20  Selling overseas

1  Any story should have the elements of God, sex and action.

2  All features should be of interest to …

(a)  New York, the centre of US publishing.

(b)  Finland, because if they have heard of it there, it is probably of interest to all of Europe.

(c)  India, because if the subject is of interest there, it will be of interest all over Asia and Africa.

(BP Singer Features, Anaheim, California, USA, a syndication agency)

The Internet has widened the horizons of feature writers. Perhaps three-quarters of the magazines in the world are in English; some of the others may be interested in translating your offerings, and they are only a few clicks away. Of course there’s a great deal of competition and your market study has to be at its sharpest. But there are exciting prospects, both for the traditional prints and for electronic publications.

You can sample some of those traditional prints online and market-study them there. You can arrange for publishers to send recent numbers and arrange to pay by credit card or international money orders. You can then pitch and submit copy by email. Otherwise, if you’re something of a traveller you may make a list of likely targets from the marketing guides and pick up copies on holiday. Or you can ask relatives and friends living or travelling overseas to send you publications from various countries.

A feature that will sell without change to different publications overseas requires careful shaping to transcend all the cultural boundaries and you’re likely to need a syndication agency (see below). Increasingly magazines are being reproduced in various (especially European) countries in their own languages (with a new title) and they will translate from English, but few features can be marketed in this way without some rewriting. There are, on the other hand, numerous possibilities for rewriting a feature, especially if you’ve done a fair amount of research which has thrown up a number of different angles that can be exploited.

GUIDES TO THE MARKET

Have another look at Figure 3.4. The various marketing magazines and guidebooks list overseas publications. Remember that names of editors and other details may be out of date and need to be checked. Try online to update these items, or telephone. Other sources for market study are the foreign embassies in the UK, which will give you details of magazines published in their countries, the Foreign Office’s and the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI’s) guides to foreign countries.

You must be clear about what rights you will be asked for (American publishers generally ask for all rights), what rights you are willing to grant and how the rights offered should affect the fee you expect. Some overseas publications are not interested in features you’ve sold in the UK under an FBRO agreement, but many are, as long as you’re offering a publication First Rights within its country. Be clear about whether electronic rights are demanded.

Some overseas magazines will accept features in English and translate them. The German periodicals business, for example, will do this, charging you a fee for the service, but often paying well enough to make it worthwhile. Increasingly magazines are producing at the same time in different European countries in their own languages. Again, they may translate your feature for a fee. But keep in mind that features that can be marketed in this way without some rewriting are relatively few. If you’re going down this road syndication would seem to be the answer.

Writers’ magazines

Although close study of a publication is the best kind of market study, editorial policies can be put into sharper focus by the writers’ guidelines that some magazines will send you on request, most likely after an initial pitch. Many American magazines, for example, provide this service. Such guidelines may include a list of subjects to be covered in future issues. These are to be regarded mainly as areas to avoid rather than be embraced – the commissions may have been established – but you may want to check if ideas on such subjects are being encouraged.

Apart from the writers’ guidebooks, writers’ magazines such as the American Writer’s Digest and in the UK Writer’s Monthly and Writer’s Forum suggest likely markets for recycling material, including reselling in different countries. Examples of this are provided by Michael Sedge in the latter publication: his feature on the sunken Roman city of Baiae off the coast of Italy had sold at his time of writing more than 20 times, in 12 countries:

The Sunken City of Baiae first appeared in Italy in 1980. As the years passed I continued to find new homes for the feature – Diver magazine in Middlesex, Oceans and Los Angeles Times in the USA, Mabuhay in the Philippines, Going Places Doing Things in Italy, R&R in Germany etc.

and more recently Canada’s Weekend Times.

Having listed a few overseas publications from the guidebooks and writers’ magazines and got a clearer idea of what you can offer to overseas publications, you might then go online to see what more you can find out about them. An online presence? Sample copies? Subscribe? Writers’ guidelines? You could also try keying into Google writers’ guides and global journalism and suchlike phrases to sample what’s on offer, narrowing the field down to the countries and kinds of publication you’re looking for.

Once you’re developing a global approach to sales you may find opportunities in English language publications that are international in scope. The monthly magazine New Internationalist, for example, published in Oxford, devotes most of each issue with campaigning zeal to an important world issues related to world poverty and inequality.

By email is the obvious way to pitch and submit, especially if you’re pitching to several editors in different countries at the same time. You simply copy your query content to your clipboard and paste it into your emails, and then do any editing required.

