 
### **_The Quick and Dirty Guide to Freelance Writing_**

By Scott Carney

### **_Contents_**

Introduction

How It Started

Great, Now What?

Know Your Market

Breaking In

How To Pitch

Value and Work

Success Through Failure

Lead Time and Novelty

A Note on Editors

Moving Forward

APPENDIX: Sample Pitches

## **CHAPTER ONE**

### **_Introduction_**

This book is meant to inspire you to write for a living. The path to a sustainable writing career isn't always straightforward, but there are a few concrete steps that you can take that will give you a leg up on success. As we proceed, you might discover that I'm not so much boosting your confidence as I am warning you about the potential pitfalls you will face. For some reason, when people get started on this path, they come with their accumulated baggage of what they think writing should be, not what it actually is. These notions lead to common mistakes where your client and audience have a different idea of what you are doing than you do.

That said, some of these early notions are useful to unpack. So before we get to the hard part, I first want you to have a clear vision of the kind of writer you want to be. When you started thinking about writing for a living, what did you see yourself doing? Are you a feature writer, covering deeply personal human interest stories? Are you an intrepid foreign correspondent, dodging in and out of war zones? Are you a food critic, eating at the finest restaurants in Manhattan? Will you pen scathing political commentary? Do you want to dish out the latest health trends? Are you writing cover stories for Sports Illustrated? There's a niche out there for just about every writer, but very few people can do it all. Before you start, it's important to know where, ideally, you want to end up.

This is because it's not enough to simply write. The very first assignments that you take will begin to shape you. If you're not careful, they can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you find that your first assignment is to write a regular column for a food blog but you really want to do political commentary, you might discover that it is a lot harder to change your business model and personal brand than if you had started writing what you had wanted to in the first place. This isn't to say that you won't occasionally write something outside of your genre; rather, as you create a body of work, that work is both what people come to expect from you and, more importantly, what you expect from yourself.

Of course it's ok if you've already started writing and are just picking up this book to hone your skills. It's always possible to alter your course. It just gets more difficult. I didn't realize what sort of writer I wanted to become until I had already written a few stories for the smaller markets; however once I figured out that I wanted to write long, meaty features for big-budget publications and then go on to write books, my aspirations became a sort of roadmap that I used to direct my actions in the moment. Every job that I took after that realization was meant to improve my career. I learned to say "no" and I never took an assignment that I didn't think I would be proud of when it was done, or that wouldn't add to the portfolio I wanted to cultivate.

I think that it's also important to mention that many writers who I would consider successful have taken very different paths to the one that I'm laying out here. They've established different sorts of editorial relationships and achieved a certain amount of stability by taking whatever gigs they can get and growing slowly. There's nothing wrong with a traditional route, exactly, but it is far from the most efficient way to make a living. Even established writers with clips in big-budget magazines can still learn a thing or two from reading this book that will help them grow their career further.

There's a saying that seems appropriate to mention at this point: "Dress for the job you want, not the one you have." I take this to mean you need to aspire to be something, rather than simply hoping that the path you are on at the moment will lead to your heart's desire. You are in command of your own career and if you want to be the top fashionista at a place like _Vogue_ or _Marie Claire_ , then you had better start making a plan to get there. Very few people outside of the world's elite were born with pre-ordained success. Most of us are nobodies to begin with and the trick to achieving success isn't so much luck, as it is believing that our dreams are possible.

So, sit back and think a little bit about who you want to be. Think about in which publication you would most like to see your byline. Think about having a book made into film, attending a White House press briefing, pontificating about your most recent story on the radio or going on a world lecture tour. Enjoy that vision. Aspire to it. Realize that if you aim toward them, you have a chance of achieving your dreams.

## **CHAPTER TWO**

### **_How It Started_**

The grant rejections didn't come all at once, but they came with the steady, unrelenting pace of a funeral dirge. I was an anthropologist, or at least an aspiring one, and every letter in my mailbox was a signal that my academic career was about to end. For me, graduate school was an answer to the existential crisis of what a person was supposed to do with their life after bumbling their way through college. The original plan was straightforward. I hoped to become a professor, assume a tenure-track position and live a life of respect and prestige from within the confines of an ivory tower. Part of me wanted write the sorts of books that sparked new ideas and vigorous discussions and enliven classrooms. But more than that, I wanted a life of adventure where I could travel across the world, learn obscure languages and have a stash of ribald stories to pull out at cocktail parties.

Of course, before the glory, I had to pay my dues. So I got into a prestigious PhD program in Madison, Wisconsin and spent three years grinding through the coursework. Now I was at the point where I need to start researching my dissertation. What sets anthropological research apart from other sorts of academic inquiry is that it requires spending a long time in a foreign country and, in my case, that meant at least a year in India, working in Bombay. I was ready. And the only roadblock left was raising the $20,000 I needed to begin my adventures. I needed to land a grant.

Every year there are about 12 programs that accept applications to fund anthropological research. Some bear imposingly official names like the Social Science Research Counsel and Fulbright-Hayes. Others are more obscure, discipline-specific programs like Wenner-Gren and the American Institute of Indian Studies, which offer money in the small niche of research that I was trying to carve out for myself. Finally, there were the long-shots like the National Science Foundation, which could bankroll my entire career but are so incredibly unlikely that few anthropologists ever actually get them.

Without getting money from one of these programs, there would be no research, no PhD and no tenure track job waiting for me at the end of the seven-to-ten-year long process - which also meant no fun cocktail party stories to entertain my future friends. What's more, every grant received hundreds of applicants for only a handful of spots and I desperately needed to outcompete my peers. If I failed, I'd have to tread water in my program, probably taking a low-paying teaching assistant job to get by, as I repeated the application process next year. In the bowels of the social sciences building in Madison there were a few aging teaching assistants in a special type of academic limbo, who had unsuccessfully applied for research grants for ten years straight. Every year, they were just a little bit more in debt from tuition and student fees, squandering what could have been the formative years of their career if they'd just pursued a job in the outside world.

When the mailman dropped his bundle of mail through the slot in my door on a sweltering day in June 2005, I tried not to run to pick it up. I'd already gotten 11 rejections; some of them included nice notes about how I might change future proposals. Others were less encouraging. And now came longest long shot of all: the National Science Foundation. I knelt down at the base of the mail drop and searched for the letter with the red and gray NSF logo in the upper left hand corner. My hands trembled a little bit when I picked it up and slid a pocket knife along the crease at the top of the all-too-thin envelope. I barely had to unfold the page before I saw the words "We regret to inform you" and I knew that I was destined to join the ranks of graying teaching assistants.

The academic year was already over and I had a decision to make. I could spent another year re-applying for the same grants or I could bail out and try something entirely different. It didn't help that I had been surviving on my sub-$1,000 a month teaching stipend, and was as close to broke as I could be without applying for food stamps. I decided to avoid the problem entirely and drown my disappointment in beer and good fellowship.

Earlier that year, I had made friends with a Sudanese refugee who was getting his Masters degree in international development. When he was a child, a local warlord had recruited him as a lookout for one of the many militant groups that fought for control of the region. Luck was the only thing that stopped him from becoming another nameless soldier carrying a ragged AK-47. A missionary took a liking to him and somehow fast tracked his application to come to America. We met over a beer and when I told him about the quandary I was in he was kind enough not to compare my own struggles to his own. Instead he flashed a broad toothy smile and said I had nothing to worry about. America was the land of opportunity. The streets here are paved with gold.

"Look," he said pointing to a copy of the satirical weekly paper, _The Onion_ , a print version of which is available on every street corner in Madison. "Open up the back pages. They give away money there. This could be your future."

"Really?" I thought. "The weekly paper?" Humoring him, I flipped to the back page of the rag and scanned the listings for prostitutes, dodgy medical marijuana posts and get-rich-quick and work-from home gigs. I could almost smell the sleaze through the cheap ink. And that's when I saw it: a short advertisement saying that it would pay healthy men for overnight stays at a clinical research facility in town. It sounded as innocuous as a slumber party, so the next morning I called the number on the add and signed up for preliminary screening that informed me local researchers were testing a reformulation of the erectile dysfunction drug Levitra. They needed thirty men to dose themselves with insane amounts of the drug to see if it was safe for human consumption. The pay would be $3,200 for just four weekends of my life.

The money was enough to motivate me. However the thought of being stuck in a room with thirty guys on penis poppers made me laugh all the way home from the interview. It sounded like some sort of slapstick setup for a movie. It occurred to me that perhaps it would make a funny enough story that other people would want to read it, too. So I sent a letter to a website called Nerve.com that published edgy nonfiction pieces and said that I was willing to be the Chuck Yeager of erectile dysfunction if they could give me a few thousand words of space. The editor got back to me in thirty minutes. He wrote that he'd pay me $2,500 for a funny and informative romp through the clinical trial scene. Between the clinical trial and the story fee, it was more money than I'd make in six months as a teaching assistant.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had just begun my career as a freelance writer.

The point of me telling you this story isn't to recount my adventures as a Levitra lab rat—you can read an adaptation of that piece in my book _The Red Market_—rather it is to show that inspiration can come from just about anywhere, at any time, and that for me, writing was way to change my life entirely. My academic career was crumbling down around my ears but I'd learned that if I found an idea that might make a good story, then all I needed to do to make money was convince an editor to have the same vision.

The next month, I put in notice with my department that I would be taking an indefinite leave of absence and I began to write regularly. First, I penned articles for small publications and local newspapers and within a few short months in internationally known publications like _Wired_ and _Mother Jones._ What's more, I was trading up from my initial academic goals. As a PhD candidate, I would have toiled on a single project for at least five years carefully culling together a dissertation. When it was done I would have sat in front of a committee of four or five specialists and if I was truly fortunate, a university press would publish it and - maybe - dozens of people would read my work. Working for the mainstream media already had three clear advantages over academia. First, I'd be able to reach a huge audience. Second, instead of years to get to print, I could publish my research in just a few months. And finally, writing could pay me far more than I was currently making.

Six months after my first assignment I bought a one-way plane ticket to India and established myself in my own news patch. I rented an apartment in the southern Indian city of Chennai where I was the only American writer within a thousand miles. Whenever a story broke nearby—the aftermath of a tsunami, organ trading scandals or a surge in militant violence—I was the closest reporter to the action. Earning in dollars and spending in rupees made it easy to fund long form investigations without relying on grants and I was doing the sort of research that I had wanted to work on while in graduate school.

I lived in India for three more years. My stories showed up in most of the glossy magazines that line the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere. For a while, I was a contributing editor at _Wired_ and I've also had bylines in _Foreign Policy, Details, Discover, Marie Claire_ and _Playboy,_ just to name a few. I've reported for NPR, and also gone on to help National Geographic TV put together an Emmy-nominated special about organ trafficking. In addition to the book you're reading right now, I've published two other books with major publishers. I've even had movie producers option my work to become TV shows in their own right.

You could say that I've been lucky beyond my wildest dreams and you'd be right. But, as I look back on the trajectory of my career, much of what I've been able to accomplish boils down to a few simple skills: the most important of which was something that I struggled with as a graduate student and discovered by chance when I found that advertisement in the back of _The Onion_. I learned how to convince magazines to pay me to write about things that interest me. In other words: I learned how to pitch.

In this book, I aim to teach you the basic skills that will set you up as a writer in your own right. There is one caveat before we proceed: while I can lay out the mechanics of what it takes to sell a piece, I don't have a magic wand to give you inspiration. Nor can I teach you how to write; the best ideas can take years to percolate through your subconscious before they earn the right to be on the page. This book is about the business of writing, not the craft of it. However, once you connect with what inspires you, this book will help you take the next steps forward into making that inspiration the driving force for a career. And who knows, perhaps, with a bit of hard work and luck you might be able to quit your day job.

