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White Papers from the Gold Coast Institute Fellows |
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SELL IT AGAIN, SAM:
SELLING REPRINTS AND REWRITES
by Gordon
Burgett Selling an article once
is a major accomplishment, at least while you’re earning your spurs.
Selling the same article again and again, or other articles derived from
the same research, is utter delight. Showing you how that is done is the
purpose of this article. For clarification,
let’s distinguish between the two major means of reselling. The first,
called “reprints,” is in its simplest form the selling of the same
article, as is, repeatedly to different markets. The second, called
“rewrites,” is the taking of the same facts, quotes, and anecdotes
and reshuffling, expanding and rewriting them into new forms, each a
different article using some or much of the same material. REPRINTS
A traditional reprint
sale follows the original sale of an article to an editor who purchased
first rights, which is how the vast majority of magazine editors buy.
That editor bought the right to use your words, that article, in print
first. When those words appeared in print, the rights automatically
reverted back to you, and your rights relationship with that editor
ended. What remained were
second rights, which are reprint rights. (Second and reprint rights mean
the same thing; the terms are interchangeable.) Once your article has
appeared in print from a first-rights sale, you can immediately offer
that very same article, without change, to any other editor you think
might buy it. It couldn’t be more straightforward. Writer’s Market
tells you what rights editors buy and whether they buy reprints, or the
editor will tell you when you receive a go-ahead to your query. It also
tells whether the magazine pays on acceptance or publication. Who buys second or
reprint rights? Mostly editors who pay on publication, plus a few whose
readers would not likely have read your words in the first publication,
who pay on acceptance. How much do they pay? What they can get it for,
or normally pay, since editors buying reprints have no idea what you
originally received. Alas, those paying on publication often aren’t
high rollers, and those paying on acceptance for a piece already used
will recognize that you will sell for less (since you’ve already been
paid for putting the research and words in final form), so figure a
third to one-half of what the original purchaser paid, then consider it
a boon if you make more. The best thing about
reprints is that through diligent and creative marketing, you can resell
the same piece many times. So when the final tally is made, you might
have earned more money for churning the same winning prose repeatedly
than you made for selling the original. Using dollars to
illustrate the point, if the original article took you eight hours to
sell, research, and write and paid you $450, that is a gross profit of
$56.25 an hour. If you resell the same article three times, each paying
$200 and taking 45 minutes apiece to find the market, prepare a copy of
the article, reprint the cover letter and get it in the mail, that is an
additional $600, or $267 an hour. (You can substitute your own prep time
and payment rates.) Mind you, nobody has
ever sold a reprint before they sold the original article, so the hard
work—the idea finding, market picking, querying, editor studying,
researching, writing, editing, rechecking, and submitting—is done
first. Reprints sold later are very tasty dessert to a hard-won meal. How do you get editors
to buy reprints? The reprint selling processSometimes editors
feverishly seek you out, begging you to let them reuse a masterpiece you
already sold—you name the price. (Or so I’ve heard from writers
whose imaginations vastly exceed their credibility.) Yet it does happen, on
a far lesser scale. Reader’s Digest is a well-known magazine
that seeks high-quality reprints to use (usually rewritten in a
condensed form) on its pages. You can shorten its search by sending a
copy of a particularly strong article with a cover letter suggesting
that they may wish to consider that recently published work for its
pages. There is no choice with
the rest of the editors who might consider reusing your bought prose.
You must find them, approach them in a sensible manner through a reprint
cover letter, and include a copy of the article in question and an SASE.
Finding the most likely reprint buyers
Common sense guides
this search. Since you want to sell the reprint without change, comb Writer’s
Market to find other publications similar to that which
originally printed your article. Check in the same subject category, or
those with similar readerships. Start with the Table of Contents. Read
carefully every publication that might even be remotely similar or use a
topic like yours, as is or redirected to a different market or from a
different setting. Now create two columns
on a sheet of paper. In the first column, write the title of every
magazine that might use the article exactly as it is. Note the page
number of the reference next to it, for easy finding later. In the second column,
write the title of every magazine that might use the subject if you
rewrote or redirected it. Next to the name write down how you would have
to rewrite the article to make it buyable: “for women: change
examples, approach from female perspective,” “wants history, focus
on subject in early 1990’s,” “uses bullets: extract key points,
create bullets,” “change the setting to France, use French
examples.” Also include the page number for reference. Let’s focus on column
one here, since the changes needed to rewrite the piece are obvious in
column two. You’ll most likely
want to contact the editor of all of the publications in column one,
whether they pay on publication or acceptance. Once you’ve created a
master reprint cover letter, computers make it quick to customize the
address and salutation and insert a personalized reference in the text.
