HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL: PART FOUR

Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist

Beyond Magazines: Books, Public Relations and An Audacious Exit Plan

 Besides writing continuously for magazines and newspapers, I produced four books during my freelancing career, two for sale in book stores and two for private clients. In 1989 I researched and wrote a book about The Federal Reserve System—a history of the Fed to be used in high schools as an additional textbook in economics or history classes.

In 1991 I was hired by a publisher to research and write a coffee table book about Houston, entitled Gateway to the Future. In both cases, the publishing companies contacted me through referrals from magazine editors in my client list.

The publishers for both of these books paid a set fee for all rights--$1,250 for the book about the Fed and $2,500 for the Houston book. The publisher for the Houston book, Windsor Publishing, also sold advertising inside the book and made most of its profits from that. When the Windsor editor contacted me, he asked me to send him an outline for a book about Houston if I were to be hired to write one. I was able to do that within a day, based on my knowledge of the city where I had lived and worked since 1971. Windsor even staged a couple of book release events at bookstores where I would sit and autograph copies of Gateway. One of these found me seated beside an author peddling a book titled The One-Hour Orgasm. Needless to say, he received more attention than me.

Compared with the experiences from the two publishing company books, the two privately published projects proved both more interesting and more profitable. The first contract landed in 1992 when a publishing entrepreneur in Connecticut contacted me on a referral from the ASJA membership directory inviting me to apply for a contract job writing a history of a Houston company called Big Three Industries. This publisher had created a business reputation producing corporate histories in the Northeastern U.S., and Big Three’s retention of him for its book represented a geographic expansion opportunity. He needed a journalist in Houston to interview company executives and research documents, offering me $15,000 plus expenses (equivalent to $28,000 in 2021) to produce a book during the next year.  This deal ranked as the largest single-project fee in my freelancing career—but I’m still not sure it passed the test of the Rockford Rule for $200 per day based on the time I would spend to complete it.

Founded in 1920 by the father of a legendary, innovative and colorful Houston oilpatch entrepreneur named Harry Smith, Big Three had grown from a regional pipeline welding operation into the nation’s largest producer of industrial gases for the petrochemical industry. In 1986 the French industrial gases giant Air L’Quide had purchased Big Three as a wholly owned subsidiary, leaving its operations much as they had been before the acquisition.

But the corporate leaders in Paris had changes in mind for greater control, so the Houston executives wanted to finally produce a hard-hitting corporate history that would tell the legendary story of the company and its founders before the French had a chance to shutter access to company documents and interview sources. So, they retained Greenwich Publishing to produce that book, and Greenwich hired me to write it.

At 82, Harry Smith in 1993 was purported to be a crusty old character with no time for nonsense. Ousted as chairman after the acquisition but still healthy, Harry had established a small oil exploration investment firm in an office in Houston’s River Oaks area where he spent several days each week working just as he had all his life. His successors at Big Three could not predict how Harry would react to my questions and my tape recorder. Without Harry’s personal story, however, there could be no book. But he welcomed me with open arms and even grew impatient for our interviewing sessions, which covered many days for two hours at a time.

He really wanted to tell the story of an ambitious young man expelled from high school for pranks, drifting around Mexico and playing professional golf there and finally coming home to assume control of the family welding business, inventing the concept of moving industrial gases through pipelines to petrochemical plants as that industry developed along the U.S. Gulf Coast in the 1930s.

Besides getting Harry’s story, I needed interviews with his top lieutenants to fill out the narrative. When I called one to arrange an appointment, his wife described him as near death and unable to talk. A few days later, however, she called back and said if I still wanted an interview I should come to their house immediately—“like today.” It was the first time in my career I had gotten a literal death bed interview.

Whlle I worked on the book, however, the absorption of Big Three into the global conglomerate was moving faster than anticipated. The French executives seized absolute control of the Houston operations and decided to kill the book project. But the local leaders remained keenly interested in finishing it anyway. They made one final effort to persuade a change of heart, sending me to visit one of the French executives at his summer estate near San Francisco, show him a draft and discuss it with him.