## **CHAPTER THREE**

### **_Great, Now What?_**

One way that might help you think about the sort of writer you want to become is to answer the deceptively simple question of why you want to write in the first place. Some people crave the prestige that comes with having a byline in a magazine or newspaper. Others want an outlet for their creative impulses and a platform to reach an audience. Or, after slaving away at a desk job for years on end, you are searching for something more meaningful to do. Perhaps you simply want to strike out on your own and have a measure of autonomy to your workday. Other people may have a burning desire to advocate for a particular cause or they might have such a unique background that they feel that the world would benefit from a new perspective. Very few people who start out as writers harbor illusions that this is an exceptionally efficient way to make money. While a best-selling book might generate millions of dollars in book sales, or a magazine article could be optioned to become a movie, no one should start out on their career expecting that these things will happen. Like any industry, far more people muddle around in the lower tiers of success than actually break into the top.

The reason that I chose to become a writer was, simply enough, that I failed or was fired from every other job that I ever tried to do. I haven't made a fortune on royalties, but for at least a decade I have set my own schedule and pursued only projects that interest me. I have a nice house, a nice cat and no boss breathing down my neck telling me what I did wrong. Every story that I publish is special in its own way. I throw my blood, sweat and tears into my work, and at the end of every assignment I own a project that I can look back on with a measure of pride. Moreover, I believe that writing is an honorable profession. As I venture out to seek the truth in whatever subject I am exploring, I like to think that I'm at least trying to make the world incrementally a richer place. I may not save humanity, or even change it all that much, but I believe that in some small way, a story illuminates something fundamental about what it means to be human in the world today.

That said, writers face a host of challenges right out of the gate that can stop a budding career in its tracks. Here are a few examples of what you might come across:

Let's say you're starting from nowhere and have sent out dozens, scores or even hundreds of pitch letters without receiving even one promising response. Every pitch takes a measure of effort and time and every unreturned phone starts to look like another red mark on a bank account's bottom line. The discouragement mounts to a point where it gnaws at your sense of self-worth. Then, when you are at your lowest point, an editor says that they are willing to take a chance on one of your ideas. You are so grateful for the opportunity to have a byline that you barely look at the contract that arrives in your inbox. You don't want to risk losing the sale, so you sign it blindly. What you might have not realized is that by not negotiating the contract, you literally signed away the rights to your work.

Or, maybe, after landing and reporting on the assignment of a lifetime—a long, meaty feature on an all-consuming issue—the story gets finished and high-fives go all around the office as people tell you how great it was. Then, as the piece goes into pre-production, the _New York Times_ publishes a similar story on the front page. When the editor-in-chief sees that coverage online he spikes your story because it's "not fresh anymore." The 20 percent kill fee that he offers you for compensation doesn't even cover your out-of-pocket expenses.

More than likely, though, your story does make it to print three months after you submit the final copy and the piece briefly trends across the Internet. It gets picked up on Reddit, spreads on Twitter and a few people blog about it. Some of the more reasoned readers have thoughtful comments, but you are a little shocked by the amount of negative feedback that people dish out. Commenters call you unqualified, or a hack, or probably worse. Somehow you have to pull yourself back from the precipice and start pitching again. Meanwhile, your payment that the magazine promised doesn't come on time and you have to harangue various accounting departments for a check. At some point might you actually beg for the money that they promised because you feel like you don't have any other options.

These worst case scenarios are sadly par for the course in a writing career. Editors and publications can have an outsized influence on our lives. Readers often don't respect the immense amount of effort that it takes to research and report a story. And there isn't a writer alive who hasn't had trouble with their clients paying on time. It can be difficult to see that it is, in fact, possible to take control of your own freelancing career and at least manage, if not completely eliminate, the obstacles that new writers face.

If there's one secret to sustainability and success it's this: don't treat your writing as an art. Treat it as a business. Whatever reason originally drove you to want to become a writer is irrelevant if you don't respect the publishing process. It doesn't matter if you have a yearning for a creative outlet, have a particular audience that you feel needs to see your ideas or have a burning desire to see your name in the pages of a national newspaper. Those passions might sustain you emotionally during your career, but have nothing to do with your bottom line. At the end of the day, your career depends on a deft marketing plan, carefully orchestrated contract negotiations and a predictable cash flow. If you want to be paid as a writer, you need to think of your work as both art _and_ as a product with a real world cash value. Writers who make this cognitive leap can go on to achieve success. Those who don't, more often than not, move on to other careers.

## **CHAPTER FOUR**

### **_Know Your Market_**

There was a time when magazines and newspapers were flush with cash. Before the Internet, the only way for advertisers to reach out to a general audience was to buy advertisements printed on dead trees. These were the golden years of journalism and newsrooms around the country flourished. Some publications were notorious for letting staff members charge three martini lunches and steak dinners on corporate cards. The check-writers barely blinked when an intrepid correspondent wanted $20,000 or $30,000 to cover a budding conflict overseas. Some of the old hands at _Wired,_ who were there at the height of the Silicon Valley gold rush, remember wild parties and piles of cocaine in the break room. Freelance correspondents could sometimes command rates of five or even ten dollars per published word for a particularly juicy feature story. Magazines were thick back then, often running five or six features every issue.

Those days were long gone by the time I stated writing. Nowadays, we complain that the web brought about a long and dismal decline of the media. Online advertising is far less lucrative than the old print models and the fortunes of even the most established publishing houses are floundering. The rise of social media and independent blogs makes it simple for just about anyone to reach their own niche audience. So while we as a species are reading more written words than any other time in history, it also means that professional writers are directly competing for eyeballs with people who write for free.

At least, this is the story we like to tell. The real situation is a little more complex. Yes, profits are not what they were at the height of market speculation in the late 1990s, but people still pay to read well thought out stories. Engaging narratives immerse the reader in an experience in a way that an Internet screed usually cannot. Indeed, if you examine the actual financial structure of the mainstream media, it's apparent that there is still more than enough money out there to fund quality journalism. Let's use present-day _Wired_ as an example, if only because I worked there for several years. According to their media kit, which they graciously posted online, a typical full page of advertisement costs $110,000 per page. When I scrolled through a recent issue, there were thirty-five pages of advertising, which my back of the envelope calculations tell me were worth about $3.85 million. The starting rate for writers there is two dollars and fifty cents per word and the magazine probably published about thirty thousand words all together. Going back to my envelope, this means the total amount of money that they paid writers for that issue was somewhere around $75,000. There are a lot of other expenses for running a magazine, too: the cost of printing, editing, general office overhead and other miscellaneous expenses. However, perhaps I flatter myself, but writers certainly contribute more than two percent of the value of the magazine. While I have a larger point to make here about how much writers should actually be paid (I think ten dollars a word is not all that ridiculous when you start crunching actual publishing revenues), I do not buy the idea that writers should have to accept lower rates just because the nature of publishing is changing.

The truth is that people read magazines because they love the experience. They want to be entertained by immersive environments and compelling characters. The audience appreciates solid editing and fact checking and advertisers are still willing to pay huge sums of money to place their products next to well-reported stories. Every aspiring professional writer needs to think about the real world cash value of the work that they produce. Publications simply cannot exist without competent storytellers. What's more? They know it. And here's a secret worth chewing on: if they really want a story, then they are willing to pay just about anything to have it in their pages.

As you begin your career, you're probably not thinking that your first stories are going to end up in the most popular magazines in the world. For every top-tier magazine or news source in your local bookstore or airport gift shop there are a hundred titles that you've never heard of and those can command the sorts of rates that I listed above. It's true that your first clips may show up in lesser-known publications, but you should never write for free, or less than what it costs you to produce it in the first place. A professional writer values his or her own work and demands fair payment. And, something I'll get into more later, the more you value you own work, the better that work will be and the more likely it is that editors and publications will take you seriously.

There is one more important thing to understand about writing markets, a notion that you will need to disabuse yourself of early on. At the end of the day the publishing business boils down to entertainment, not education. It doesn't matter what you are writing about—whether it is the escalation of violence in the Middle East or Kate Upton's new haircut, people read because they enjoy it. They want to be diverted from whatever it is they were doing in the day and explore the world that you create in your story. Even magazines and newspapers that have a split between editorial and advertising (by which I mean all the good ones) still need pieces to be compelling, interesting and to evoke a response in their readers. Most people's lives won't change drastically just by reading about a genocide in North Africa, or the distribution of polio vaccines in Afghanistan or the story of an inspiring tech entrepreneur. They may learn something in the process, but that is a side effect of their desire to be entertained and engaged. That isn't to say that stories like these are meaningless; I'm just suggesting that entertainment is a much more effective way to convey an important message than education. More on this when we talk about pitches.

## **CHAPTER FIVE**

### **_Breaking In_**

At this point, you're probably thinking that everything that I've mentioned so far is all well and good, but if you can't break into the business in the first place, then why worry about it? After all, if you're new to this, you're probably struggling with a different sort of problem.

Who is going to trust a writer who doesn't have any clips? Every unpublished writer faces the same conundrum. Even if the idea you're selling will burn its way off the page and into their reader's hearts and minds, many people feel that no one will take them seriously if they don't already have a track record of similar stories. It's true that this can be a problem—especially since new writers often haven't developed an individual voice and editors are likely correct in guessing that they are going to have to spend extra time working on the piece.

That said, everyone starts their career from the same spot and the fact that there are writers at all proves that it isn't an insurmountable challenge. The first thing that you need to understand is that even established writers face a tremendously high failure rate when it comes to pitching their ideas. At the beginning of my career, I calculated that I sent out at least a hundred pitches to various magazines before I received an encouraging word, let alone an assignment. Today, after almost ten years writing, my rate has improved somewhat. Now one out of every five pitches I send out turns into an assignment. Stories get rejected for a number of reasons that don't always have anything to do with the idea itself. Every publication and editor has their own idiosyncratic biases. While I was writing at _Wired,_ it was common knowledge that the editor-in-chief at the time thought MRI studies were pseudoscience, so every pitch that included a reference to a brain scan was rejected out of hand. Other editors will feel that your idea is too similar to something that they've already published. In my case, this sometimes meant that when I was writing magazine features from India I would receive rejections from magazines saying that they ran an India story two years ago and can't run another one for another year. It didn't matter that the stories were wildly different; the piece they published was about the nuclear industry and mine was on the rise of organized crime. While it may seem unfair, this is just the way the industry works. Rejection doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.

For the would-be successful writer, the relative likelihood of failure should be a call to arms, rather than an assumption of defeat. The silver lining to having an inbox full of rejections is that every pitch you send out to an editor makes you seem more real to them. While they may have rejected your first dozen or so pitches, your name will ring familiar to them when you send in the thirteenth. Once in my early days, I sent an e-mail to the editor-in-chief of the _New Yorker_ (a publication I still have not written for) and was elated when he wrote back to me a simple one word response: "No". Sure, I wasn't even close to getting an assignment, but at least I knew that he read what I was sending. I chalked his reply up to a success and carried on with pitching.

Aside from pitching a whole lot, there are a few other things that you can do to improve your success rate. The easiest is probably to create a professional website. These days, there are dozens of free and very cheap website templates out there that you can deploy in only a matter of a few hours work. You claim your own URL and then use that website to carefully craft the image of the sort of writer that you want to be. Even if you don't have any published writing, a website with a sharp biography, a few interesting photos and a contact page gives you a professional feel. It legitimizes you in a small way and might make the difference between getting a response to your pitch and being overlooked. The first website I deployed was in blocky HTML, had only one clip on it and a bad picture. Even so, my response rate tripled.

