Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist
From Unemployment Scrambling to Credible Magazine Freelancing
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| In my office at Ampersand in 1981. |
Recycling refers simply to the process of selling the same basic story to multiple publications. While that might sound almost fraudulent in the age of the Internet, recycling ranked as a cornerstone of freelancing in the 1980s, and standard writer’s contracts accounted for the possibility. In those days, freelancers usually sold only the right for first North American publication. Rights to the research and the article reverted to me, for example, after a magazine had published it. Some contractual exceptions included so-called “work-for-hire”—as when Time paid me by the hour for research or Ampersand paid $1,500 per month for a general job description of editorial services like a part-time employee.
Editors, of course, preferred to have the most exclusive rights possible, but they had little leverage on the standard contracts purchasing what they called “First North American Serial Rights.” If one found an exact copy of an article in a rival publication, he likely could decline to buy anything else from that freelancer again. In those days, however, editors lacked the access to other publications available today. Nevertheless, a smart freelancer would at least work to rewrite an article sold to different publications, emphasizing an angle separate from the theme of the initial publication.
Recycling proved a cost-effective business strategy because research comprises the lion’s share of the time involved in completing any article—at least 80 percent or more for someone who can write acceptable first-draft manuscripts. And I was that guy—a master of the first-draft. The basic facts of a recycled article remain the same, with only the need for a bit of updating on occasion.
My first true magazine article emerged as an example of recycling, and there would be several more in 1981. My opportunity arose, once again, in an unexpected way. In October of 1980, I had been interviewed by Dallas freelance writer Hugh Aynesworth for a story he was writing on assignment for Westward, the Sunday magazine of the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper. A veteran of Texas journalists, Hugh became an inspiration to me as a freelancer when he arrived at my apartment in a coat and tie to interview me about a newsworthy adventure in my life from earlier in the year, one that would become the subject for my memoir written in 2009. His Westward article in 1981 would be the first real magazine article on my personal escapade beyond the standard newspaper articles chronicling the events as they occurred in Houston. Hugh explained that the Times-Herald had decided to enhance its Sunday magazine by boosting its freelance budget and recruiting writers who could provide interesting articles from anywhere in the state.
This interview marked the first time I had encountered a credible professional journalist actually working as a freelancer. Sixteen years my senior, Hugh already ranked as a legendary Texas newsman from his work at The Dallas Morning News where he had covered the Kennedy assassination. Later in the 1980s he would continue to attract attention for books and other journalistic endeavors including research about serial killers Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas. While he interviewed me about my case in 1980, I interviewed him about the craft of freelancing and asked if he thought Westward might assign anything to me despite my pending appearance as a primary source for his article. He referred me to the editor, Mark Ivancic, who encouraged me to submit some article ideas.
I responded with my first formal freelance queries, listing topics from my ideas inventory and summarizing my expectation for what each finished story might include. Mark immediately assigned me to research and write my idea about lost treasure—an updating of a lengthy feature I already had written once while at The Houston Post in 1976. Inspiration for the 1976 version of “True Treasure Tales” had come while browsing a magazine stand and noticing a group of magazines designed to attract treasure seekers. Their articles included famous tales of lost treasures, such as Arizona’s Lost Dutchman gold mine.
Several of these magazines identified their editor as John “Long John” Latham with editorial offices in nearby Conroe, Texas. So, I interviewed Latham and wrote a Post feature about Latham’s five best true treasure tales—the treasures he believed real enough to pursue if he wanted to invest time and money in a search. The Post had published my feature March 4, 1976, across half-a-page under the headline: “Publishers find rich gold tales in Texas, Southwest.”
Now, in 1980, I called Latham again to make sure he was still alive and to see if any of his favorite treasure mysteries had been solved. Using most of the information I had gathered for The Post five years earlier, I wrote my new version for Westward, which published it in March of 1981 under the title “A TROVE OF TALL TALES OF LOST FORTUNE AND GREED” and paid me $750 for my first legitimate magazine byline. In the true spirit of recycling, of course, I was not finished with Latham yet. I was destined to sell his story yet again in 1983 for $1,000 to the editor of the Muse Airlines Monthly under the title “TALES OF HIDDEN TREASURE: John Latham built a publishing firm on rumors of gold, silver and other treasures hidden in the Southwest, Or, so the story goes.” You can read a full copy of the Muse version in my blog post from 2019.