That meeting ended as I expected with the foreign executive astonished that Harry Smith and others had provided so much detailed insider information about their business. He laughed in my face at the idea of producing a book like this and sent me back to

Houston. Nevertheless, in one final act of defiance, the locals decided to proceed in secret. The company paid us in full for the book, which it published in a limited edition for a select group of company veterans. Harry in particular expressed his pleasure in a letter. And over the years I have received requests from several Big Three old-timers for copies of the “top secret” volume we titled “Built on the Air.”

Although shorter, the fourth book of my freelancing career proved just as interesting as the history of Big Three. And it represented the only time in my 16 years that my small annual classified ad in the Yellow Pages paid off, finally earning enough to cover the $1,600 total spent since 1980 for the listing under “Writers.” This project began with a phone call from a Vietnamese refugee who had reviewed those listings seeking a writer to produce a book about his life story.

He called himself Dan Vo, but over the course of our project I would have reason to doubt that as his real name. Due to the mysterious and clandestine elements of our brief relationship, I came to believe he might have been living in Houston under the U.S. government’s witness protection program. He always insisted on meeting at my home for our interviews in 1994, refusing to provide a phone number and calling me instead to make arrangements for our schedule. He offered no information about himself beyond what we needed for the book. Of course, I felt a bit concerned dealing with such a sketchy fellow, but I couldn’t resist the lure of the story he told or the $5,000 fee I eventually received for production of a book we decided to call “China Green.”

On the business side, my negotiations for compensation of this project allowed me to finally experiment with a sideline business idea that had been fermenting in my brain for several years without any opportunity for implementation. I had concluded early in my business that a market existed for personal memoirs with me ghostwriting privately financed books for subjects who wanted to bequeath a legacy of ideas and experiences to their descendants. I had even discussed the idea with a couple of estate attorneys, hopeful they might have elderly clients interested in combining a memoir with a will as part of their estates. I even had produced a couple of brochures marketing a business I called Personal Biography Unlimited, extolling the importance of leaving more than money for one’s heirs.

Besides being too busy with magazine and newspaper assignments to mount an aggressive marketing effort, however, I also struggled with a formula for compensation that would allow me to collect a profitable hourly fee while allowing the customer to know precise costs before signing a contract. I had developed a rough blueprint for compensation in my mind without attracting any clients for negotiation. Then Dan Vo found me in the phonebook, and I made him my personal memoirs Guinea pig.

Dan knew exactly what he wanted. He tempted me by saying he had an extremely interesting story to tell that might be worthy of sale to Hollywood. Of course, I had heard that before, but you never can predict when someone really will have a story worthy of sale to Hollywood, so I continued to listen. It grew more realistic when he explained he did not want a writer to pitch it for him.

Instead, he wanted a writer to produce a rough literary version that he could then pitch himself. He wanted the writer to remain anonymous while agreeing to accept nothing from any subsequent sales of the story for film or to a major publishing house. He wanted to offer our manuscript as a project written by himself. In short, Dan was willing to invest his own money to pay me to record his story in his belief he could sell it for broader circulation. And, at worst, he said, he would have a readable book for his descendants—a comment that echoed my marketing material for Personal Biography Unlimited.

I realized that my agreement to those terms might cost me an opportunity for attachment to a multi-media project with windfall potential. It seemed clear, however, he would not tell his story without it, so I would never find out either way. Still, I had to be paid for whatever work I would contribute. Using my compensation blueprint and applying the Rockford Rule, I offered to produce his story at an hourly rate to cover the time for recorded interviews, transcriptions and a narrative manuscript about his life story. And I agreed to cap my fee at $5,000—even if the project required more than 200 hours to complete at $25 per hour. I estimated I could do this job well within that time period or at least close enough to make it profitable. At that point Dan would receive the interview tapes, the typed transcripts and a reasonably literate manuscript. If he decided to publish the manuscript as a book himself or wanted me to assist his pursuit of a movie-deal, we could negotiate additional fees for my assistance in that phase.