The fact is that while editors probably should carefully vet everything that you've written before they give you an assignment, most of them will just do a cursory look at your work. They will get a feel for who you are by the face that you present them. The website is a tool that can develop your brand before you even have anything to show for yourself. And, as your career grows, it becomes a place to showcase and cultivate your portfolio.

Eventually you will get a first assignment. It may not be the weighty feature that you had hoped for, but a magazine or newspaper will offer to pay you for your words and agree to publish your story. The reason they accepted you wasn't because they wanted to give an aspiring writer a chance. It wasn't because they felt bad for you. It was because you sent them an idea that they thought would be valuable to their readers and, at a larger level, help them sell advertisements. The moment they accept your idea is the moment that you go from having no value as a writer to someone who is sitting on a potentially lucrative commodity. Your first assignment isn't only about getting a clip. Ideally, it will set up the future of your career.

Even with this first taste of success, things will be slow. You will get assignments but not nearly as many as you want, and most likely they won't pay as much as you need. In those first years many people think it's important to live near the headquarters of national magazines. New writers flock to Manhattan, Brooklyn or San Francisco. They figure it will be easier to get their foot in the door of a major publication if they can meet an editor in person. This is a mistake. As William Burroughs once said, "The only thing a writer needs is cheap rent." The biggest metropolises in America tend to be exceedingly expensive and already saturated with high-level writing talent. At the beginning of your career, you don't have much to distinguish yourself from the masses of other aspiring writers. When you get what you think is a unique idea that you want to send to a magazine, you have to wade past all the other local writers who have come up with similar pitches simply because they live near the same sources. In a place like Brooklyn, you could throw a stone in just about any cafe and it would hit a writer for th _e New Yorker_ on the head before it hit the ground. Every one of them will be able to outcompete you to a story idea. As you pay astronomical rent on a studio apartment in a bad area of town, you burn away your capital needlessly. It is far better to live in some remote corner of the country—or for that matter the Earth—where you are the only writer of any note around. Any story that breaks near you will be yours by default. On top of that you will be spending a lot less on rent, which means you can invest more of your financial and time resources into reporting.

I started out in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was one of only a few freelance writers in the area. I did fine because I didn't have many people pitching the same ideas near me. Everything got astronomically better for me when I moved to Chennai, India, where I was the only American writer for at least 500 miles in any direction. Not only did I own my own news patch by default, but I earned money in dollars and spent it in rupees. I found that I could survive by writing only two features a year for the national press. That gave me extra time to spend on every piece, which let me create higher quality writing. The higher quality writing turned into more opportunities as my career moved onwards. While you don't have to move abroad, think seriously about whether where you're currently living is the ideal place to be starting this career.

## **CHAPTER SIX**

### **_How to Pitch_**

Effective pitching is the single most important skill that a freelance journalist can develop. In many ways, it's the only weapon in your toolbox that really matters. At its most basic, a pitch is the way to introduce your story idea to an editor before you go out into the world, do the research and write it up. It's a sales tool as much as it is an outline for the work you are about to produce. A pitch can also save you a lot of time and prevent you from wasting precious hours on a story idea that has no real shot at getting published.

There are several advantages of pitching before going out and completing a story and then trying to sell it. As I've already mentioned, it is impossible to know what a magazine is going to want. If you go out and fully report a story before talking to an editor, you haven't given them a chance to weigh in on the development of the idea. Unless you come back with something truly irresistible, you might discover that you've wasted time and money working on a piece that never had any hope of making it to print. A pitch, however, is a way to gauge how much appetite there is for the story. If the magazine likes it, they will usually offer to cover your expenses for the research and writing. This means they will buy plane tickets to foreign countries, rent cars and hire fixers to ensure you get the very best material possible. If you've already researched and written a piece, they have no incentive to cover expenses that you've already paid out of your own pocket.

A pitch can be a phone call or a casual conversation while meeting an editor at a bar or coffee shop; however, my most successful pitches have always been over e-mail. I write a letter with a very brief note to an editor about who I am and how I know them and then launch into a few hundred words about the story I want to write. My idea might come from anywhere—a conversation with a friend, scanning a local newspaper for stories that feel unfinished or through social media, where great ideas rise and are often quickly forgotten about. The pitch needs to accomplish three things: first, it needs to whet their interest and sell a great idea. Second, it needs to show that the story is possible to report. And third, it needs to convince the editor that you are the ideal person to report it. The opening sentence of my pitches - what journalists call a "lede" - is almost always a visceral image that takes the reader right to the heart of the action. As the paragraph opens up, I attempt to show the editor what sorts of juicy details he or she might expect from the finished article. Think of the pitch as an advertisement of your own writing skill. Some pitches that I've sent have been so full of detail that they could have been published on their own. Usually, I will have done an hour or two of research online and called a few potential sources to get a feel for what sorts of information I'll have access to if I really commit to the story and start pursuing it. At the end of the letter I talk about what it would take to fully report the piece in terms of time and money and then I end it with a description of who I am and give a link to my website. At the end of this book, I have included a list of sample pitches that I've had approved over the years. It will be a useful resource to study as you attempt to master their structure.

Obviously there are a lot of things that you won't know about the story if you haven't reported it yet. You don't definitely know what anecdotes you will be able to tell, what sources are going to say or how events might develop over time. Don't worry about those things just yet. A pitch is simply there to sell the hope of an amazing feature. Every editor knows that you can't control the future and that the world is often more complex than the one you present. So, while you will lead with a tantalizing anecdote and colorful images, those details will shift and change over time and come into focus as you report the story. In essence, you are asking the publication to trust that you will be able to navigate the story as it develops. Part of the fun of reporting is going out into the unknown and seeing what you find. Have faith that the world is often more interesting than you think it is.

Once you've written the body of the pitch, you need to decide who to send it to. Most writers have a list of publications that they dream of writing for. They sit in a hierarchy with one intimidatingly impressive publication at the top. For me, I've always wanted to write for the _New Yorker_. The list proceeds for a hundred or so names all the way down to _Cat Fancy_ and _TV Guide_ at the bottom. If you don't have a list, you should make one up right now. Place magazines in groups, or tiers, with the ones you most want to write for at the top. Since you can only publish in one magazine at a time I suggest that you start pitching at the top of your list and then work your way down to the bottom. Don't feel that your idea is definitely not yet good enough for your dream magazine (it probably isn't, but it doesn't mean you can't hope). If you don't know any editor at the magazine, and can't finagle an introduction to anyone there through your friends or other journalists, buy a copy of the magazine and locate the staff directory - what we call a _masthead_ in the business - at the front of the book to find the names of editors. You want your pitch to land in the inbox of an editor who has enough time on their hands to read your pitch, enough power to get it assigned and who doesn't yet have so many writers they work with that they're not interested in hearing from new people. Look for someone who is a recently hired senior editor or an associate editor. Barring that, you can just count down from the top of the masthead seven or ten names and assume that someone that far down probably has the time to read over your idea.

Almost universally, editors expect that you will send them ideas exclusively and won't be sending the story to anyone else until they've had time to respond. Sometimes they will tell you directly that they won't even listen to your idea if you have pitched it elsewhere. Naturally, publications want exclusivity. However, you should also realize that the interests of the magazine and your own interests as a writer don't always line up perfectly. Unless you have an established relationship with that editor, I think it is a very bad idea to send your idea out to just one magazine at a time. There is no guarantee that the editor you pitch will respond to your message at all. You might wait days, weeks or even months hoping for a reply.

If you give every editor a period of exclusivity as you work your way down your list, any time-sensitive story will likely die before you even have a chance to report it. In light of this, I suggest pitching as many magazines with your idea as you can. Tailor each pitch to the magazine and editor that you want to target but if your pitches go out separated by only 15 minutes from each other, it's ok. Most editors will reject your idea anyway. If you pitch multiple outlets, you have the advantage of taking the best offer possible that comes your way, rather than being locked into an agreement before you've even seen it. After all, what's the worst that could happen? You might get offers from more than one magazine. That's a good problem to have.

Once someone expresses interest in your idea, you should probably stop taking it out to new places. In general, the editor will ask information and start working with you on developing the idea for a specific niche in the magazine. Magazines are structured in a way that, even if the editor thinks your idea is a good one, he generally doesn't have the power to green-light your piece. They will need to seek approval from the editor in chief, or, occasionally at a pitch meeting where all the editors come together and vet all of the ideas that have come into the magazine in the last few weeks.

These meetings are often quite competitive and if an editor take your idea in front of the entire staff, it means they believe in your work and are willing to stake a bit of their own reputation on the line to get it on stands. The editor has a lot to gain if you write a good story. If they get a reputation for bringing solid stories into the magazine, then they stand a good chance at a promotion. If the stories they pitch never get green-lit or get killed after being reported, it can be something of a black mark for the editor.

This brings me to the subject of my next section: understanding the value of your work.

## **CHAPTER SEVEN**

### **_Value and Work_**

Your revenue stream is key to your survival as a freelance writer and, before you set any words onto a page, it's necessary to first understand what a story is actually worth. Most people believe that there is a fairly straightforward freelance model: you sell an idea to a magazine and agree a fair market rate. Once it's online or in print, you expect a check in the mail and your expenses covered. Depending on the contract you sign, that could be the end of the line for your potential income on a given piece. While some magazines might be able to offer a high enough rate that this seems enticing, a savvy businessperson understands that the initial publication word-rate is only the opening salvo for what might be an idea that will continue to generate income long after a story is off the stands. There's a particularly terrible contract that major publications offer new writers known as a "work-for-hire" contract. In these arrangements, the writer gives copyright to the publication and allows them to control all the future versions of the piece—often without offering the writer any compensation at all.

The very first national feature that I wrote was for _Wired_ magazine back in 2007 and it was a 2500 word investigation into the the underground market for human skeletons. At two dollars a word, I was initially excited to earn $5,000 for just few months work. (Remember, I was living in a cheap place and that check could get me through a year). To report it, I traveled to remote graveyards outside of Kolkata, India and tracked down grave robbers who dug up human corpses, de-fleshed them and sold them to American medical schools. The article was something of a home run in terms of feature writing. It was nominated for a few awards, I got calls from National Geographic and a Hollywood production company, who wanted to turn it into a TV show. _Wired_ 's parent company, the giant magazine empire Conde Nast, sold reprints of the piece to their international affiliates. Conde Nast runs _GQ, Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired_ and a dozen other magazines that you see everywhere. They also have foreign affiliate editions in just about every country.

The contract that I signed with them allowed any affiliate of Conde Nast a month to option my story. If the piece was republished within a year at any foreign affiliate, I stood to earn twenty cents a word. Several magazines loved the story and it appeared all over the world, allowing me to make a few thousand dollars from the international reprints through the Conde Nast agreement. It was easy money that I didn't have to work for. Then, a few months later, after their period of exclusivity ended, other magazines that weren't affiliated with Conde Nast called me up and asked to reprint my stories.  Since the copyright was mine, and I knew that I had a great piece, I was free to set my own rate for the story. I opted to charge them them my ordinary word rate for every reprint and soon reaped more than $20,000 from publications in France, Turkey, Germany, Brazil and South Africa. This was my eureka moment, where I realized that contracts didn't always have the writer's best interest in mind. If the five or six Conde Nast publications that optioned my piece had to pay my actual rate then I could have made $40,000 instead of $20,000. Not that I'm complaining. Any way you slice it, the initial amount that I earned for first publication was the least lucrative part of the deal.