The potential of a resale, even slight, outweighs the small amount of
time, copying, and postage required to get your article and letter
before a healthy scattering of eyes. Do not send the reprint
cover letter and article copy to those magazine editors paying on
acceptance who already rejected your query, or those major magazines
that never buy second rights. Sometimes there are reprint buyers that
are flat-out foes of each other. Submit to one first (the most likely to
use it or pay the most), and the second if the first says no. (Years
back I sold to the Air California and PSA magazines, both fierce
competitors. While I was within my rights to simultaneously offer
reprints to both, since reprint sales are nonexclusive, if both had
bought the reprint and used it on their pages, I would have lost two
good clients forever!) Once you have
identified your marketing targets, you’ll need a clear copy of the
article you want to sell as a reprint. If the article is exactly one
page long and includes only your copy, great. Copy and send it as is.
But when there is adjacent, non-related copy next to the text or the
prose trickles onto later pages, you’ll want to cut your article out
and paste it up. Include the photos or illustrations that you also wish
to sell. If the name of the publication and date of the issue aren’t
in the copy, add them to every page. And number the pages in consecutive
order. Then head to the quick
copy shop to have as many copies reproduced as you will need, collated
and stapled. Just make certain that
the final copies you will send to the editors are clear, easy to read,
and include everything you want to be seen. The reprint cover letter
It’s not enough just
to have names and addresses plus copies of what you want the editor to
buy. You must sell the prospective buyer through a one-page cover letter
accompanying the reproduced copy of the article. Your cover letter must
do five things: (1) It must make the
topic come alive before the editor ever reads a word of the actual
article. (2) It must tell what
you are offering and the rights involved. (3) It must describe
any additional items or services you can provide. (4) It must tell how
the manuscript will reach that editor. (5) By far the least
important, it might talk a bit about you and your credentials. Let’s look at each of
these areas. The editor doesn’t
know you, already gets too much mail, and has too little time to waste
on an unexpected and probably unpromising letter with an article also
enclosed. So your first (and probably second) paragraph has to make the
subject of the article jump off the page. It has to make the editor say,
“Wow!” Or “I’d be a fool not to want to read this article” or,
at the least, “Looks interesting. I’d better read that.” This is
where you show the editor that you can write, discuss the topic on which
you have focused your obvious talents, and why (by inference or
statement) that topic would find high favor with his or her readers.
This gets the editor to pick up the article and read it through. The next paragraph is
short and placed after you’ve stirred the editor’s interest. It
tells what you are offering and what rights are available. You must tell
who bought the first rights, when the piece was in print, and what
rights you are selling. I usually get right to the point, since I
don’t want to dally here: “As you can see by the article attached,
first rights were bought by (publication) and appeared in print on
(date). I am offering second rights.” (I could say reprint rights as
well.) In the following
paragraph you will want to tell of other items beyond the words that you
are also offering. These could be photos.
Since photos are almost always bought on a one-time rights basis, you
can offer the photos the editor sees in the article or any of the rest
that weren’t bought. You can offer to send slides or prints for the
editor’s selection, if interested. They could be line
drawings, charts, graphs, or any other artwork that either appears in
the printed article or that you could prepare to add to the piece. You could also offer be
a box or sidebar that you prepared but wasn’t bought by the first
editor—or one you could produce. (If the text exists, you might send
it along with the copy of the article to expedite the sale and show the
reprint editor precisely how it reads.) Somewhere in the
reprint cover letter you must tell the editor what format you will be
sending the article in. If you say nothing, the editor will assume that
you expect the copy of the article to be retyped or scanned, neither
exciting prospects. You enhance the reprint sale by offering either to
send the original text double-spaced in manuscript form or on a computer
disk, mailed or sent by e-mail. Electronic submission is by far the most
appealing. As for what to say
about yourself, the article alone will speak volumes, and the quality of
the reprint cover letter will probably fill in as many gaps as the
editor needs. There are three areas where you may wish to expand, if it
isn’t done in the bio slug with the article: * If you have many
publishing credits, particularly in this field, and * If you have a related
book in print or are an acknowledged expert in the field, * If the work described
in the article offers some element of original, unique knowledge or
research. In other words, inject
more biographical information only if that significantly increases the
importance of the article or why the editor should use it. Otherwise,
the editor knows the most important information already: that another
editor thought your writing was good enough to buy and use. The rest the
editor can probably deduce from reading the text. If not, supplement. Finally, don’t forget
to include either an SASE or a self-addressed postcard for a reply.