Dan agreed to the terms and signed the contract I drafted without any help from an attorney. He paid an advance of $1,500. As he told his story, I grew relieved to learn it did not have Hollywood in its future, at least in my opinion. But it proved interesting enough as it followed him across the Pacific as a child of the so-called boat people after the 1975 fall of Saigon and into the home of his relative-sponsor in Maryland where he grew up.  Working in the Washington D.C. area, Dan got involved with a Chinese gang that operated a human trafficking ring. As an undercover operative for the U.S. government, Dan had helped to destroy the gang, sending dozens of its members to prison.

Or, so he said. If I had been writing his story as a journalist, I would have spent countless additional hours double-checking the records and interviewing other sources to ensure it all actually happened as he had said. But I viewed my role with Dan as ghostwriter for a vanity book and realized he would not have paid overtime for those extras.

When he arrived at my house to receive the tapes, transcripts and manuscript, Dan still owed me $3,500. I worried that I was about to get stiffed because I didn’t even have an address to use in a small claims court lawsuit if he just said thanks and left. Instead, he sat at my kitchen for two hours reading the manuscript before making final payment. Of course, he paid in cash with $100 bills, and I never heard from him again.

Inside my brochure for Personal Biography Unlimited

In the process, however, I concluded my compensation scheme for personal memoir ghostwriting as a sideline probably held merit. But I still never had time to mount any sort of marketing effort to attract more clients. I did keep a list of potential targets, clipping stories in the papers about doctors or architects retiring at the top of their professions—people with money and stories to tell that would fall short of marketable autobiographies.

Meanwhile, I also wondered if the next knock at my door might be someone demanding I lead them to Dan Vo. And every time a new movie surfaces about human trafficking from China, I take a peek to see if the plot resembles anything I heard from him. So far, it appears our manuscript of “China Green” represents the only version of his tale.

Public Relations

While technically “free” to write for anyone willing to pay me, I realized early that I needed to move cautiously about accepting assignments from public relations firms. Because I wanted to work primarily as a journalist, I could not risk the potential damage to my credibility if editors suspected I wanted to peddle stories for PR clients boosting their business. This aspect of freelancing hit me in the face almost immediately when I contacted the first editor of Houston City magazine in 1980 with a story idea about an historic Houston business specializing in fountain pens. Instead of considering the merits of the story, he challenged me to prove that I was not working for the business. I wasn’t. But the encounter made me think this editor had been burned by some PR practitioner posing as a freelancer. So, I took note.

During the next 16 years, I would accept writing jobs for a variety of Houston PR and marketing firms, but I steadfastly refused to engage in pitching press releases to the media. I wanted to work in the shadows, functioning as an information provider rather than a pitchman. Most PR practitioners need contract writers because they excel at smooth talk rather than writing. And I enjoyed some interesting experiences on the writing fringes of PR where the pay exceeded the $200 per day required by the Rockford Rule.

One example of a typical PR freelancing assignment concerned my work for Goldstein Communications on behalf of its client, Houston real estate developer Ed Wulfe. The Goldsteins were a husband-and-wife team without any staff while Ed helmed a large company developing malls and strip centers across the city. Ambitious and energetic, Ed wanted someone to ghostwrite essays for placement in professional journals or newspapers promoting himself and his company. He hired the Goldsteins, and they hired me. I can’t recall how they found me, but they agreed to my hourly fee and likely charged Ed quite a bit more.

Ed’s essays covered a wide range of subjects, political to instructional. Our first collaboration involved his desire to share his method for brainstorming. I attended one of his staff brainstorming sessions and carefully recorded his rules for effective brainstorming, such as building off someone’s really lame idea without insulting them. I actually found the assignment intriguing and delivered a pretty impressive article that was published under Ed’s byline in a national professional journal. Ed was ecstatic. He wanted more.

He started calling me directly at all hours of the day and evening with his latest ideas on subjects. When I finally informed him he had to work through the Goldsteins and could not call me directly, he said: “To hell with them.” Ed offered me a job writing for him—speeches, essays, op-eds—he had ideas for everything. After thinking briefly about the opportunity, I ultimately concluded it would be the kiss of death for my business if I got a reputation for stabbing my benefactors in the back and stealing their clients. I reported the offer to the Goldsteins who responded by terminating our relationship. So, I lost Ed and the Goldsteins.

