THE FREE LANCE

by Tabitha M. Powledge

Members have been busy of late on NASW freelance policy matters. Here’s a roundup on three projects at the reportable stage:

Contracts redux

This is the crucial topic in freelance life right now, but also sprawling, miscellaneous, and next-to-impossible to get your arms around. “Contracts” means hot issues that affect all creators, notably the evolution of copyright law (especially in the US) and the thorny and completely unsettled question of who owns—and who should own—electronic rights to works that first appeared in other media. But it also includes concrete practical issues that pervade our work lives every day, affecting not only cash flow but state of mind. When is it OK to accept a work-for-hire arrangement? How many drafts can the editor demand? What are the grounds for turning down a manuscript, and will I be paid a kill fee if that happens? Will I share in any money from reprint sales? Can I really be forced to pay a publisher’s attorney fees, and maybe huge settlement costs, if a litigious reader brings a baseless nuisance lawsuit against something I wrote? And the biggie: Who owns our words, anyway? Us or Them?

Some months ago, a subgroup of the Freelance Committee sent you a survey asking what kinds of things NASW can do to help you negotiate these rapids. This being NASW, there were almost as many suggestions are there were respondents. But many of you agreed on a few ideas; for example, that NASW should take a more activist stance on contract issues—perhaps joining with other groups in this. Several proposals came under the heading of education. You felt you didn’t know enough about contract issues and didn’t know how to decode contract language. Beryl Benderly quotes a literary attorney as saying that contracts are a source of great shame to writers. That about covers it.

So let us dispel our ignorance and cast off this secret shame. Heeding your desires, Freelance Committee Chair Kathryn Brown is organizing a workshop on negotiating contracts, part of the NASW workshop program preceding the AAAS meeting in Seattle next February. The session is titled “How to Deal: Negotiating a Better Contract.” The panelists will be Erik Sherman, chair of the contracts committee at the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a Seattle-area media lawyer (TBA). Sure to be a wise investment of your time and money that will help you maximize your time and money.

Also under the aegis of education, the committee will provide contract information on the NASW Web site. Since it would be dumb to duplicate what other groups are doing, we are beginning by posting links to helpful contract tips and documents on sites elsewhere—for example, those from ASJA. Eventually, there might be original documents tailored just to science writing—sample contracts, negotiating tips, anecdotal accounts of real-world resolutions of contract issues, and guidelines for judging the merits of a specific contract’s language. We could use some help with this; drop a note to Kathryn Brown at kathryn.s.brown@worldnet.att.net.

DIY publishing: out of the shadows?

We all know that the book publishing industry has fallen on evil days, meaning that good writers with interesting things to say—that is, NASW members—are having an awful time getting conventional publishers to take on books without blockbuster potential. Jon Franklin has a delightful idea for fixing that. Thanks to the ‘Net, he believes, self-publishing is coming out of the shadows and no longer carries the stigma so long associated with the output of the vanity press industry. NASW should be helping members take advantage of this novel state of affairs, Jon thinks, and so he has launched a new committee to figure out ways to do that.

Because many of us may be eager enough but don’t know where to begin, the first task is to find ways of providing advice and tools so that science writers can publish their own books and get them into the hands of readers. The plan is to set up a new section of the Web site with information on what services are available to novice self-publishers. Tentative ideas include material about print-on-demand publishers, lists of printers that will do short press runs, the ins and outs of electronic publication (either on the Web or CDs), copyright issues, tips on book promotion and maybe lists of people who do it, and the options for handling sales. Did you know that Amazon.com will list your book for sale? I didn’t either, but hearing it made me quite cheerful.

A listserv called newpub has been set up for discussing this hopeful monster. Not much traffic at this writing, so sign up and help us reach critical mass. You can get to instructions for joining listservs from the NASW home page, www.nasw.org.

Medical insurance redux too

Late last year, Robin Henig and I took a preliminary look at how freelance science writers could find and buy medical insurance. Our discouraging findings were described in this column in the Winter 2003 issue. But hope springs eternal, and so the board asked David Lindley to see if he could unearth any better news about the insurance industry’s attitude toward freelances. The short answer is No. He got 256 replies to a member survey—thank you, thank you. And thanks to David for his willingness to take on this dispiriting task. Here are some excerpts from his report:

“With such a small number of people scattered across the country, not to mention that respondents are young, old, single, married, with or without children, with or without pre-existing conditions, general conclusions are hard to come by. And, of course, we don’t have the means to compare in detail the sort of coverage each respondent has. But a few things stand out.

“Rates: for single people, the range $250 to $450 per month includes half the respondents (40/80). Of those paying less, some are getting bare-bones or catastrophic insurance of some sort, but there are bargains, apparently, out there. (I am paying $146/month for a Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy in Northern Virginia, though I haven’t used it yet and I have just been told it will be increasing in a couple of months). I have the impression (although statistics are too small to trust this) that people living away from the big urban centers can find lower rates—assuming they can get any insurance at all, which can be a problem if you’re out in the sticks somewhere.

“Some of those paying higher rates (above $500, the highest figure being just over $1,000) are on COBRA, and may be able to do better by shopping around. But some (perhaps for historical reasons) just seem to be stuck with high rates. Those getting family coverage are even harder to assess. The number of respondents is small, and includes couples only, couples with children, and single parents with children. Some are getting low rates—$150 or less—for catastrophic coverage. Other rates are scattered from around $400 all the way up to $1,200.”

Where to find insurance? Canada, said three respondents who live there. If stuck in the US, you can marry someone with a job and access to a medical plan; 87 respondents chose that practical melding of heart and head. Ten even—gasp!—got jobs themselves. A daring 17 were going without, all but one of them by choice. These are presumably newly fledged science writers, still young enough to believe they are immortal. The 138 who pay for their own insurance took several routes, among them local brokers, Web sites, and big national insurers like Blue Cross and Kaiser. The Healthy Chutzpah Prize for Creative Self-confidence goes to the member who reported getting a job every 18 months, then quitting and going on COBRA.

Information David has gathered about where to get insurance will probably be on the Web site by the time you read this, www.nasw.org.

David concludes, as the previous report did last year, that the difficulties self-employed people have in getting and paying for health insurance are inherent in the present structure of the insurance industry. By itself—or even by joining with other small professional groups—there’s little NASW can do about this other than provide information.

“The good news is that most NASW freelancers have managed, one way or another, to find health insurance. The bad news is I can see no general lessons, except fend for yourself,” David says. “Of course, we are a small group, but I detect again in the newspapers a growing sense that health care is back on the political radar screen, and the more voices pushing for reform, the better. There is a certain irony in the fact that many people who write for the general public about advances in medical treatments and biotechnology have difficulty getting standard care and treatment, because of the insurance system.”

Dotty correction

In the last column, a production error made the published version of the URL for the search engine at the National Academy of Sciences come out wrong. The correct URL is wwwsearch.nationalacademies.org. That’s right: no dot after www. Bet you never saw that before. Thanks to ever-vigilant Dodi Schultz for pointing out this inadvertent superfluous dottiness.

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Tabitha Powledge can be reached at tam@nasw.org.