Otherwise you’ll never know that the editor didn’t want to buy your
words for reuse. The reprint cover
letter is a sales letter, on one exciting page. Spelling, punctuation,
grammar all count. Make the topic come alive and shout to be used on the
editor’s pages. Keep the rest businesslike, forthright, easy to
understand, and compelling. It’s a letter from one businessperson to
another, one who has space to fill, another with space fillers to sell. Modified reprints
What if an editor wants
to use you article but insists upon changes? Fine. But is it a reprint
or a rewrite? That probably depends upon how much change the editor
wants and who will write it. If the changes are major, treat it like a
rewrite, which is discussed next. But sometimes an editor
just wants to squeeze the piece a bit, dropping a few words here, an
example later. Or use his/her own photo. They will make all of the
changes. No problem. You might
ask to see the final copy before it is printed, to make sure the changes
make sense. Or the editor wants you
to tie the topic to his locale, adding in a quote or two, some local
examples, or even a sidebar that
offers local specifics. They want to use the reprint as the core, with
modifications by you. The more the labor, the
more you might want to negotiate about the price. Find out what the
editor intends to pay for the reprint, then try to get that increased to
compensate you for the additional research and writing. REWRITES
A rewrite, in the least
complicated terms, is an article based on an earlier article and uses
most or all of the first’s article’s information. It is rewritten to
create a different article that has its own sales life. Let’s say that
you write an article about training in long jumping for the Olympics.
You follow the usual format: complete a feasibility study, query,
receive a go-ahead, do the research, write the text, and edit it. The
article is printed. Then you find two other, smaller magazines that pay
on publication that are interested in the same topic, so you send their
editors a reprint cover letter, copy of the published article, and a
return postcard. One buys a reprint.
But why end there? Why
not go back to that first article and see how you can reuse most or all
of your research to create other solid, salable articles? For example, why not an
article for the high school athlete called “So You Want to Be in the
Olympics?” From the original, you develop a long-range focus and
training program for any athlete in any field, perhaps using long
jumping as the example or tying in several examples, including long
jumping. Or an article based on
three or four athletes each from a different country showing the paths
they followed to the Olympics, with tips from each for the reading
hopeful. If all four are long jumpers, you have less research but
probably less salability as well. Or four U.S. Olympians
from widely varying fields, including long jumping, to show their
reflections on having competed: Was it worth the effort? What benefits
have they received? In retrospect, what would they do differently? What
do they advise the readers thinking of following their Olympic paths? By now the process is
clear: Extract something from the original article and build on it for a
subsequent article. The more you can use from your original research,
the less time you need at the feasibility, querying, and researching
stages. The trick is equally as
obvious: You need a clearly different article, one that has its own
angle or slant, reason for being, message, and structure. Rewrites need their own
titles, leads, quotes, and conclusions built around a different frame.
You can use the same facts, quotes, and anecdotes but in a different way
and for a different purpose. Once you’ve designed
a different article, it must pass through the same selling phases
we’ve described: the feasibility questions, the query, the go-ahead,
the additional research, the new writing, the editing, and publication
in a different magazine. Since rewrites have
their own legal existence, you can even sell reprints of rewrites. You
can even rewrite rewrites, then sell reprints of rewrites of rewrites.
That’s just a name game. The editor buying a rewrite calls it an
article, an original work created for that magazine and its readers. He
doesn’t want to know, and you don’t want to reveal, that it’s a
spin-off of earlier research. Does it have its own legs? Does it stand
on its own merits? If so, the term “rewrite” has sense only to you,
as part of the developmental chronology and evolution of an idea put to
print. Further discussion of
rewrites falls squarely under the general discussion about how you
create and sell copy. Since a rewrite is based on an idea that already
sold and comes from research that has passed the test of acceptability,
it simply has an edge on the competing articles, if it is worth using in
its own right. A SUMMARY OF REPRINTS AND REWRITES
The difference is best
seen from the rights perspective. A reprint is an article
sold on a first-rights basis that is being sold again (and again).
The original buyer purchased the right to use that article on his
pages first. Once used, the rights reverted to the writer. Following the
protocol described, the writer then contacts other editors offering the
resale of that original piece, on a reprint or second rights,
nonexclusive basis. The copy is the same or includes few changes. A rewrite is a
different article based on a previously written article and all the
research that involved. It’s a rewrite only in the mind of the writer.
To the buyer it must be completely different from the work sold, since
first rights to those words have already been purchased and it is not
being marketed as second or reprints rights. Reprints and rewrites
require attention to publishing proprieties. If they are done
improperly, you can lose more goodwill, and future earnings, than you
earn at the outset. The most important element of those proprieties is
honesty—defining in your own mind whether the piece is a reprint or it
is a rewrite. If in doubt, discuss it
with the interested editor. They don’t bite, they just hold their
purse strings tightly. Gordon Burgett is the
author of 1700+ printed articles and 27 books, including five selected
as top choices by the Writer’s Digest Book Club: Sell &
Resell Your Magazine Articles, Travel Writer’s Guide,
Publishing to Niche Markets, How to Sell 75% of Your
Freelance Writing, and Query Letters/Cover Letters: How
They Sell Your Writing. Gordon has offered 2000+ keynote or
workshop presentations, and currently speaks most about his latest book,
How to Plan a Great Second Life: What are you going to do with
your extra 30 years? He can be reached at (800) 563-1454 or at Gordon@super-second-life.com. |