Is Syndication Still A Good Business Model For Freelancers?

An award-winning journalist riffs on why syndication is a waste of time for freelance writers and journalists today.

By Natasha Khullar Relph

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I was chatting with a friend a couple of weeks ago about syndication, and how it’s now a dead end for most freelance writers. It was after I posted this about Conde Nast’s decision to start making movies from previously published articles and how this would affect writers.

We started talking rights, and the conversation headed to selling reprints and syndicating your work.

Now if you’ve been in business for more than five years, you’ve heard the advice to keep all your rights and then try to sell reprints. In fact, many writers have said repeatedly that a large chunk of their income comes from selling reprints to various regional and niche magazines. Successful writers like Michael Sedge have made an entire living out of keeping rights to pieces and then selling worldwide rights one country at a time, much in the way agents do with books.

But, in my opinion, this business model no longer works.

I’ll admit right off the bat that none of my work has much resale value anyway. I’m always keen to work on new stuff. Even articles and essays that could have resold never ended up being sent out because I wasn’t keen on them anymore. With each assignment, I’m often ready to try something new, write a little bit better.

But even I, someone who has never spent much time on trying to sell reprints, sold a few every year. Until two or three years ago. That’s when I noticed that the model was shifting.

I believe syndication (or selling reprints) is a waste of time for writers now and unless you already have star power or name recognition, it’s not going to be a big money-maker for you.

Here’s why:

1. Publishers are increasingly asking for more rights

Worse, they’re not keen on negotiating those rights. This means that your only options are to accept or turn down the contract. It’s easy to turn down contracts when one or two publications are asking for all rights. But when all of them are doing it, it’s going to be increasingly hard to make a living if you’re turning down 90% of what’s coming your way.

In fact, if you’ve ever looked into guest blogging, even blogs won’t accept reprints any more. A few years ago, you saw writers sending the same article to various websites and because they all had the same readerships and numbers, they started losing readers. So now most blog owners won’t run pre-published content. Which means syndication is dead.

2. Google likes original content

There’s another reason for this, too. If you’ve published the same article on ten different websites, for instance, Google will penalize those websites for not having original content and lower their search engine rankings. Why does Google do this? Well, it started off as a fantastic measure by Google to penalize those websites whose owners do nothing more than copy-paste other people’s content into their blogs. But it then affects people who’re putting up previously-published material as well.

3. There’s no longer money in reprints

Heck, the pay rates across the board have been slashed. How many reprints at $50 a pop are you going to have to sell to make a good chunk of cash?

4. There’s little value in reprints for international stories

For international writers, I’ve found that there’s even less value in syndication. What you sell to a publication in India– unless general-interest– isn’t going to sell to a publication in the UAE or the USA. Even with general-interest or, say, health features, you’re going to have to quote experts from that country, which will turn it into a different article entirely.

Why, then, take less money for it selling it as a reprint when you could just take that initial seed of an idea and sell it as an original feature instead?

For instance, I’ve written two stories on Body Dysmorphic Disorder, one for an Indian women’s magazine and one for an American website. In both stories I ended up quoting very different experts, and so the stories themselves ended up being almost entirely unique. I still reaped the benefits because the research was the same, so it took me half the time to do the actual reporting and querying.

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