Ironically, I achieved my own byline in Westward before Hugh’s article about me appeared in June of 1981. And I added another in August with publication of an article assigned specifically by Ivancic, profiling the East Texas town of Sour Lake and its sad history of overreach during the first days of the oil industry at the turn of the century.
Thus, by agreeing to an interview with Hugh Aynesworth in 1980, I had stumbled into another opportunity destined to provide regular income for the next three years, until the Times-Herald decided to cancel inhouse publication of a Sunday magazine and killed Westward. But not before I had recycled some other works, including that article I had done for Ampersand’s banking publication about the professor who appeared to be an expert on anything. My Westward version ran in June of 1982 under the title: “CALL HIM DR. KNOW-IT-ALL.”
Recycling, of course, works both ways, and I would manage to rewrite some original Westward articles for other publications later in the decade. One was a profile of legendary high school football coach Gordon Wood and another was an article about regular citizens who had become heroes by risking their own lives to save a stranger in danger. Another notable story updated and recycled something I had written at The Post years before, profiling several female prison inmates who had given birth while incarcerated.
Another example of recycling provided my second legitimate magazine byline with the April 1981 publication of a story about two Houston racquetball stars in a fledgling magazine called Texas Sports. I had discovered Texas Sports during one of my regular expeditions to browse the publications at a newsstand, an activity I pursued to scout opportunities rather than reading material. Although I had never worked as a sports writer during my newspaper career, sports always had been a subject of great interest to me. I had played sports all my life and in college had been elected athletic chairman for my dormitory, a position requiring me to organize the dorm’s participation in all kinds of intramural sports contests.
Embracing my desire to add sports to my portfolio of freelancing subjects, I fired off several queries to the editor, and he replied immediately with a list of assignments. Drawing on my experiences covering the Houston racquetball scene for Southwest Racquetball magazine, I immediately drafted an article about two young players I’d covered for my part-time job as editor there, effectively recycling a lot of material already in hand. I followed with an article published in June profiling the trainer for the Houston Astros, expanding on some comments he had made to sports writers at The Houston Post about his ultra-modern training techniques.
A more ambitious assignment concerned my suggestion to identify the ten best high school football coaches in Texas for the magazine’s fall edition. In my query I explained a scheme to contact a list of the nation’s top college coaches and interview them anonymously about their views of Texas high school coaches. The magazine loved that idea, but I had no way to be sure I could persuade the college coaches to share their opinions. I was pleasantly surprised to find them eager to provide lists based on their experiences recruiting players from Texas. I added interviews with them about the importance of solid high school coaching and tips about the qualities they sought in recruits, so their programs received attention in the article without disclosure of their selections.
My top coaches article ran in the August 1981 edition of Texas Sports and included brief profiles of each high school coach with interviews about their techniques. In the process, this article introduced me to a legendary Texas coaching figure named Gordon Wood, who surprisingly ranked as the coach with the most wins at any level in the country. Wood had been named number one on every survey form returned by my college coaching sources. I immediately recognized Wood as a subject for wider circulation and contacted Ivancic at Westward to pitch him on a larger story about the coach.
The magazine paid my travel expenses to spend a weekend in Brownwood, Texas, attending a practice and a game with Wood and the Brownwood High Lions. Westward published my story on Wood in November of 1981, and I kept my notes so I could recycle Gordon Wood several more times in the years ahead for other general interest magazines.
Texas Sports became another regular source of income with assignments that included coverage of the tryouts for the Oilers’ Derrick Dolls cheerleading squad (August 1981), a story about the famous Astrodome baseball scoreboard (October 1981) and profiles of prominent Astros Art Howe (April 1982) and Jose Cruz (June 1982). Although the magazine failed to last very long, I ranked as a frequent contributor and thoroughly enjoyed the assignments.
I recall interviewing Cruz in a dugout at the Dome during a practice when he saved me from a foul ball I didn’t see. I telephoned Howe’s little league coach in Pennsylvania to collect some anecdotes on his early development. I also used the assignments to stimulate my imagination for the generation of other ideas I might pitch to publications in the future.
