This week
a thread was posted on 2+2 where a writer was outing WPT Poker Magazine for not
having paid him for 7 months. It now looks like he is (hopefully) going to be
paid as a direct result of him doing this.
I can see
why a lot of people would think that 7 months was a scandalous amount of time
to be paid, but I spoke to several of my fellow poker writer peers, and well
all shrugged our shoulders and said “meh, pretty standard, I wouldn’t worry at
7 months”.
7 months
was a long time to wait, but not as long as you would think. Most poker magazines
have a policy of not paying until 3 months after the article is printed, and
often it takes about 2 months between submitting the article and before it is
printed. So even though I think 7 months is long, I wouldn’t even be chasing
for the first 5.
I used to
solely rely on magazines for my income. It once was a gold mine, but over the
years I have watched that part of the industry change dramatically. I'm glad I
got out of magazines, unfortunately I have done so with three magazines still owing
me money to this day (Only one still exists).
I should
also say that I have a great relationship with the guys at WPT, and I am quite
confident that the guy will get paid. The following is not really a comment on
WPT magazine, but most poker magazines I have dealt with (other than the
B2B magazines).
There
were some comments in the thread about the wait time was indicative of the
magazine being close to bankruptcy. I don't agree with that, but I do confer
that many of them live on the breadline. Lots of them literally rely on the
same advertising revenue from issue x to pay for the freelance contributions
for issue x, with no spare budget waiting around for situations like
this.
This is
not all magazines of course, for example I wouldn't expect this to be the case
at PokerPlayer Magazine, because they are part of a larger publishing network,
Dennis Publishing. But most of them are part of much smaller publishers, in some
cases standalone ones.
It wasn't
always this hard for poker magazines, there was once a time, right after the
boom, where they had money to burn, and paid ridiculous amounts (I’ve never
been paid better for a single article than I was the first year I started
writing them). But the UIGEA hit the advertising budgets hard, and more
recently, Black Friday did the same. Even non-US magazines felt the impact as
hard, despite not being directly affected.
While the
freelancers are being delayed by the magazines, the magazines are being delayed
by the advertisers. This doesn't make it ok for the magazines to string the freelancers
along in the meantime, but it is important to know they are part of a long an arduous
chain, and often get screwed out of money themselves (Sadly, advertisers not
paying is a frequent occurrence in poker).
This may
seem odd to many, that poker magazines are so dependent on advertising revenue.
The fact is that most of the time, poker magazines don't rely on sales, or at
least, they only make up a small part of their revenue which is deemed a bit of
a bonus at best. In fact, many advertising packages are based on the
presumption that the issues will be distributed for free in casinos,
guaranteeing lots of gamblers will see them.
To give
an extreme example of this, I did some work for GX magazine, who never paid me.
It turned out that they weren't a real magazine at all, they just printed a few
hundred copies of their pretend magazine to show advertisers, so they could
hoard in the ad revenue without worrying about the printing costs. Check out
this blog from Nick Pryce, someone who worked for them, to learn more about
them.
The last
frustrating part of the process with poker magazines is that the editor is not
the boss, not in the traditional sense at least. Most freelancers expect the
buck to stop with him, but in reality they often are pretty powerless when it
comes to payroll. Editors are often in an impossible situation here, where they
have to take the flak when people don't get paid, but can't do anything to
influence it.
They only
thing they can, and should do, is create realistic expectations with
freelancers from the start.
Times are
tough for print magazines in general, and even harder for poker magazines. Most
of the best content these days, or at least the most up to date, is available
online and advertising revenue is getting tighter by the day.
Most
magazines these days rely on free contributions from people with something to
promote. Strategy articles from sponsored players, news articles branded with
the logos of a news site, tournament reports provided by the people organising
the tournament. The few bits and bobs I have done for magazines in the last
year or so has been to promote my book more than anything.
Anyone
looking to freelance for magazines these days, in my opinion, should be very
aware of this. There is still a future for print magazines in poker, but it
will be on shoestring budgets. There are still people out there that will pay
you to write for poker magazines, but it is not necessarily the guys that
publish them.
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