Grub Street Revisited

All work and low pay make freelancing a dull joy

Gay Talese was an obscure metropolitan reporter for the New York Times in the late 1950s when he sold his first freelance magazine article, a 3,000-word profile of Boxer Jose Torres, to a men's adventure magazine called Argosy. His fee: $500. Talese went on to bigger things (a total of $1 million from The Kingdom and the Power and Honor Thy Father, a $600,000 advance for his major book on sex, due in 1981), but Argosy did not. It's stated top payment for an article, some 20 years later, was still $500.

Freelance.* The phrase suggests freedom, adventure and the protagonist of a thousand B movies, Berlin-bound on the night train with a dream and an Olivetti. The dream, however, has turned sour. For most freelancers, magazine writing today has become the slum of journalism--overcrowded, underpaid, littered with rejection slips--and the denizens are growing restless. "It's a synonym for unemployed bum," grumbles John Jerome, who left the editorship of Skiing a decade ago to write for himself and has spent half that time in debt. Warren G. Bovee, acting dean of the Marquette University journalism school, once calculated that some 25,000 citizens call themselves freelancers but fewer than 300 make a living at it. Says Talese: "There is no way you can prosper writing for magazines alone."

Freelancing has never been the gentlest of callings. Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary immortalized the ink-stained wretches who lived on London's Grub Street turning out literary piecework. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," said Dr. Johnson, who nonetheless spent most of his life in poverty. In the platinum age of periodicals, roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, it was possible for man to live by word alone, provided he sold it to a magazine. The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Collier's, LIFE, Woman's Home Companion and Coronet routinely rewarded writers more handsomely than many magazines do today. The Post paid $5,000 to F. Scott Fitzgerald for diamonds smaller than the Ritz and, shortly before the weekly's death in 1969, $2,500 to anyone for a lengthy article. (Top scale today at the Post, revived in 1971 and now appearing nine times a year, is $1,000.)

Though many of the giants are no more, it seems that freelancers should be thriving, not starving. The magazine industry just recorded its most prosperous year in memory. Altogether, some 9,200 magazines are published in the U.S., and most provide at least some work for freelancers. It is usually cheaper to rely on them than to maintain stables of salaried staff writers. But the number of contributors is outstripping the growth--and quality--of the market. Everybody seems to be freelancing: housewives, public relations men, professors, reporters, the growing army of jobless journalism graduates. Circulation of Writer's Digest, a how-to monthly for such dining-table dilettantes, has leaped by 17% in the past year and a half, to 127,000.

The result: too many writers are chasing too few magazines, giving financially squeezed editors little incentive to raise their rates. Consumer prices have nearly doubled in the past decade, but the average payments for major articles (roughly 3,000 words) by the ten largest-circulation magazines have risen by only onefourth. A few markets have become more lucrative: the skin magazines ($2,250 for Playboy, $1,200 for Hustler) and some city and regional magazines ($1,000 at New West, $1,100 at Texas Monthly). But other magazines have not raised rates at all: Washington Monthly has been paying writers the same 100 a word for the past eight years; previously, it paid 130. Holiday's average fee was $1,200, the same as a decade ago, when that magazine was absorbed by Travel last fall; Travel/ Holiday now pays $250.

Then, too, the shower of new magazines (334 in 1976, 272 last year) is not much to cheer about. Most of the fledglings are small (average circulation for last year's crop: 10,000), parsimonious (typical rate: 7-c- a word) and narrowly focused (Sludge, Modern Drummer, Wild World of Skateboarding).

High-income freelancers are as scarce as generous magazines. The median annual earnings of the 500 established writers of the American Society of Journalists and Authors was a modest $10,000 when they were last polled two years ago. Loretta Schwartz's articles for Philadelphia have won her a wailful of journalism awards--and an annual income of less than $7,500. Says Catherine Breslin, a now successful New York City writer who made $800 in 1975: "A freelancer lives at the end of a sawed-off limb."

There are exceptions. Political Writer Richard Reeves earns more than $100,000 a year, Diplomatic Expert Tad Szulc makes about $80,000, and Sportswriter Bil Gilbert grosses more than $40,000. But the big moneymakers almost always have some kind of cushion. Reeves has, among other odd jobs, a regular Esquire column that guarantees him $50,000 a year; Szulc does books (twelve to date) as well as magazine work; Gilbert has a contract with SPORTS ILLUSTRATED that places a solid floor under his yearly income. Such props are essential. Says Literary Agent Scott Meredith: "There are no writers left who can make a living just by articles."

It also helps to have help in dealing with reluctant editors. Do not call Meredith, however, or most other top agents. "We won't accept a writer who does only magazines unless we think he'll do a book some day," he says. Explains Agent Henry Morrison: "With a book, you work for two or three days for 10% of a $50,000 sale. With a magazine, you work two days for 10% of a $3,000 sale."

Yet freelancers insist that their vocaion has its attractions. "I'm my own boss," beams Reeves. Says Breslin: "It's the exquisite pleasure of being able to sleep until noon." It is also the exquisite torture of having to spend more time selling stories than writing them, of waiting months until the magazines print--or pay for--them and of passing long hours with only a typewriter for company. Says Marilyn Bethany, who quit freelancing last year to edit a home-decorating quarterly: "The worst part is the loneliness."

For relief from that solitude, a dozen or so freelancers gather every Wednesday at the Shelter, a Manhattan restaurant, for lunch and sympathy. The shut-ins trade magazine atrocity stories, buy rounds of drinks whenever someone's mail carries a check, and patiently explain to outsiders why they have chosen their perilous existence over regular employment. They may be hungry, but, as they like to remind one another, at least they cannot be fired.

* The word was first used in the Middle Ages to describe roving knights whose lances were for hire by any king or cause. Today, a freelancer is someone who makes a living writing for various publications on anything but a salaried basis.

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