Looking back on these publication dates 40 years later, I’m astounded to see how busy I must have been, juggling the magazine stories with assignments from Time and monthly publication of Southwest Racquetball amidst the hectic life of a single dad supervising daughters aged six and three. Of course, I was just 34 years old at that time, but I still wonder: How did I do it all? Reflecting on these events at the age of 74 provides a boost to my self-esteem I guess I had taken for granted over the years.
Clearly fear and responsibility ranked as primary motivation for all the hustle. When I recall the pressures of my chaotic private life during those months, I also can see that the work schedule likely emerged as the refuge I needed to maintain my sanity through a year climaxed with a five-day child custody jury trial in September.
My mother died of cancer on March 14, 1981, at the age of 62 in my parents’ home in St. Louis, Missouri, some 1,200 miles away from me in Houston. My 59-year-old father would follow her to the grave three years later, also from cancer. Her death in the midst of all the changes in my life had minimal emotional impact on me. We had never been close, and I had lived away from home since leaving for college in 1965. I was not religious. But one of my deepest life regrets remains my failure to visit her after her diagnosis in 1980.
My dad himself had suffered a stroke in 1977, so both parents were infirm miles away while I was wrestling my own issues in Houston. One of my sisters worked as a lawyer in Denver. But the other one was fifteen years younger and still living at home with my parents while finishing high school. She had to grow up fast in that house where she assumed control at too young an age. She would go on to become a banking executive without attending college. I felt confident in her ability to continue handling things for our dad in his final years so I didn’t contribute anything besides some smart-aleck commentary.
Sitting with my dad and sisters while the funeral director pitched casket selections for my mom, I remember replying, “I believe people should rot where they fall.” Such was my emotional state at the time, that I never cried during her service. I needed to get home where my ex-wife was crossing a milestone in her own life.
She called out of the blue one day to announce a religious conversion that included allegiance to a minister who lived on some sort of collective in Wimberly, Texas, about 150 miles west of Houston, near Austin. She had decided to leave her job as a child welfare caseworker and move there. And she wanted to take our daughters with her. She insisted she no longer would recognize the temporary custody order I had secured a year before while she resided in a mental hospital. I responded by denying her visitation, and the fight was on.
Borrowing money from her dad, she hired an attorney and quickly learned that my order indeed gave me the power to deny her visitation. So, in June she filed to vacate the order and began a battle to win full custody for her planned relocation to Wimberly. My attorney was a friend from my days covering courts for The Post. Aware of my financial challenges, he agreed to defend our court order and argue for my appointment as permanent custodial parent for just $5,000. I still had to borrow that from my dad.
But I believed I had no choice except to fight for the girls. They both seemed to be stable and well. I had made plans to shift Erin to a different school for first grade for more convenient transportation. Her grades painted the picture of a girl excelling in the district’s Vanguard program for gifted students. At the same time, Shannon continued at the same Montessori program she had attended since infancy.
Since her release from the hospital in October of 1980, their mother had enjoyed split custody with my blessing, the girls living in her apartment on weekends and at my place during the week. For the first time in several years, our lives seemed stable. We were catching our breath from a period of domestic turmoil. Their mom even seemed to experience tranquility with the arrangement. I have to laugh now recalling that a religious conversion would disrupt tranquility rather than secure it.
Still, eager to make sure a custody fight would serve our interests best, I hired a long-time friend who worked as a private investigator while attending law school to research the religious group in Wimberly. His reports reaffirmed my suspicion that a shift to a farming commune would create a detrimental shock, regardless of their mother’s presence with them. At the urging of a new girlfriend, I scheduled therapy appointments for both girls as much to use as evidence in the coming trial as to show me if they were suffering emotionally from our new life. Their therapist would eventually tell jurors during our five-day trial in September that “the older one is thriving with life the way it is. He shouldn’t change a thing.”
I did not mention two of Erin’s major accomplishments. Under my supervision, she had learned to make a Scotch and water to deliver to me without spilling it: ice, cheap Scotch poured to a level of two fingers on the glass and tap water on top. In addition, she had helped me play darts in a bar called the Hard Times Soup Kitchen by serving as the chalker on the scoreboard, standing on a chair and improving her subtraction skills by marking the scores down from 501.