Play it by ear. How successful are you in getting your ideas accepted in this way? Editors everywhere are getting many queries this way daily. They may find it convenient to reply ‘No thanks’ but it may be more convenient just to press that delete button. Experiment with follow-up emails when a pitch gets no reply within a week or so. Decide from the response or lack of it whether to keep that editor on your list or not. You have to accept that with the vast increase in opportunities comes a corresponding reduction in the proportion of pitches that are accepted.

The phone may be a better bet for a few editors overseas if you have some track record, or a letter if you have something extra special to offer.

CHOOSING YOUR COUNTRIES

Choose countries you know something about, that interest you, that you can research reasonably quickly. Contacts living in them will be useful to keep you up to date with the journalism there and send you periodicals. They will be able to add a personal slant to your market research. It helps if you, or contacts, have lived or worked or travelled to the countries you select.

The culture study

You must extend your market study. You need to study not merely the target publication but the country – its culture and its people. Features about prison life in the UK, for example, or about sailing round the coast of Britain may well be of interest to overseas markets. But you should have a good idea what the prison life or the sailing is like in the target country and what the target readers would be most interested to know. You will avoid any suggestion that your country is superior in the way it handles things (unless of course that’s what you’ve secured an agreement to do, and the facts stand up and you can do it tactfully). It will help if you know the different varieties of slang and the kinds of English used overseas. A feature sent to the US must use American spelling and watch those cultural references. Refer to a baseball rather than a cricket match.

Start your culture study with guidebooks, encyclopedias, almanacs and the like, going online when you’re more sure of what you’re looking for. Read, if you can, what they read. If you’re aiming at the US, get acquainted with Time Magazine and the New Yorker and the New York Times and have a look at some of the other papers and magazines as well. Then you will need to convince when you pitch that you’re clued up. You will show that, first, you have something to offer that might be more difficult to obtain from the natives – a different angle, a different way of looking at things that will intrigue or arouse curiosity; and, second, that you know what sort of readers you’re talking to because you’ve acquainted yourself with their culture.

If you’re pitching to an Islamic country you’d be wise to avoid mention of women in bikinis, human body parts, alcohol, dogs and pigs. You would find out how strictly the religion was interpreted. Features are rejected in some European countries because they suggest readers can obtain certain goods at certain international chain stores such as Wal-Mart or can visit a Macdonald’s when these establishments haven’t arrived yet.

SOME LIKELY OPPORTUNITIES

Many of your opportunities for writing internationally are going to come out of your travelling.

Freelances have an advantage here because they can find more time for it and because they have more freedom to publish in a wide variety of publications. Even when travelling without the specific purpose of producing a feature the benefits of seeing how other peoples live and of broadening your horizons generally are obvious. Travel articles, in the usual sense of the word, were given a little space in Chapter 6 (because there are many good books on the subject). Here we are concerned with features that come out of travel, whatever your interests. If you write about the catering industry, art, architecture, agriculture, sport, banking, zoos, whatever, you can find subjects, ideas, angles, features all over the world to be produced for English-language publications everywhere.

With luck, and increasingly through experience, you’ll be able to get your travel expenses covered without using up your fees on them. You might want to do it by producing in the course of each trip a travel article that will attract free travel and accommodation from travel companies, hotels, tourist offices or international trade associations if not from commissioning publications. The latter may well defray at least part of the cost. Where you don’t get travel expenses you’ll get information.

Apart from the United States the old imperial countries are obviously a good bet. Many of their media organizations have editorial offices in London – the Australian Consolidated Press, for example. Having acquired samples of the magazines such an organization produces, you can make your pitch via London. Spain with its English-speaking tourists and expats has a fair number of English-language publications, and so does the Netherlands where English is widely understood.

SYNDICATION

Assuming you’ve followed the general advice given in Chapter 3 about multiple submissions, the rights you’re selling and on fees, a few more points are worthwhile here. Market-study syndication agencies before approaching them. Their requirements (and their efficiency) vary greatly. Some buy your work outright, others will pay you between 25 and 50 per cent commission from the sales. Some deal with translation fees, others don’t.

If you can keep a regular column going that becomes eagerly awaited in many different areas you may be catching sight of substantial rewards. The masters are mainly American, such as Art Buchwald, who could learn the art at home. Agencies are not likely to be interested in taking you on, though, until you are well established. Even then you have to convince the agency that you can produce a column of international quality indefinitely.

How to define that international quality? The quote at the start of this chapter gives you a starting point.

Some syndication agencies want a series of columns that will continue indefinitely, and are already being published. When the field is specialized (food, architecture) illustrations will help to sell – photographs or line drawings. Agencies are often interested in finding book publishers to consider putting a writer’s work into a book.