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Businesslike Billing
by A. D. Coleman
Editor
ASJA Newsletter
To the Editor:
First, the bad news: Camera
& Darkroom (a publication of LFP, Inc.), one of my major forums and sources of income since March 1990, abruptly ceased publication with its September 1995 issue. Its unexpected demise -- which took the staff and writers entirely by surprise -- may be connected to the fact that when editor-in-chief Ana Jones ran a profile/interview featuring controversial photographer Jock Sturges earlier this year, the Wal-Mart chain permanently banned the publication from its racks -- a serious financial blow.
Now, the good news: I got paid
in full for everything I've published there, and even
for one piece that was submitted and on the boards but
will never see print in those pages. I have a very simple
system, that's been in place for the past five years.
Not only do I create letters of agreement for every
assignment, but with every text I submit to every editor
I include an invoice.
This invoice (listen up: this
matters) looks like an invoice: it has an apparent business
name as its letterhead (just a name I made up, for my
"literary agency"), plus a date, an invoice
number, the name and address of the publication, the
commissioning editor's name, the title and date of submission
of the piece, the agreed-upon fee (including author's
copies), a statement that payment is now due in full,
a 60-day warning with a penalty for late payment, and
instructions on making the check out in my name and
where to send it -- not my home address, which the editor
might recognize, but a P.O. box. (You could also file
for a DBA under a business name, and have the checks
made out to that name; I haven't found it necessary.)
My theory is (a) that businesses
pay other businesses before they pay individuals, (b)
that accounting departments recognize invoices as documents
requiring procedural attention but do not understand
letters of agreement, and (c) that editors cannot be
relied on to transform your letter of agreement into
whatever invoice form their various accounting departments
require to inititate the payment process. My invoice
makes life simple for them: the editor clips it to whatever
the publication's standard form might be, or simply
sends it along to accounting all by itself. This becomes
so habitual that, even with publications that do not
as a matter of policy pay before publication, I'm usually
paid within 4-6 weeks of submission.
I keep these invoices in a separate file on my computer, with a short list at the head of the file on which I track invoices and their payment. My self-created system is probably cumbersome; there are some easy-accounting programs that no doubt do the same thing much more efficiently. If those are of interest to you, by all means explore them. However you set it up, the system works. In the five years I've employed it, I've been stiffed only once -- by Smart, which burned everyone. Today I'm $650 richer because of it. A word to the wise.
/s/ A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, NY
This letter appeared in two parts
under the titles "Market Monitor" (for the
first paragraph and "Letters: Businesslike Billing"
in the ASJA Newsletter, Vol. 44, no. 9 (October
1995), pp. 7-8, 21. This publication is the newsletter
of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Copyright
© 1995 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For
reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication
Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F
(718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com
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