts, then health and fitness. The network of contacts she had built up in the entertainment world as an editor at New Body magazine proved a valuable asset in doing off-camera research for Dateline NBC and Prime Time Live, and for authors covering the O.J. Simpson case. "That's a highly specialized kind of research," she notes.

Among my sources, other specialties making possible a $30,000+ income included environmental writing, health and medicine, banking and finance, kitchen/bath design, aviation, space and technology, and computers. "Having a specialty gets you into a smaller club," says Catherine Dold, a science writer based in Boulder, Colorado. "Editors have the perception that if you're not scared of the stuff in that specialty you must be good at what you do." Dold points out that specializing also makes it easier to come up with salable ideas. "I'd hate to be floundering around, trying to create ideas out of thin air. By narrowing my interests, I just have to pay attention to what people in a field are talking about, watch the news and cruise the Internet."

Even if you enjoy writing on every subject under the sun, you can take advantage of editors' preference for specialists by following the lead of Tim Harper, a self- described "true generalist" living in Ridgewood, New Jersey. "I have a number of 'specialties' depending on the publication," he says. "For the Washington Post, I'm a travel writer. For the International Herald Tribune, I am a telecommunications specialist, though I do lots of other things - especially international trade. For a lot of publishers, I'm a beer specialist. For Sky, Delta's inflight magazine, I write a lot about education, and about technology and society. And so on."

I encountered some disagreement with respect to my third $30,000+ strategy, writing books. A writer for computer magazines who said she was receiving $4,000 per feature article said her first book advance fell far short of that, taking into account the amount of work it would involve. Another argued that hardly any book contracts work out to $1.50 a word or more. Nevertheless, having completed my ninth book, I can list several advantages of writing books that can produce a higher annual yield for some writers than magazine articles.

First, you can make one sale that keeps you busy and financially covered for four to six months or more at a time. Dropping out of the picture are the time and effort necessary to make ten to twenty sales to magazine editors to equal that income. Second, instead of getting paid just once (except for occasional reprints), a book deal can - though of course it doesn't always - generate royalties for years. My HarperCollins book on freelance writing brings me checks twice a year for work that I did in 1987, which could never happen for magazine work. Additional book-writing bonuses have come to me in the form of translation income from Japanese, German, Korean, Belgian and Taiwanese publishers, also extremely rare in the magazine world.

Third, books offer writers opportunities to cash in on a reputation with speaking fees and consulting. Newspaper and magazine columnists have these kinds of opportunities as well, but rarely so for writers doing even a lot of here- and-there newspaper and magazine writing. When I wrote for large-circulation magazines, it was humbling to discover how many readers never even glanced at bylines, much less considered the writer an authority.

Based on my research and experience, I feel safe urging those who want to join the upper-earning echelon of writers to start seeking editors who will feed one steady work, developing a specialty or moving on from articles to books. Or, if you enjoy a diverse diet of work, you can complement article writing with teaching or with copywriting assignments for corporate clients. Novelist John Gardner once recommended that writers find themselves a wealthy spouse. He meant it seriously, I think, but writers don't need to go that far to achieve financial stability.