I have come to look at the initial fee from magazines as merely a taste of things to come. If you write a blockbuster story, there are dozens of ways to earn revenue from it. And it behooves you to negotiate as hard as possible when you get your first offer so that you don't miss out. Many writers eyes glaze over when they see the section on movie rights. They don't realize that Hollywood is so voracious for original content that they will pay authors serious money simply to option a story—even if they never make the movie. Option deals mean that you sell the future rights to your story to a studio and they pay you a monthly or yearly retainer for the work. My option deals have mostly been small ones—$5,000 here, $1,500 there. But several of my colleagues have had four or five deals at $20,000 a pop—some of which are renewed on an annual basis. Major movie studios will pay to hold the rights to a piece they think might make a good movie, simply so that their competitors can't make it. Of course, sometimes the movies actually get made and the writer can usually negotiate one to two percent of the overall production budget for that. On a movie with a modest $20 million budget, the money might put a down payment on your new house.

There are hundreds of examples of this happening, but let's just look at one recent one. A few years ago, the writer Joshua Bearman wrote a story for _Wired_ about a hostage crisis in Iran where the CIA hired Hollywood to help extract a few stranded diplomats. It was a good story and Ben Affleck, who subscribes to Wired, saw it and decided to option the piece. It turned into the Academy Award-winning film _Argo._ Since Bearman was smart about the contract he signed, he got rich in the process. __

Just about any movie or TV show you see that uses the line "inspired by real events" originates from a magazine article or a book. Joshua Davis, another old hand at _Wired_ , doesn't even begin pitching a magazine story until he's spoken with his film agent about how best to lure a possible movie deal.

Of course, movie deals aren't in everyone's stars, but there are still other ways to make money on a story for which you control the copyright. There's a lucrative speaking engagement business that writers can hop on to, as well as lectures to universities and businesses around the country. You might find yourself starring in a TV show, or, as I have done twice, use a feature article to sell a book with a major publishing house. Indeed, the word rate itself is the least of your concerns when you sell a story. The lifecycle of non-fiction can stretch into places that you had no idea were possible.

It makes sense that the writer should have access to these revenue streams. When I walked into a Kolkata graveyard with just a camera, my notebook and a tape recorder, I implicitly expected that anything I found would belong to me and not the publication. While I was overjoyed that _Wired_ found my work to be impressive enough to publish, my agreement with them was that the story itself was my creation and, once it came off the shelves, its future was mine.

Unfortunately, many magazines already know that their content has tremendous earning potential and send writers pre-fabricated contracts that take away as many rights as possible. If you're not careful, you might discover that you signed away your future. After all, very few people expect to be rich when they write so they give up on the dream of making it big. Still, even if it is unlikely, you need to be sure that your contracts at least offer you an option of making money on your stories down the line.

Some writers will think if they don't sign the first contract that comes to their desk, then the magazine will walk away from the deal. I have never had this happen. In fact, quite the opposite: I have found that every time I have negotiated (while not being rude, just professional), the publication was interested in my story enough that they backed away from their more aggressive points. And the key to contract negotiations is to never begin one unless you're willing to walk away from the agreement. You need to have enough faith in the value of your work and your ability to place the story in another publication (which is likely, since one already gave you an offer) that you can say no.

It's scary to walk away from a potential deal, especially since you may have collected a few dozen rejections before getting a single bite. Closing is so tantalizingly near that you feel have to grab whatever offer is in front of you, lest you end up never being able to write your piece in the first place. This is what I call negotiating from weakness, and it's the absolute death-knell of a career. If the publication feels that you are definitely going to accept the contract, then they will be much less flexible in giving you honest terms for honest work.

Major publications are so used to working with desperate writers that they generally keep two or three tiers of contracts that have already been worked over by their in-house lawyers. After a pitch is approved, the magazine first sends out the most restrictive contract and waits to see if the writer pushes back. If they do, there is a second, slightly less restrictive contract that they keep in reserve. Oftentimes this contract offers only very small concessions, but it becomes a starting point for more detailed discussions. While a writer can certainly push too far and tank a deal, it's usually worth it to stand by your major demands. When the magazine won't back away from very important points—like film rights—it's sometimes even advisable to bring in a lawyer, preferably a lawyer who is willing to work with you pro bono if you can find someone who went to college with you or through a friend network.

It all boils down to basic human psychology and, shockingly, standing up for your work will actually change the perception of you in the mind of your editor. You won't just get a fairer deal, the publication will actually be more eager to work with you.

Here's an example—it comes from the TV world, but the lesson is applicable to all negotiations. A few years ago I had finished a story for _Wired_ about a group of illegal organ brokers who went to a tsunami refugee camp to acquire kidneys for foreign patients. A producer at the _National Geographic Channel_ saw the story and called me up saying they were planning to produce an episode on organ trafficking and wanted to hire me to help them with their research on the ground in India. It was an exciting offer for me because I had never done any work on TV before. We talked on the phone for several hours and it looked like they were going to need me for about two weeks and would use most of the contacts I had rounded up during my original reporting. At the end of the conversation, I brought up the subject of money and the producer said that they could afford to pay me $1,500.

It was an astonishingly low rate for the amount of work they wanted from me but it was also similar to what they had paid other freelancers. I told the producer I was sorry but their offer was impossibly low and that I might know some other people who could help them out in that budget range. I said I would need at least four times that rate for it to be worth my while. We hung up and I was prepared to simply walk away. Fifteen minutes later she called back with an offer of $6,500.

A few months later, the crew came to India and I worked closely with the producer dodging in and out of refugee settlements and interviewing organ brokers. One night over drinks, she told me that it was only when I asked for more money that she realized I was a professional and that, indeed, she didn't _want_ to work with anyone else one. It was an important lesson and the resulting documentary went on to get nominated for an Emmy award.

The takeaway here is that, above all else, you must remember that the magazine is not doing you a favor by publishing your story. Magazines need content just as much as you need work: it's a mutually beneficial relationship and, ideally, both the publication and you should come to the table as equal partners.

## **CHAPTER EIGHT**

### **_Success Through Failure_**

By now, you've provably noticed that I've been giving you two conflicting messages. On one hand, I'm saying that your creative work is incredibly valuable and you should never undersell yourself. On the other hand, I've said over and over again to expect an extremely low rate of success and that you should expect failure. A savvy reader will note that there is a wide gap between these two statements. Constant failure, after all, would seem to indicate a low market value, not a high one. Resolving this disparity requires a certain shift in worldview. The way that I look at it, no failure is actually a total loss. Instead, every rejection is really a way of discovering where your work has value. A story pitch that receives nothing but rejections might very legitimately have no market value but if it ascends to a publication, then it suddenly exists alongside high-paying advertisements and reaches that particular magazine's audience. Since every writer gets a certain amount of pitches rejected, it also means they get a certain number accepted. As long as you aspire to creating quality content, eventually a story will stick and have a chance at reaching an audience and becoming valuable.

There are hundreds of different sorts of setbacks that you'll come across if your career is long enough. One of the seemingly most dire ones is when a story gets killed. In general, when you sign a contract, there is a clause that states that if the magazine decides not to run your piece, then you will get a only a fraction of the overall payment they promised you. The rate varies but is often as low as twenty percent of the commissioned price. After you've worked on a story for several months, invested your time, possibly put yourself in physical danger and maybe even written several versions of the piece, a kill fee can feel like a career-gutting event. Indeed, some writers who get their first killed story feel so disaffected that they leave the field of writing all together.

It's true that sometimes stories are killed because they are bad stories but every writer should know that, very often, it is for reasons beyond your control. When they go into an agreement, most magazines realize that there is a chance the story won't make the final cut. They compensate for the disparity by over-assigning pieces even though they know they won't ever be able to publish everything that comes across their desk.

One reporter I know says that the _New York Times Magazine_ will assign one-third more stories than they have room for because they expect to cut pieces. After all, what do they have to lose? Since they are only the hook for twenty percent of the final price, they are effectively only buying an option on a story when they agree to a contract with you. In my opinion, this is bad-faith arrangement. The kill fee is so low and the editors know that there is a good chance the piece will not make it. The writer, on the other hand, is so excited to work for the _Times_ that they don't even want to contemplate what it would mean if it were killed.

Be that as it may, having a killed story does not always have to work out to a writer's detriment. A killed story can often be re-sold to new publications as a finished piece. Generally, it's easy to contact all the publications that rejected the original idea in the first place and tell them that you have a completed version that they could look at. Of the four stories that I've had killed over the years, only half remained unpublished. One of them I was able to negotiate up from a twenty percent kill fee to a fifty percent one and then I was able to sell that same story for twice the original commissioning price to another publication. There are a couple lessons to learn from this: first and foremost is that you are never done pitching an idea—even after it's already been reported and supposedly finished. Second, just because you had a piece killed doesn't necessarily mean that you wrote a terrible story.

It's important not to let perceived failures set back your writing career. If you can find a way to look at any action on your stories as a step in a direction (preferably a good direction), then you will be much more resilient to the ups and the downs of the market over time.

## **CHAPTER NINE**

### **_Lead Time and Novelty_**

Anyone who has seen _All the President's Men_ , or for that matter any movie or TV show about the journalism business, knows this is a competitive industry. Every salacious news event sparks a sprint to get to print. The logic is that if you're late to the finish line, then you never really had a shot of getting noticed in the first place. This dynamic infects newsrooms around the world and can sometimes cause writers to sacrifice quality reporting for speed. As you start pitching ideas to editors, it is fairly common to have ideas rejected because someone at the publication feels that the story is too dated. For a magazine journalist, this excuse can be baffling. It can take six months to a year for a magazine story to go from pitch to publication. Once a piece is copyedited, laid out and fact checked, it generally takes three months for the magazine to wend its way through printing presses and onto newsstands. This means that if you read a piece in the July issue of a magazine, the writer actually submitted final copy in May of that year.

Given the facts of the editorial pipeline, there is never any question of whether your story will be truly fresh in the pages of a magazine. There's no way to anticipate the future. Blogs and newspapers will have chewed through the subject ad-nauseam by the time your piece appears in print. On the surface, this seems like it would be a disadvantage, but you need to remember that it is a disadvantage that hits every magazine writer equally and its implications can be quite freeing.

Instead of fighting to have a story out as quickly as possible, a magazine writer can take advantage of the long lead time and write a __ better _,_ or at least different _,_ story than competing publications. For instance, in 2012 I came across a story that I knew was going to be big. A 38-year-old man named Ian Thorson died in the wilderness of Arizona while participating in a controversial three-year-long silent meditation retreat. A group of American Buddhists considered his wife, Lama Christie McNally, a living goddess. There had been an internal conflict in the group that some people considered a cult, and the couple exiled themselves to a remote cave on a nearby mountain. After a series of bad luck and worse decisions, Thorson came down with a bad fever, he turned purple and began to die. Instead of immediately calling in emergency services with her emergency beacon, McNally prayed over his desiccating body. Thorson died three excruciating days later.

I began pitching the story as soon as I learned of the man's death, but I didn't land an assignment for several as I worked my way down my list. Eventually I found a sympathetic editor at _Playboy_ who agreed to cover my expenses and publish a 6,500 word feature under the title "Death and Madness on Diamond Mountain". Unfortunately, by then I was late to the game. I was speeding down the highway in my Hyundai Sonata from California when _the New York Times_ ran a story on the death on its front page. When I arrived in Arizona, news crews from around the country were already flying in and the group was nervous about all the coverage. Soon, other writers from _Psychology Today_ and _Rolling Stone_ would also land assignments on the same topic. Even though I was one of the first people to know about the event, there was no chance that I would break the story.