Another small shop found more effective ways to deploy my journalistic skills in the pursuit of PR. It hired me on several occasions for media training of corporate executives. Basically, my job involved playing rough with an executive during a practice interview so he could learn how to be polite with rude reporters.

On another assignment, this firm teamed with a larger firm on a complex training project for the Houston office of Australia’s Broken Hill Petroleum Company. They recruited about a dozen journalists including me to respond to a scripted exercise involving an imaginary offshore well blowout that killed people. Neither the reporters, nor the Broken Hill execs knew the script and both teams had to learn about events unfolding in real time with a group of actors and PR representatives fielding questions as if they were emergency workers and law enforcement.

The grand finale occurred at high noon when Broken Hill’s CEO attempted to answer questions at a practice press conference to update the reporting team on the day’s events. The PR firms scored well when the CEO discovered the reporters had learned more about the disaster than his staff, leaving him to flounder unmercifully while facing our questions. Then, of course, the PR representatives took him aside for a debriefing about ways to improve both the media presentations and the internal investigations of company disasters. 

Other PR opportunities emerged from unlikely spots proving that every entrepreneur should remain alert during all encounters. Remember that waiter job I had for a couple of weeks at the start of my freelancing business in 1980? A couple of years later I received a call from the management consultant who had hired me for lunches there while he reorganized the restaurant. He tracked me down because he needed some writing to help market his new business as a provider of commercial signage.

He had just landed a large contract to place signs inside Houston’s Intercontinental Airport directing visitors to the restrooms, escalators, baggage claim and other important locations. He hired me to ghostwrite an article about him and his business under his byline, of course. He was thrilled when The Houston Business Journal agreed to publish it. The airport contract had given him credibility, and our article provided lots of educational information about the science of signage.

Although they did not produce revenue, two other PR opportunities bear noting. One came from an editor at the AAPG Explorer who left that organization to launch his own little PR business in Tulsa. He offered me the chance to serve as his Texas office without

Three of my cards

really providing a job description. Two days later I received a box of business cards identifying me as the “vice president” for his Tulsa-based firm. Then I never received an assignment or anything resembling a job. I suppose he hoped I would become some sort of rain-maker in Houston, soliciting clients for the group and generating revenues. But he never called to say so. In fact, he never called again. But I kept the cards and still show them occasionally to prove that I have had a vice president title in my career.

Then, one of my bar tenders from the Richmond Arms Pub contacted me for help with his new business. Mike Byrd had started a restaurant, which he decided to call The Byrd’s Nest. My first suggestion would have been to choose a better name, one more befitting a dining establishment. Mike wanted me to write some unspecified marketing materials as well as liner notes for his menus. When I told him about my Rockford Rule of $200 per day plus expenses, he countered with an offer to provide complementary dinners on a regular basis at The Byrd’s Nest as compensation for my services. I declined and left him to fend for himself.

One PR gig that did pay off for a couple of years saw me writing content in a quarterly newsletter for a small Houston engineering company. The engineer’s marketing consultant distributed the newsletter to promote the firm’s projects and professionals.

I also wrote some copy for radio ads pitching the services of a small Houston blinds manufacturer. My client on this contract had a one-person ad agency so small he had no office. He always wanted to meet at a strip club called the Silhouette Lounge so he could deduct the drinks and dollar tips on his taxes.

Another interesting quasi-PR assignment came from a Houston attorney who paid me $500 to write a test newspaper article about his injured client in a civil lawsuit. He didn’t want to publish it. But he wanted to show the lawyers for the defendant insurance company how bad they might look if the lawsuit went to trial. I never heard if it worked to trigger a settlement, but he never called again on any other cases.

Besides writing for national publications like Time and The National Law Journal, I also produced assignments for a number of small local publications. I made a rule of never treating them any different from the big names in my client list. I considered that a good habit to develop. Anyone willing to pay me for my services deserved the best efforts I could give. During the 1980s, many would-be publishing entrepreneurs tried to make their mark in Houston—much like the ladies at Ampersand—and I enjoyed reviewing their ambitious business models as a way to learn more about the industry.

