SELL IT AGAIN, SAM:
SELLING REPRINTS AND REWRITES
by
Gordon Burgett
Appeared in the PMA
(Publishers’ Marketing Association) Newsletter, Oct. 1999, pp. 1-10.
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 8 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 process
Sometimes 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 and Utne Reader are two
well-known magazines that do seek high-quality reprints to use (usually
rewritten in a condensed form) on their pages. You can shorten their searches
by sending copies of a particularly strong article with a cover letter
suggesting that they may wish to consider that recently published work for
their 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, nonrelated 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 have to
make the subject of the article jump off the page. They have 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 their 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 |
(800) 563-1454 |