So, instead of just telling the twisted story of one man's tragic demise, I decided to go bigger. As far as I was concerned the real story wasn't about an individual tragedy, but about the way that many Americans accept Eastern wisdom uncritically. I wanted to write something with universal appeal. I framed the piece to be about our obsession Enlightenment. Thorson was just an extreme example how people in super-heated yoga studios and meditation groups aim to achieve inner piece with the same gusto that triathletes training for races. By aiming at a larger truth instead of a just the particulars of this individual tragedy my article stood out from the other coverage. I used the long lead time to investigate unexplored details of the theme and, in the end, it paid off. A few months after the piece came out I took the piece out to book publishers and convinced them to allow me to turn it into something longer. Now's the time for a little shameless plug you can buy _A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness and the Path to Enlightenment_ __ from Gotham Books to see how it turned out.

The lesson here it is rarely possible to be the first person to cover a story, but that doesn't mean that you can't write something that sets itself apart from all the other coverage.

## **CHAPTER TEN**

### **_A Note On Editors_**

As a freelancer, you occupy a unique place in the media ecosystem. You are not on the staff at any particular publication and you sell your pieces to the highest bidder. Your ideas compete for space with other freelance writers and with staffers who often have an easier route through the pitch process. And even though you're your own boss, you still work at the pleasure of your clients. They are your financial lifeline and your route to print. When it's working, relationships between writers and editors can be nurturing. An editor will see your writing at its least confident and will work diligently to make it better. Some editors will go above and beyond what is expected of them and save a piece that might have been doomed to the rejection pile. At other times, editors are inattentive and may ignore a piece that has been in the editorial pipeline for weeks or even months—not returning e-mails and missing presumed deadlines. Finding someone with whom you work well is incredibly important to your success. An editor can be a mentor who can improve your skills and make you the writer that you want to be. You might even offer particular editors exclusivity with your pitches if you feel that they will treat you with respect.

The flip side of this is that you will not always have cozy and supportive relationships with everyone you work with. Sometimes you will work with someone who is perfect for you, only to discover that, once you have established a solid relationship, they get laid off or take a job at a different publication. It happens more than you might think. While every human relationship is nuanced and unique, my general rule of thumb is that I treat editors the way that they treat me. If I feel that someone is dismissive of my ideas out of hand, I don't necessarily feel like I owe them much effort to improve the relationship. If they give me respect, listen to my ideas and get back to me quickly, I will give them exclusivity on a pitch and put extra effort into producing the best piece that I can. If I feel that an editor is not very interested in my work, I generally am not interested in giving them my best.

One advantage of being a freelance writer is, once you're over the initial hurdle of establishing a revenue stream, you no longer have to worry about getting laid off. If you publish regularly in four or five magazines, it doesn't matter if one or two of them go under, or an editorial re-shuffling leaves you without a contact. Editors who seem to sit at a cushy place on the masthead are often much more scared of losing their job than you are. One bad season or failed product launch can end their career. In fact, the turnover at magazines is so terrifyingly high for people in the middle of the masthead that I rarely expect them to still be on staff when I get to the point where I might pitch them a second idea. In the best case scenario, an editor leaves one magazine I write for and lands at another, better one. But usually the moves are not so convenient. Many of them end up in public relations, working at web startups or at a magazine outside your usual market.

So while it is important to be professional with the people you pitch, in the back of your mind you should expect that they won't necessarily be around forever. Instead, you should be comfortable with the notion of cold pitching new people for feature stories. You need to develop your own brand as a writer, rather than rely solely on relationships that you've already established, to land stories into print. Conveniently, this attitude is useful when pitching multiple magazines with a hot new story idea. Many editors feel slighted if you've taken an idea out to multiple platforms. In the rare case that you have two or three acceptances for a piece, don't worry too much about whether you are going to burn a bridge with any particular editor. More than likely, by the time you have another feature story appropriately positioned for their magazine, they won't be there to read it anyway. The caveat to this, of course, are the editors who have been at a magazine for decades and are likely to stay there for the duration. These editors are often the ones who write back to you and give your ideas a fair shake. Indeed, just as the best writers are helped out by a nurturing editor, the best editors have been nurtured by great writers. Understanding that the relationship depends on reciprocity and professionalism will, in the end, help you both produce good work.

## **CHAPTER ELEVEN**

### **_Moving Forward_**

So that is my quick and dirty guide to making a living as a freelance writer. Some of these tips are probably useful for any self-employed person. I hope that I've been able to explain at least the basics of what this career path is supposed to look like. There's still a lot more to learn, though. As you move forward with your career, you may feel that you want more tailored or specific advice. I'd recommend you reach out to other writers in your field and learn what their secrets are for success.

You might also be interested in hearing more tips from me. I run a blog with freelance writing tips at scottcarney.com and have a newsletter you can subscribe to for regular updates. I also provide private consultations for journalists of any level and will be offering a conference for more advanced tips.

However, even if you don't do anything else with me, I want you mostly to remember that everything you write has value and you should never let someone you work for take that from you.

At the end of this book I've listed a rather long appendix of sample pitches. Study them. And then go out there and start making your writing dreams come true.

## **CHAPTER TWELVE**

### **_APPENDIX: Sample Pitches_**

Below are a few sample pitches that I've had approved over the years. Not all of them were published (one ended up being killed, and I sold one to another writer) but they all passed through the editorial gauntlet known as the "pitch meeting". Realize that a pitch is a very different animal than a story. Not all of the facts are confirmed and not all of the anecdotes have happened yet. What you're selling here is the idea of the story which could come into existence if a publisher decides to fund the research and editing.

****

**The Iceman's Inner Fire**

_Sold to Details, Killed. Resold to Playboy_

_Published March 2014 under the title "The Iceman Commeth"_

_http://www.scottcarney.com/article/the-iceman-commeth/_

The arctic is cold. So cold that the mere thought of arctic ice makes most people want to curl up next to a fire with a mug of cocoa. But for Wim Hof arctic ice makes him want to strip down to his skivvies and go for a jog. For the last 35 years Hof, who is also known as "the Iceman", has practiced an idiosyncratic form of meditation that allows him to modulate his body temperature almost at will. The technique has resulted in some near impossible feats: including running a half-marathon in the depth of a Finnish winter wearing only shorts and no shoes, to summiting some of the world's most formidable mountains without acclimatization. In 2007 he attempted to summit Everest in the same attire, but had to back out after a foot injury. Still, his showmanship has attracted a fair amount of scientific attention, and several US and Dutch scientists have begun to study Hof to reveal his secrets.

He chalks up his own success to uncanny control over his Hypothalamus--which through biological voodoo somehow raises the temperature in his core. Two experiments seems to prove the point. In a controlled setting scientists dunked two people into ice water for 15 minutes, while the control subjects body temperature dropped to a scare 81 degrees, Hoff's barely budged. In another experiment doctors at an Amsterdam hospital injected Hof with a flu-like virus that should have certainly made him sick. Hof shrugged off the bugs and didn't so much as sniffle.

Now, at the age of 53, Hof thinks that he can teach students his secrets. In February he's running a four day training camp in Poland with ten university student volunteers. At the end of their time the research subjects will return to Amsterdam where doctors will inject them with endovirus and see if they can repeat Hof's immunological response. "It is incredible what people can do with the right conviction. If there is a fire in your home then you run like hell. You are so fast that you don't even think. That is where I will bring people to," says Hof. And, in another trip, Hof will bring 15 people up Mt. Kilimanjaro in just 4 days without acclimatization. Their uniform: just biking shorts.

I'd like to write a feature article about Hof. Over the years Outside has run several stories on Icemen--from the 2009 article "Professor Popsicle" whose own experiments ended in occasional frostbite, to the 2003 piece on Lewis Gordon Pugh whose breathing techniques made him the fastest cold water swimmer. On the face of it, though, Hof's feats could be even more miraculous. And if he's right that they're teachable, and not the result of some genetic anomaly, perhaps he's the beginning of a new way to look at the body's unlock-able potential. On the other hand, if it IS all about genetics, then all of his followers might be in for an unexpected surprise when they find themselves on the side of Kilimanjaro in the throes of altitude sickness.

I think the best way to do this piece is to meet Hof in Amsterdam or Poland to cover the ten kids who he is teaching his techniques to. Barring that, I believe he will be in California in March on an iceless rock climbing expedition.

Related Links:

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof

Wim Hof's personal website: http://www.icemanwimhof.com/en-home

**The Weakness of Diamond Minds**

_Death and Madness on the Path to Enlightenment_

_Published by Playboy March 2013 as "Death and Madness on Diamond Mountain"_

_http://www.scottcarney.com/2013/06/death-and-madness-on-diamond-mountain/_

_Is the basis on my forthcoming book "Suicide Sutra: Madness and Death on the Path to Enlightenment" (Penguin/Gotham 2014)_

Ian Thorson was dying of of dehydration on an Arizona Mountaintop on April 22nd and his wife, "Lama" Christie McNally didn't think he was going to make it. She dialed 911 on a pre-paid cell phone and within hours a search and rescue helicopter thumped its way to Tara mountain to evacuate the stranded couple.When they arrived Thorson was already dead. McNally would require hospitalization. Until that week, McNally and Thorson were rising stars in the tight community of meditators in the Tucson area, had co-authored several books on tibetan meditation. Along with Michael Roche, who was the first American to receive a geshe degree, they were founding members of the nearby Diamond Mountain University which attracts an enormous following of spiritual seekers. In 2008 the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/JYIuWD) lauded their teachings.

In 2010 Christie and Thorson began an intensive 3-year long silent meditation retreat on Diamond Mountain's campus in Bowie, AZ along with about a dozen other people. The course was so rigorous that if they completed it they would be heralded as new authorities of spiritual awakening. The duo updated the world on their progress through a blog, but, according to the strict rules of the retreat, were only seen in public wearing veils. But after two years of seclusion their practice turned to madness. McNally stabbed Thorson with a ritual knife during what she later described as meditative ecstasy. In the technique McNally envisioned that she was a wrathful Tibetan protector deity who was using the knife to "cut through ignorance". She stabbed Thorson so deeply that the dagger "penetrated organs" and he needed immediate medical help. That week the board of directors at Diamond Mountain asked Thorson and McNally to leave the retreat, giving them several thousand dollars and a prepaid cellphone, but did not seek out professional help. In a decision that would have fatal consequences, Thorson and McNally climbed the nearby Tara Mountain to continue meditating on their own.

Thorson's death has set off a firestorm of debate among the meditation community in Arizona and across the world. Former friends of theirs have posted strings of blog posts demanding that the Diamond Mountain University psychologically evaluate the other retreatants who are still in seclusion and have asked Michael Roach to step down immediately. A full account of the debate can be found here: http://bit.ly/Iw8cN2 It's worth a read.

However, the story goes much deeper than an obscure religious cult going off the rails, Their deaths are just the most recent, and extreme, out of a series of incidents that point to a nexus between meditation and madness. The last 40 years of scientific inquiry into meditation has largely focused on the benefits of meditation--showing substantial improvements to cardiovascular function, as a tool to manage depression, improve memory, and even significantly altering the composition of the brain's gray matter. However there has been far fewer studies into possible negative side effects. Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist at Brown University, is one of the few to tackle the issue with a NIH-funded study on "The Dark Side of the Contemplative Path". In the ongoing study she has found numerous cases of acute psychosis that seemed to be triggered from intensive meditation, whether on retreats, or on their own. In 1984 Leon Otis, a psychologist at stanford, showed that 70% of meditators have symptoms of mental illness after transcendental meditation. The DSM-IV even has an entry on "Chi-Gong Psychotic Affective Disorder" which notes that people who do meditation frequently descend into delusions. A 2008 paper on "Meditation Induced Psychosis" out of Denmark noted several similar cases.

