Freelancers' union due

Derek Finkle has been a writer (author of the true crime book No Claim to Mercy) and editor (former editor-in-chief of Toro magazine), and has recently assumed the position of literary agent. Sort of. Finkle's intention isn't to slosh gimlets around with his feet up on a mahogany desk (this is what agent-ing looks like, in my head), but to rescue the abused puppies of the Canadian publishing industry: freelance writers.

"The main problem is that the rates for freelance writers haven't really changed in about 35 years," Finkle says to me over the phone, part of a long explication on the much-discussed need for some kind of change.

"It means that even at the most profitable commercial trade publications like Chatelaine or Toronto Life, the standard rate that's been going on for years at the top publications has been about a dollar a word. The cost of living in Toronto, or at least the cost of housing in Toronto has gone up in the same 35 year period by about 400 percent."

Finkle's proposed solution is the Canadian Writers Group, which is "modeled after a traditional book agency" and seeks to represent the top tier of freelance-writing talent in Canada, significantly undervalued as they are. The agency is set to launch in early 2009, pending the sign-up of enough writers, and will negotiate rates and rights (a seriously contentious and punishing part of being a freelancer in the age of Internet ubiquity), as well as handle invoicing and related business, which writers notoriously suck at, for a 10 per cent cut (15 for book deals and work that the agency sources for the writer).

Finkle laments the impossibility of professional development and financial growth for even really good freelance writers who need or want to stay in Canada. He notes the fact that he would be (and has been) paid adequately in a full-time editorial position with a magazine, yet as the same person with the same abilities working in a freelance capacity, he's supposed to accept the same kind of money he made 15 years ago.

"Why shouldn't I be able to have a career trajectory? The problem is, the system doesn't make any sense … What needs to happen can't be done by individuals, but the idea of putting together an agency that represents 150 or 200 of the top freelance writers in the country, it could certainly impose a career arc on the industry.

"One of the consequences is that the talent pool starts to dry up. What happens is you're in your early to mid-20s, you want to be a freelance writer, you go gung-ho, you work at it, you try to move up the ladder as it were, and write for bigger and more prominent publications. And then, if you happen to be one of the people who manage to get to the top of the ladder, and you stay there for a few years, you realize that it's still a real struggle. What happens is, the good ones end up in New York."

Finkle calls writing at this level "a valuable skill, a special skill." Great journalism, especially great feature writing, is indeed a particular ability that readers and editors and corporate daddies expect and depend on, in respected (and profitable) products. Hustling for work and then providing that work for meagre financial payoff can and does grow tiresome, though, especially for older, more experienced writers staring down kids and mortgages. By Finkle's assessment, most discouraged freelancers turn to teaching, book-writing or alternate career choices when they can't afford to freelance anymore.

"It affects the whole industry, because they're constantly reliant upon the next round of talent being turned out by Ryerson or some other school where hopefuls eternally reside. The quality totally suffers. We don't have a system that could ever create a Seymour Hersh type of character. It's not that publications here can't afford it, they choose not to afford it. When they say they don't have the money, that doesn't literally mean they don't have the money. Another way to put it is, 'We don't have it in the budget.' When they're saying it's not in the budget, what they're saying is, 'We've chosen not to spend the money on writers.'

"What happens every year is you have an editor going to a publisher, saying 'We need to make the editorial budget bigger' and this is in a meeting in which they've already discovered that they have to jack up the printing budget and the distribution budget … and they get to the editorial budget and everybody is just burned out at that point. And someone says, meekly, 'I think we need to revise the editorial budget' and there's five seconds of silence and they end the meeting. And that's what happens."

Finkle points out the necessity of a critical mass. "The writers who have come on board with the agency understand that the only way to really combat this is to absorb as much of the talent pool as possible." Writers who intend to join include Katrina Onstad, Sasha Chapman, Hal Niedzviecki, James Chatto, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Ian Brown, Marni Jackson, Johanna Schneller, New York-based freelancer Duff McDonald and many more that comprise the highest rank of Canadian writers.

"I think a lot of writers are too timid to bring up some of these matters, and try to protect themselves, because they don't want to ruin the relationship with the editor. Psychologically it's a lot different when you have an agency doing that on your behalf and the terms are a lot different when that agency is representing a massive chunk of the talent pool in this country.

"This idea, this agency I've dreamed up, this is something that would never work in New York or in the United States, where the industry is so massive. You could never absorb the talent pool to achieve the kind of negotiating position that you need. Here, the industry is just the right size, the talent pool is just the right size, and it's a much more feasible concept here.

"Right now you have this quite arbitrary system where most people charge by the word, or sometimes they have a set system [that is still arbitrary]. What we're going to do is similar to what commercial writers do, or what copy writers or what marketing writers do, which is to charge based on the value of their time. I'd always say [to magazine editors], 'Why do you pay everybody the same? Why does everybody get a dollar a word?' They'd pay a dollar a word because they're completely terrified of opening the floodgates; someone's going to find out that someone makes more than them and that's just going to cause problems, but that's completely ridiculous. That's not how the real world works.

"The people who are the most in demand generally make the most money. What we're going to do is negotiate and base our rates on the project, who the writer is, what skills they bring to the table, and how much time of theirs this is going to take up. In some ways, that's going to give the writer more leverage in the negotiating process than just simply having the publication determine that 'This is a 300-word piece that we pay $300 [for].' If you want professionals to work for you, you have to treat them like professionals.

"People think that [there is] excitement in being a writer and seeing your byline; it wears thin after a while when you can't live in a city like Toronto, where it's actually not that cheap to get by. And I think that the magazine industry and the newspaper industry need to get over the paternalistic attitude. That includes unpaid internships and wanting people to work for free and all that bullshit, all that stuff has to come to an end because essentially that sets writers up to have an inferiority complex."