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Businesslike Billing
by A. D. Coleman

July 31, 1995

 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