I am currently working on a book about this dark side of the spiritual path which explores about a dozen similar incidents to Thorson's death, starting with the suicide of a former student of mine at a retreat center in Bodh Gaya, India. There are at least hundreds of accepted meditation techniques of varying levels of intensity. They are all currently on the upswing in the United States. Dr. Oz sits on the board of Delek Hospital in Dharmsala, Oprah recently endorsed Transcendental Meditation and just about every yoga studio in the country has a relationship with a meditation center. However by and large, Americans aren't following in the linage of long-standing religious traditions out of Asia, but are borrowing different techniques piecemeal and founding what essentially amounts to a new, and untested, religious tradition. Paul Hackett, a religious scholar at Columbia university recently told me "People are mixing and matching religious systems like legos. And the next thing you know is that you have some fairly powerful psychological and physical practices into whatever idiosyncratic attitude you've come to. It is no surprise that people go insane," he says."

I'd like to carve a feature article out of my book which uses the death of Thorson to investigate the larger, and unspoken, social phenomenon of what happens when the spiritual path turns sour. Perhaps there are things that we still don't understand about the practice of meditation that neuroscience might be able to shed light on.

_Scott Carney (_ _scottcarney.com_ _) is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and author of "The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers". He speaks Hindi and has spent six years in India. _

**The Suicide Sutra**

_It is easy to think that India is magical. It can also be deadly._

_Approved by Details_

_Published as "Death on the Path to Enlightenment"_

_http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201210/india-syndrome-death-enlightenment?printable=true#ixzz27aaVnvvO_

In 2006 while I was the director of an abroad program for American colleges students in India, one of my wards committed suicide after a meditation retreat. Some of the last words in her journal declared "I am a bodhisattva", and that all she had to do to attain enlightenment was leave her body. After she died I spent the next three days moving her corpse from a bandit-infested backwater to New Orleans, along the way building a make-shift coffin out of plywood, blocks of ice and an air conditioner. Emily's death led me to investigate other foreigners who have died or gone missing in India, and I've come across a pattern of spiritual misunderstandings that can have dangerous consequences.

If the stories were true then the Himalayas would be dotted with nearly naked levitating monks whose meditation-induced body heat melts the snow around them. Yogis could open their third eye and see your accumulated karmic burden and gurus could turn ash into golden trinkets. For Americans India is a land of outrageous poverty, a hub for IT outsourcing, but also, mostly, a global center for mystical spiritualism. Every year tens of thousands of Americans take pilgrimages to meditations centers, yoga ashrams and holy places on the Indian subcontinent seeking some form of enlightenment. Not everyone comes back sane. Or alive.

These spiritual seekers are especially susceptible to a little known psychological disorder colloquially known as "India Syndrome", a condition most frequently experienced delusions of enlightenment and magical powers. A normal physical response to sitting in one place for an extended period is to see walls breathe and move, during meditation many novices take this as a sign of great power. At Privat Hospital in Delhi a doctor once described an American brought to the clinic screaming "Don't you dare touch me! Don't come near or I'll open my third eye and kill you!" before the hospital sedated her. The hospital reports that is sees 100 similar cases a year. Multiply that by every major metropolis in the country and there are signs of a spirituality induced epidemic.

Last month a 28-year old Irish journalist for the IHT named Jonathan Spollen went missing in the holy town of Rishikesh after a meditation retreat. In 2005 Ryan Chambers (an Australian) left all of his possessions on his pillow at a hostel and disappeared, also in Rishikesh. Gary Stevenson, also known as "Gary the Sadhu," a fixture of the Varanasi tourist scene, was often seen gnawing on dead human bodies with a group of ash-covered ascetics known as the aghoris while on a quest towards enlightenment (he is interned at a mental hospital in Texas now). Until the mid-1990s the German embassy in New Delhi had so many complaints of lost travelers that it ran a special program in Delhi to try to locate them. In all cases travelers came to India expecting to find solace, but went astray on their journeys.

I would like to write a feature about India's lost travelers in an attempt to identify how preconceptions and spiritual quests in India can trigger delusions of grandeur that lead travelers down treacherous paths.

The story of my student, Emily, is the entry point for my research. By exploring how these other travelers lived, died, or disappeared while traveling the sub-continent, I hope to also explain how romantic notions of Eastern religions that formed over hundreds of years of orientalism make it easier to believe that there are magic powers in exotic places far from home.

_Scott Carney (_ _scottcarney.com_ _) is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, author of "The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers. He speaks Hindi and has spent six years in India. He plans to be in India this summer._

**Art of the Steal**

_Approved by Bloomberg-Businessweek_

Story Killed.

In a dark warehouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles Kristine Eubanks practiced a signature on a yellow legal pad. Chagall's had been giving her trouble and she had 700 to sign before her friday broadcast. What she didn't know was that the police would find the legal pad full of her practice forgeries as well as thousands of fake Picassos, Chagalls and Dalis during a raid of her office in 2006.

From 2002 to 2006 Eubanks was the mastermind behind one of the largest consumer-level art frauds in the history of the United States. At the height of her operation she was selling more than a million dollars worth of fake art every month for a total of more than $20 million from ten thousand victims. The court proceedings have only just become available, and as of April 2010 she was sentenced to 7 years in jail.

Her plan was as simple as it was brazen: Teaming up with DishNetwork and DirectTV , Eubanks broadcast a four hour live auction every week of forged fine art prints, over-appraised "certified" jewelry and original paintings. She claimed to have access to estate sales around the world where she found thousands of serialized fine art prints signed and authorized by the original artists. Piccassos supposedly valued at $50,000 sold for $700, Degas for $1100 in fast paced live TV auctions. When the price didn't rise fast enough she submitted fake bids to keep up the action.

The host for Fine Art Treasures TV show was T.J. Myers, a C-list celebrity known for scantily clad roles on late night cinemax dramas, as well as a 2004 film called "Poop" and, later, as the host of a program detailing the world's most notorious art crimes. (see a clip here: http://is.gd/g8sCg). In a corresponding scam, Eubanks also sold prints to the captive audience on Princess cruise lines.

Eubanks story taps into the investment frenzy of the sub-prime mortgage boom where everything in America was seemingly going for nothing. Poorly equipped consumers were duped into art investments that were simply too good to be true. While the FBI seized $3.4 million from Eubank's accounts, most people who bought from her own artwork that isn't worth the price of the frame. At least two people lost their life savings.

Both the FBI and the LAPD's Art Crime Detail—the only detail of its kind in the country—investigated the Eubanks case. I've been corresponding with Eubanks by letter since September and have an open invite to speak with her at the Federal Correctional Facility in Victorville. It would be the first interview she's ever given to the media on her past. I am also close to the detectives who headed up the case who have said that they will open up all of the records to me. It should also be easy to track down victims and the show's former staff. The story will explore the murky world of art valuation and the ease with which the scam continued to operate in the open for four years in the public eye.

**The Transponder that Cried Wolf**

_Approved by Outside_

_Published as "Panic Button"_ _http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/outdoor-skills/survival/Panic-Button.html?page=all_

In February the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group received their ninth distress call in three months from the same unregistered emergency transponder. Every time the signal would stay strong for three hours at a time and then mysteriously disappear. Either someone was in trouble and only able to send out a signal intermittently, or they were playing a hoax. Nevertheless, Paul Woodward mounted eight separate searches in some of the most treacherous terrain in the American West to locate this lost soul.

But this time was different. The transponder didn't flip off. And the rescue team—clad in orange vests and wilderness gear—zeroed in on the distress beacon: a diner in downtown Boulder. Bursting into the office they located a highly embarrassed alpine skier who says that he hadn't read the box that his personal locator beacon (or PLB) came in. He thought the satellite unit was supposed to warn him about potential avalanches. He hadn't realized that every time he went out to ski that he had sent search and rescue out after him.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association there were 4434 false alarms in 2009. In most of those cases search teams, helicopters and law enforcement went out looking for the non-existent distress-ees. In that same time period NOAA assisted in rescuing 195 people in real life-threatening danger. That signal to noise ratio wastes tens of millions of dollars every year. "This sort of thing is a huge waste of money, but it also risks the lives of rescuers who take more chances, go over more difficult terrain and fly in dangerous conditions thinking that someone's life is on the line," says Steve Rorark a project officer at SARSAT and former search and rescue pilot. In 2004 four British helicopter pilots died in a crash while responding to a false alarm.

The rise in false alarms speaks to a deep issue in modern outdoor security. As hikers and outdoorsmen gear up for their excursions into the woods the PLB is becoming a tantalizing necessity for emergency convenience. Scrambling a helicopter is as easy as pushing a button. In many cases, the convenience of pressing a button and getting rescued makes many non-life-threatening situations—like a friend of mine who "ran out of water" on a hike in the desert, pressed the emergency button, found a stream of cool water a mile away and met search and rescue eight hours later—far too common.

I'd like to write a feature about the rise of false alarms are pushing emergency rescue teams to the breaking point. I will juxtapose stories of seemingly mundane excursions that baffled rescue attempts with the danger and excitement of rescue missions. In many cases the end result is a waste of resources and a hearty dose of embarrassment. But the alarms can also result in huge fines (often hundreds of thousands of dollars), or send the rescuee to court to face jail time.

_Prior coverage: False alarms are usually the stuff of local newspaper coverage. And there are probably hundreds of articles a year about searches that are called off. I am not aware of any major features that try to link them all together._

Scott Carney (scottcarney.com) is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. His first book "The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's organ brokers, skeleton thieves, blood farmers and child traffickers" comes out with Harper Collins in June 2011.

**The Price of White Eggs**

How Eastern European Prostitutes are supplanting the market for Ivy League gametes

_Approved by Fast Company_

_Published as "Human Egg Sales Raise Bioethical Issues"_

<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/eggs-for-sale.html>

There are a lot of factors that go into determining the value of a human egg. From a medical perspective grade-A ocytes are the ones most likely to be carried to term in another woman's womb. But on the free market the price of humanity is determined by the education and race of the donor. In the United States the most valuable eggs come from white 20 year old women in Ivy league institutions who can get paid as much as $100,000 for a single cycle. African Americans can expect about $8000. Whiteness is the single most expensive factor in in egg markets, and, though most fertility clinics won't advertise it, egg markets are racial politics writ large. But this is the age of globalization. In the same way that Berkeley women can contract surrogate pregnancies in India for a fraction of the cost of the American system, she can buy white human eggs from Eastern Europe to get just the right phenotype.

Markets in human eggs are legal in only a handful of countries (among them the United States). In most of Europe laws exist that extend harsh penalties to egg selling that approximate the punishments on human trafficking . The exceptions are Spain and Cyprus who have capitalized on their legal free zone and turned egg selling to big business. The permissiveness has sparked a brisk trade in fertility tourism. Here people from the UK and US can fly in for a week, pick up a packet of eggs and get them implanted at clinics back home who don't ask any questions about where they got them. But rather than harvest eggs from the local population, both spain and cyprus have found Eastern European migrants--refugees from former East Bloc--will give up their eggs for cheap. For a cycle of hormone treatments and harvesting they are paid between $300 and $1000, about 1/100th of their US counterparts.

The clinics claim that they are simply well positioned in the market and advertise the nordic-ness of their egg supply (see http://www.nordica.org/)). Yet critics maintain that the eastern european egg markets are capitalizing on human suffering and taking advantage of people least able to protect themselves from a global traffic in body brokers. In the last three weeks I've been in touch with top anti-trafficking experts in Cyprus through the US embassy and learned that many of the egg donors are prostitutes who have been trafficked into the country for sex work. For these women, their first stop is at a hospital where doctors test them for STDs and offer them other ways to sell their bodies than just sex.