My Exit Ramp

In my office 1996

Just as it had begun in a response to a change in my personal life, my freelancing career would conclude as a response to another life change. In 1980, I needed a more flexible work schedule to take care of my daughters. By 1995, both had graduated high school and left for college. Re-examining my professional goals in light of my newfound empty-nester status, I began to weigh the pros and cons of continued self-employment versus a return to a single employer.

Although I maintained my core clients of NLJ, JOC, Money and The Explorer, I had begun to see cracks in the magazine marketplace.  In retrospect, I can clearly see how the evolution of the Internet in the next few years would have wrecked my business model. But I can’t boast about being prescient enough to have predicted it in 1995.

The treadmill and the juggling of so many articles had worn me down, however, and I still did not feel secure despite nearly two decades of survival in the freelance market. Health insurance costs continued to increase for an entrepreneur like me with no corporate papa to pay half the tab on premiums. I had not taken a true vacation since the 1970s—and I would even tell one prospective employer I only wanted his job so I could have a paid vacation, only half in jest. 

With my daughters all grown up.

More than anything else, I suppose, I never had really matured past that sensation of feeling unemployed. Despite the years of multiple, regular returning clients and adequate income from that life, I still could not believe it could happen. Self-doubts left me wondering if I had just been lucky. Have I fooled all these editors? I asked myself, again only half in jest. Looking back with the perspective of time, I hold a lot more respect for my accomplishments as a freelancer today than I did in 1995, when I was still juggling and riding the treadmill every day. So, I began looking for an exit sign.

Although I officially closed my business in June of 1996, the following year looms as a sidetrack or time of transition back into mainstream journalism with an ill-conceived foray into public relations. It began with the offer of a full-time employment from an Atlanta firm that specialized in promoting attorneys, charging huge fees to write marketing material and secure media interviews for members of its client firms. I worked in Houston, writing summaries of cases pending at the client firms and occasionally pitching prospective new clients with the woman who ran the boutique operation in Atlanta.

In closing down my freelance business, I had another entrepreneurial idea that still leaves me chuckling at the audacity of my exit. After writing several business stories about entrepreneurs who had sold their businesses to move on, I wondered if I had a business I could sell. My client-editors had all hired me for my skills, so it seemed I could not guarantee any assignments for a prospective buyer. Given my disdain for the concept of freelance writing as a true business, I thought: “If I can get someone to pay me for whatever value I might have, it would be the icing on the cake of 16 years survival.”

But the failure of The Houston Post in 1995 moved a large number of qualified reporters into the unemployment line. They scrambled to find jobs at rival newspapers or bide their time with spot freelance inquiries. Some were even calling me for advice. Thus, when I accepted the full-time offer in 1996 from the firm in Atlanta, I decided to inquire if one of the qualified former Post reporters would be willing to buy me out. One of them expressed interest.

I proposed a nominal fee of $2,000 plus 10 percent of any fees generated by my leads in the next six months. In exchange, I agreed to contact my core editors on her behalf and introduce her as my successor. I also would refer all other inquiries to her in the future. We struck a deal, and my editors seemed pleased that I had not simply walked away. They all agreed to give her an opportunity to take the baton from my hand.

Within four months of closing down, however, I had come to regret it. I did not enjoy the PR work. More importantly, the firm suffered severe money management issues. Not only had I accepted a job for a little less income than I had been earning as a freelancer, but I started missing payments. In 16 years of service for a crazy quilt of different publications, I rarely had missed a check. Now dependent on one source of income, I sat three months behind and had to use savings for basic expenses.

So, in January of 1997 I turned to my old friend—the classified ads in The Houston Chronicle and answered one seeking an experienced journalist for a new kind of venture in something called “online news.” By June 1 I started work as Deputy Editor for Chemical News & Intelligence in the Houston offices of British publishing giant Reed-Elsevier. With good pay, health insurance and a 401K, it was a position I would hold until 2004 when I accepted my final job with McGraw-Hill’s daily oil industry newsletter Platts Oilgram News, which would see me through to retirement in 2012.

Next in Part Five: Observations, advice and an anthology of my articles