CHANGE IT UP
After the loss of one client, Simon Whaley explores the way every writing business needs to evolve over time to stay successful
In 1963, when addressing guests at Frankfurt’s St Paul’s Church, President John F Kennedy said, ‘For time and the world do not stand still.
Change is the law of life.’
JFK’s quote came to mind when a magazine editor emailed to say they were dropping a section I’d regularly contributed to on a freelance basis for more than a decade. They’d reviewed their online content and decided to make several changes to what appeared in their print publication.
It was a shock. From a business perspective, while this client wasn’t a huge income stream for me, they were still an important one. As a freelancer, I can’t take anything for granted. Markets change, they always have done, but this one was sudden and unexpected.
It made me think about how my writing business had changed over the years. Fifteen years ago, I contributed short stories to the women’s magazine market. At that time, many women’s magazines had one, if not more, fiction slots in every issue. Get the story right and, because the magazines only took limited rights back then, we could sell the same story to publications in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and even Sweden. Today, I rarely write short stories. The market has changed drastically. Few of the women’s magazines have a fiction slot now, and of those that still do, they either only accept submissions from a closed group of writers or they insist on taking all rights in the story. All rights are not something I’m willing to give up when selling my fiction.
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