But this isn't just a story about egg selling. It's also about the potential risks of egg donation. Approximately 3% of women who undergo egg harvesting have serious side effects that can include stroke and even death. The clinics in Spain and Cyprus are known to give much higher hormone doses than in the United States that while increase the number of harvestable eggs, but also potentially lead to increased chances of serious side effects.

This story, which will be included in a book I am writing about human organ trafficking and published by Harper Collins in 2011, will be a major feature article about the current dangers of globalized egg markets. I have solid contacts in Cyprus and believe I can accomplish the reporting for this with a week on the ground.

I am an investigative journalist based in Brooklyn, NY and contributing editor at WIRED and writer for Mother Jones and NPR. More information about me on my website at http://www.scottcarneyonline.com

**Red Markets:**

_In the US, it's illegal to sell your blood, kidneys, corneas, or any other body part. Instead, you can donate them. _

_Approved by Wired_

_http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_redmarkets/all/1_

By social consensus, the supply of human flesh must be driven by altruism rather than lucre. A clinical trial can be stopped before it begins if an ethics committee finds that payments to human guinea pigs are high enough to cause "undue incentive." A would-be surrogate mother has to pass a psychological assessment to determine that she's motivated more by giving the gift of motherhood than taking the paycheck. But while you can't sell your own body, you can certainly buy someone else's. A certified prime US surrogate womb can run $100,000. A new kidney goes for at least $50,000. There's a price tag attached to every pint of blood used during surgery.

This disconnect between supply and demand creates tremendous economic pressure, and that pressure finds a variety of outlets. Million-dollar businesses are based on an unreliable system of donations with no readily available source of spare parts. Shady operators are only too willing to fill the supply-chain vacuum. Advances in refrigeration, transportation, banking, drugs, and surgical techniques lubricate the flow of goods, while globalization brings together buyers and sellers: If you can't buy the parts you need at home, you can go abroad and get them at a deep discount. Welcome to the red market.

Law and economics recognize three types of markets: white, gray, and black. The red market operates outside this system, product of the contradictions that arise when social taboos surrounding the human body collide with the individual urge to live a long, healthy life. We insist that a human flesh can't be valued, and assume that it's in short supply. In fact, the prices are well established by the medical community, and the supply is endless, thanks to burgeoning populations in impoverished parts of the world. In Egypt, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, entire villages sell organs, rent wombs, and sign away rights to their bodies after death— not under duress, but in mutually agreeable transactions. Middlemen who have the legal authority to deal in human parts—often hospitals and government institutions— buy for the lowest possible price while assuring buyers that the parts come from an ethical source. And while procurement is frequently illegal and sometimes abhorrent, the final sale is not only legal but sanctioned by the implicit moral dimension of a human life saved.

Consider the market for blood in Gorakhpur, India, a city that boasts a dozen hospitals. Encouraged by steady demand, suppliers kidnapped 20 people and milked them three times a week for two years, delivering a product indistinguishable from that of the local Red Cross. The blood thieves were busted in due course, but even a year after the arrests, authorities note that legitimate banks account for only 50 percent of the blood used in surgery. No one can say where the rest comes from.

I've covered some of aspects this trade in articles about skeletons, surrogate motherhood, and adopted children. But I've come to see common elements in these markets and others, including organs, gametes, and connective tissues. HarperCollins has commissioned a book on red markets, and I'd like to introduce the concept in Wired. I envision 3000 words sketching out the major features of red markets and showing how these features bear out in various markets, supplemented by quarter-page Dewars Profiles on each of the markets discussed. I will show how a shortage of blood created the illicit market in Gorakhpur, how the market for surrogate mothers in India boomed in the wake of US regulations, and how criminal organ-trading networks make the US transplant list irrelevant. I will also show how respected insurance companies, well-meaning medical authorities, and international institutions come together to make red markets the norm, rather than the exception.

**Sugar Pills**

Writer: Scott Carney

Editor: Ted

_(This one was approved by Wired, but I sold the assignment to another writer)_

<http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all>

The idea behind modern medicine is simple: put a chemical into someone's body and it will have a predictable effect. Sure, there are a few reasons why this might not happen--variable sensitivity to the compound,interference from other medications. By and large, though, we tend to accept that medicines work as they're designed to work. But there's one complication that's giving the medical industry fits: the placebo effect. Although the phenomenon has been recognized since the days of the ancient Greeks who named it, the placebo effect remains little understood. In the past few years, research has established that it definitely exists, and it's neither bias ("all in your mind") nor a natural fluctuation of symptoms. Placebos work through specific brain pathways and can have a profound impact on autonomic functions like endocrine activity and the immune system as well as cognitive functions like mood and memory. The first over-the-counter placebo, Obecalp, for nonspecific childhood ailments, went on sale this summer.

If an inert substance like sugar or saline relieves pain in 20 percent of people and an analgesic helps 21 percent of recipients suffering from the same illness, did the medicine have much to do with it? Drug companies try to answer this question in two ways. First, they routinely start their trials with a placebo-only study and throw out all the candidates who showed a strong response, retaining the rest for testing. Second, they match their drug tests with control groups who received only placebo. To gain FDA approval, the drug must outperform the placebo, if only marginally. There are problems with this system. For one, by rejecting people who respond to placebos, researchers make the placebo look less effective than it really is, skewing their results in favor of their drug. It also opens a loophole that pharma companies use to fudge results — say, by switching participants from the drug group to the placebo group so lingering side effects can be attributed to the placebo. Moreover, when a drug beats the placebo, it's likely that some percentage of recipients improved due not to the medication but to the placebo effect. Was it a small portion or the lion's share? There's no way to know. Sometimes the placebo outperforms the medicine it's pitted against. Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard found that placebo treatment tested better than any existing med in 270 patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Most mysterious, beneficial placebo effects are often accompanied by a negative "nocebo" effect that parallels harmful drug side effects.

These issues have become the elephant in the clinic, especially when it comes to the efficacy of the class of drugs known as SSRIs. Treatments like Prozac and Zoloft are the most frequently prescribed meds for depression - and the most profitable class of drugs on the market, accounting for $10 billion annually in profit. Doctors report that they have undeniable positive, even life-saving effects in some patients. Yet in clinical trials, they rarely outperform placebos, and when they do, it's only slightly. Drug companies are desperate to demonstrate that SSRIs are effective. "The placebo effect is overwhelming the ability to make a distinction between the pharmacology of a drug and an inert imitation," Kaptchuk observes. All of which makes it a top scientific priority to understand the placebo effect. The NIH made a special call for proposals eight years ago, and research has exploded since then. Thanks to sophisticated brain imaging techniques and cleverly designed studies, researchers are closing in on the mechanisms that underlie the phenomenon and devising test procedures that can distinguish it from drug-induced effects. Jon-Kar Zubieta at University of Michigan is studying whether responsiveness to placebos is related to estrogen and testosterone levels. To minimize placebo effects in clinical trials, C. Benedetti at the University of Turin suggest supplementing overt drug tests, which presumably activate some degree of placebo effect, with a group of subjects on an IV drip so they can't tell whether or when they're getting dosed. A comparison would reveal the drug's own placebo nature.

I've made contact with a few pharma insiders about the havoc the placebo effect is bringing to their industry, and with researchers about what it means and how we might cope. Medicine will be changed by the current ferment. Let's capture the transitional moment and offer a glimpse into the future.

Prior coverage: Mother Jones covered the ineffectiveness of SSIRs in relation to placebo in 2003 (and it remains an ongoing story). Although that was after the NIH started pushing placebo research, it was before much of the new understanding of placebos began to emerge. The New York Times has reported regularly on manipulations of drug trials. Discussion focusing on the placebo effect has been confined mostly to medical journals, particularly PLoS Medicine.

**No Country for Young Children**

_Approved by Mother Jones_

_Published as "Meet the Parents"_

_http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/meet-parents-dark-side-overseas-adoption_

Sivagama only turned her back for a second, but that's all it took for her son, Subash, to be whisked away into an auto-rickshaw by kidnappers. Later that day he was sold to an orphanage in Chennai, India and ultimately adopted by a family in the United States. Now, ten years later, they might have a chance for a reunion.

The last two decades have been bad for Indian adoption agencies with protests from adoptees about poor record keeping and accusations of child trafficking. Though orphanages here are dismal and overcrowded, poor government oversight, and byzantine regulations have made legal adoptions complex and often impossible. However a few agencies have thrived by circumventing the law entirely by hiring gangs of kidnappers to steal children from the streets and funnel them into a world of non-profit organizations, churches and well-intentioned parents who desperately want to care for disadvantaged children. Along the way, foreigners pay top dollar—as much as $20,000 in donations and fees—to arrange the child's transfer. That money has been incentive enough to attract the worst kind of attention.

Between 1999 and 2001 the orphanage Malaysian Social Services (MSS) arranged 121 international adoptions—sending children mostly to the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. In 2005, two men, and two women were arrested in Chennai on kidnapping charges after police overheard them arguing loudly in a crowded slum bar at how low their fees for child stealing were. During their interrogation they admitted that they had been selling children to MSS for several years. One child brought them 10,000 rupees ($280); They got 20,000 for two. The money was even better for the orphanage, according to court records, MSS earned more than $250,000 in adoption fees from abroad.

The police have spent the last three years investigating the case and are about to file formal charges some time in September or October. They have tracked 21 children to the United States, and followed one paper trail to the doorstep of a Christian family in Wisconsin where Sivagama's son has ended up. For the last ten years an upstanding Christian family who is active in their community has raised him. An inside source close to the police gave me his adoptive family's contact information.

I have the blessing of the family in Chennai to speak with the adoptive family and give them a message of reconciliation. In a way, I would be leaving the traditional role of journalist here as I deliver a message between the two families. There is the chance that my contact with them will be the first they have heard of a possible abduction. However, the family here has little faith in the police to resolve the matter as they have already dragged on their investigation for more than ten years, despite knowing the child's location for the last three years. The family here hopes that I will get there before INTERPOL re-abducts the child, and sends him back to India forcibly, as they realize that after ten years, the child may be more American than he is Indian. They suggested that I get DNA evidence to make the case transparent and raise awareness in the weakness in the adoption system.

What happens next will raise complex ethical and legal issues and send a jolt through the world of regulated international adoption. Should a child who has been raised for ten years in America be forced to return to an Indian slum? Have high adoption fees created opportunity for child trafficking? Has Western altruism been turned on its head?

This story is not only confined to the experiences of two families, but potentially thousands of adopted families across the world and dozens of orphanages across India. Among these leads are Deserie Smolin and her husband David who adopted two kidnapped children who remembered their birth brother, and over the course of several years, led them back to their biological parents in India. There are also at least 300 pending cases here in Chennai. I have solid leads (meaning names and addresses) of two similar cases in the United States, two in the Netherlands and one in Australia that shed light on the true scope of the issue.

I took these photos of the families in Chennai this week: http://scottcarneyonline.com/photos/USA%20Kidnapping/

<http://scottcarneyonline.com/photos/zabeen-kidnapping/>

I am an American investigative journalist who has lived in India off and on for the last ten years. I am a frequent contributor to WIRED and National Public Radio. My work has also appeared in Discover, Fodors, GQ, FHM and several major European news sources. A documentary that I helped produce for the National Geographic Channel on the international organ trade has been nominated in this year's Emmy award. A story I wrote for WIRED titled "The Bone Factory" is being made into a movie, and was selected as a finalist for both the Livingston Award and the Daniel Pearl Award.

(Read it here: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/15-12/ff_bones ). I speak Hindi and Urdu. Find out more about me on my website at http://www.scottcarneyonline.com ****

**Pirate Gambit**

Everyone knows that you don't negotiate with terrorists . . . but pirates? That's a different story.

_Approved by Wired_

Published as "Cutthroat Capitalism"

<http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-07/ff_somali_pirates>

Case in point: Last September, the Ukrainian freighter Faina, carrying scores of Russian tanks and grenade launchers plus a crew of 21, was overrun by 50 gunmen. Even as gunships from the US, UK, and Russia surrounded them, the attackers demanded $20 million to give up the boat and its contents. Last week, a helicopter dropped $3 million onto the deck. The brigands released the crew unharmed (though one had died of a heart attack during the ordeal), dumped some guns overboard (presumably to pick up later), and slipped away to plan their next attack.

The Faina incident is by no means unique. Somali pirates who infest the waters off the Horn of Africa attacked 111 commercial ships in 2008 alone. Armed with rocket-propelled grenades, automatic weapons, and speedboats, they captured 14 vessels and took 300 crew members hostage. In every case, the shipowner struck a deal, paying for the release of the return of the ship, and letting the pirates go free.

This state of affairs amounts to a revolution in the piracy business. For centuries, pirates have operated in a familiar way: Board the target, take everything of value, and flee. That's the way Indonesian and Caribbean marauders work to this day. Somali pirates, on the other hand, demand a ransom. The Faina's $3 million settlement may seem small, but it's the largest ever in such a caper — and, in any case, it's a fortune compared to northeastern Somalia's average per-capita income of $180 a year.

The new Gulf of Aden business model is a delicate dance among four parties: Somalis need a way to survive amid total economic collapse, shipping companies need protection, insurers require security, and private security firms need work. It's a cozy relationship in which everyone benefits. The pirates can make a living without demanding more than the market will bear. Shippers absorb the ransom as a minor cost of doing business; with typical cargo loads worth tens of millions of dollars — and ships upward of $125 million — a few million is small change. The insurance companies charge ever higher premiums, up from $900 to $9000 per trip within last few years multiplied by 20,000 ships passing through the Gulf annually. And the security companies earn a handsome fee for resolving a crisis.

In a way, the Gulf's pirate infestation is an unintended consequence of efforts to make the notoriously unstable region safe for international trade. Everyone is willing to pay to minimize risk. The pirates start with outrageous demands, but they'll settle for a modest purse. They know that harming crew members would bring their operations to an abrupt and bloody end, so they treat hostages well. Ship captains, like convenience-store clerks, are trained to surrender. They're allowed to defend themselves with high-pressure water hoses, sound cannons, and evasive maneuvers. "Beyond that, we are not to resist," says Jayant Kohli, who regularly sails the Gulf. And negotiators start out knowing they'll settle on an agreeable sum sooner or later. "Paying ransom to criminals isn't criminal in itself," says Leslie Edwards, a former British Special forces commando who now works with Clayton Consultants, a security company. "We're not there to solve the issue of piracy on the high-seas."

I'd like to tell the story of the symbiosis between piracy and globalization. I'm in touch with top security experts and former hostages. The reporting presents obvious challenges: Security companies sign confidentiality contracts and several journalists have been kidnapped at the port of Ely, where pirates are based. However, it looks likely that I'll be able to travel through the Gulf of Aden on an escort boat. With attacks surpassing 100 a year, I could well see some action. I have placed enquires with the British, US, and Indian navies and I'm working the back channels at several security companies.

The fate of the Faina and Somali piracy in general have been covered extensively in the daily press. However, most cover only breaking news. I have seen nothing the traces the business priorities that make this new style of piracy so potent.

**Mobgalore**

_Approved by Wired_

_published as "The Godfather of Bangalore"_

_http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-11/mf_mobgalore?currentPage=all_

Eight years have passed since _Wired_ published Brad Wezeir's article "Boomgalore." In that time, the city has continued its metamorphosis from a sleepy administrative outpost to globalization's premier showcase. New IT campuses continue to sprout, teeming with call center operators and Ivy League-educated programmers. Real estate prices have skyrocketed, from $25 per square foot in 2001 to over $1000 today in the center of town. There's just one wrinkle: Bangalore's very success has turned the city into a hotbed of organized crime.

The mob has its fingers in prostitution, video piracy, and pharmaceutical smuggling, but it operates most flagrantly in real estate. Developers looking to build new corporate campuses face the challenge of obtaining a deed. Land ownership in the region is absurdly convoluted, and two or three people can claim ownership of any given plot. Settling deeds in court can take between decades—too slow for modern business. (I've read about land disputes going on for 140 years.) Mobsters have learned that the IT industry's unquenchable thirst for land means big profits for anyone who can bribe, threaten, and murder their way into possession of a legitimate title. Some 40 percent of land deals happen on the black market, often with the collusion of the police and government officials.

In this lawless environment, Muttappa Rai provides a valuable service. Hired by a would-be buyer, he checks out the parcel and decides who has the strongest legal case for ownership. He offers that person 50 percent of the land's current value in cash. To those who have a weaker case, he offers to divide 25 percent — still a fortune to most Indians. Then he sells the land to his client for the full price and pockets the remaining 25 percent. What if the original claimants don't like his terms? Rai arranges for them to be persuaded — frequently leaving them terrified, injured, or dead.

In 2001, Rai's minions gunned down a prominent real estate developer named Subburaj. During the escape, the two gunmen dropped a cell phone that implicated Rai, who fled to South Africa and eventually made his way to Dubai. There he joined forces with an international crime syndicate run by Dawood Ibrahim, who orchestrated the 1993 Mumbai bombings. Within months, Interpol brought him back to Bangalore to face 20 charges of extortion, murder, and organized crime. However, before the trial, some witnesses had fatal accidents (including Subburaj's wife). Others recanted their testimony. The arresting officers have gone into early retirement and today Rai is a free man. He has founded a "social organization" that facilitates land deals and acts as a local labor union. Living in a fortress replete with AK-47-wielding guards and 12-foot walls topped with barbed wire, Rai is busy cleaning up his image for a political run.

US companies hoping to share in Bangalore's success are inevitably dragged into the morass. I haven't yet uncovered the full extent of American complicity with the land mafia. However, a prominent land developer showed me an IT park, Golf Links Private, Ltd., that was brokered by Rai's gang. IBM, AOL, and Cognizant are listed on the lease. I've identified several properties owned or rented by US companies; it's hard to imagine they could have taken possession without help from the mob. More examples are sure to surface when I return to Bangalore.

Wired is in a unique position to uncover the relationship between the rise of Bangalore's IT industry — based on billions of dollars in foreign investment — and the careers of crime bosses like Rai. Over the last two years I have made dozens of contacts — the assassinated Subburaj's family, arresting officers, lawyers, developers, builders, even Muttappa Rai himself. There are some important caveats. Many people are afraid to speak up about Rai, and the police case against him has faltered. That said, I don't think it will be difficult to show that he's a bad man.

**When Going Green Means Drawing Blood**

_Approved by Foreign Policy_

_published as "Fire in the Hole"_

_co-authored with Jason Miklian_

<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/fire_in_the_hole>

** _Note that there is a huge difference here between the pitch and published story. This is a classic example of what you might find on the ground isn't necessarily what you expect. AKA: Never confuse the project with the proposal_ **

In an age when gas-guzzlers have pushed us to the brink of climatic catastrophe, hybrid vehicles are a shot of medicine for the green technology movement. In addition to cutting fuel emissions, they show our neighbors how committed we are to tackling climate change. Even President Obama drives one. And his administration is giving billions with the goal of putting 10 million more hybrids on the road in the next decade.

But the cost of the green technology is paid in more than dollars. Instead of the currency of petroleum products hybrids use batteries and drive motors manufactured out of exotic compounds and rare earth elements which are only found in a few select places in the world. America has only a tiny fraction of what it needs within its borders, and international supplies are dwindling. The green industry has come to rely on Chinese mines, but both green activists and manufacturers are wary of keeping it that way forever. They're looking for friendlier sources.

This quest has led to central India. The geologically fertile ground holds all the raw materials needed for not only the neodymium and dysprosium needed for hybrid batteries, but also the steel for the cars themselves. Both Toyota and Honda are ramping up their operations in India, with over $1 billion in 2009 investments alone. The rare earth search has kicked off a new gold rush in some of the most contested territory in all of South Asia, and the potential for profit has led international companies to turn a blind eye to the fact that they're searching for riches in the heart of a war zone.

It is a war between four parties: the Communist Party of India-Maoist (also known as Maoists or Naxalites) who began their ideological struggle against India's central government in the 1960s; government military forces that always seem to be one step behind the Maoists; mining companies who don't care who controls the area's ideology as long as the companies can control the resources, and finally millions of innocent civilians who are caught in the middle of the firefight. The stakes are enormous. Since 2006 alone more than 100,000 people have been killed, injured or displaced.

The war spans the length of the mining belt states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. Legal and illegal mines number in the thousands, and are often located in remote areas where government is weak. It's an opportunity for the Maoists, who have learned to exploit the mines, to add cash their war chest. First they attack the mine's equipment and supply lines, then blackmail the mine owners into mafia-style 'protection' services. Those mine owners who refuse are kidnapped or even killed, dragged through the jungles to secret rebel headquarters where the police fear to tread.

Government officials who play along with the Maoists use the conflict to their advantage. Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda went from being a day laborer to a multimillionaire in under a decade through mining-related payoffs alone. Local police also use mining kickbacks to hire goons that squash the political competition. Some corrupt politicians even lock up political opponents and human rights campaigners under Orwellian anti-terrorism laws.

This leaves local farmers and indigenous communities caught in the middle of a war with nobody to protect them. Their families had tilled the soil here for centuries, mostly ignored by the conflicts that had swept the continent. Now with their land suddenly valuable, many villagers are forced to choose between one of three horrific options:

If they try to stay, they are told to leave at gunpoint by security forces because the area is 'infested' with rebels. If they still refuse, mining companies sometimes hire the Maoists to cut off the hands of random farmers until they all flee. With the land vacant, laws guaranteeing its right to stay in tribal hands no longer apply. In this way, mining companies have acquired more protected lands in the last five years than in the previous fifty.

If they give up farming, local people's only real option for employment is to work in the mines. Employees get paid about $9 a week in exchange for 15-hour workdays in dangerous environments that virtually guarantee the early onset of chronic lung and skin diseases. Illegal mines are even more dangerous. In the unregulated sector, employees receive no protection from the mining companies or the Maoists, leaving them easy targets for exploitation.

Their third option is to join the fight. Where the Maoists used to need years to indoctrinate the disadvantaged to take up arms for their revolution, they now simply use their newfound wealth to buy troops and weapons in regions where jobs are scarce. The mining money is an irresistible incentive for farmers to join the Maoists, and being pushed off of their land provides all the justification they need to take out their rage on the state.

The Indian government is trying to quell the bloodshed, but officials privately admit that they're fighting a losing battle against the tight-knit consortium of Maoists, miners, and politicians. And new large-scale military offensives like the newly tagged Operation Green Hunt confusingly operate not in the districts where Maoist activity is highest but in the areas most coveted by mining companies. There's just too much money to be made for any side to be concerned about how the war affects the innocent.

The heated climate change debate in Copenhagen this week assumes that the only costs to increasing our green technology investments are on the financial side. Blindly pushing ahead can sometimes lead to unexpected consequences, like villagers in India losing everything for the sake of slightly greener technologies.

In the meantime, that hybrid in your driveway just lost a little bit of its moral sheen.

_Jason Miklian is a researcher with the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). He is the author of several articles on conflict and insurgencies in South Asia._