Asked about my career during the trial, I was able by September 1981 to testify that my freelance business was doing much better than expected, easily well enough to support the three of us without any financial support from their mother. Ampersand’s $1,500 per month retainer provided a financial base, and I showed I had managed to supplement at least another $500 from Time and the various magazine assignments. In contrast, I estimated my monthly expenses at $1,454 including $300 for the Montessori school, $285 for rent, $212 on my car payment and $200 for groceries.
The trial ended with jurors voting 10-2 in my favor. They asked to meet with us after the verdict to explain their decision. Speaking for the group, one woman asked if there was any chance we could find a way to stay together. She said jurors had been impressed with both of us, but thought the girls would benefit more from the stability I was providing in Houston. I laughed and told them thanks for their careful consideration. I promised their mother would have all the visitation she could handle in an effort to ensure the girls continue their relationship with her. Then I asked the judge for $40 per month in child support, just for the principle.
Their mother left Houston quickly after the trial and lived in Wimberly for about a year. In a telephone conversation in July of 1982, she would thank me for preventing her from taking the girls with her. The commune apparently did not work out well for her. But she did remarry, have another child and would move back to Houston a decade later, buying a house near me and rebuilding her relationship with our daughters. By then, I had built my freelancing business model into a satisfactory economic foundation for their future.
Despite the regular income from Ampersand, Time, Westward and Texas Sports, I continued searching for new opportunities by reviewing a wide range of magazines even while preparing for the custody trial. During this period, I landed another assignment destined to become a regular income generator for the next 15 years. It occurred when I had purchased a magazine called Writer’s Digest and reviewed its classified ads. I responded to a couple with my resume and quickly received a call from an executive in Tulsa at the headquarters of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), the world’s largest organization for those professionals.
He explained that the AAPG wanted to produce a monthly newspaper for its members that would include legitimate news stories about the oil industry alongside announcements of important meetings and briefs about geological research papers. He wanted me to research
and write the first article as his Houston correspondent about the growing interest from Canadian investors in Texas oil ventures. Beginning with publication of that article in November of 1981, the AAPG Explorer newspaper would carry at least one byline from me every month for the next 15 years.
At the same time, I discovered an opportunity in corporate communications with Shell Oil Company’s US headquarters in Houston. Besides reading magazines and following classified ads, I had used the telephone to contact other Houston-based writers advertising in the telephone book to learn if they had extra work to toss my way in exchange for a referral fee. I quickly learned that most of the listings for “writers” were either disconnected or served as income tax expense deductions for individuals who received complementary listings to purchase an official business line. Did writers actually advertise in the Yellow Pages and find work that way? I found a couple of listings for individuals who sought work on pamphlets but no journalists. One of them noted my journalism background and suggested I contact his acquaintance at Shell, who worked as the editor for Shell’s monthly inhouse news magazine titled Shell News.
My timing proved perfect. That editor, Eldon Libby, responded immediately to my inquiry with an assignment, noting that his primary freelancer had just moved out of town. Libby assigned me to produce a three-story cover package for the June 1981 edition of Shell News about the company’s efforts to navigate a political landscape where state governments enjoyed increasing regulatory authority. The package included an overview article titled “Meeting Challenges of the New Federalism” and profiles of two Shell executives involved in lobbying.
While a few months earlier I might have scoffed at this work as propaganda since Shell controlled the final result, I still received some journalistic satisfaction from the interviews and writing. I gained great respect for Libby and would continue to take assignments from him several times each year. A few years later my Shell connection would cost me a big assignment from Time, which considered me for researching a major article on Shell, then gave it to someone else after learning I had earned fees from the company as a freelancer.
Another random contact introduced me to the previously unknown world of in-flight magazines when I chatted with him in a bar. At that time Kent Demaret was a former newspaper reporter teaching journalism at the University of Houston. I bought him a drink and asked him about his freelancing career, which he said had lasted ten years after his former newspaper folded.
“Ten years?” I asked in astonishment. “If I can do this for ten years I’ll be amazed. Who paid you for articles?”
Demaret laughed and said, “Magazines are out there. Just look. You know, all the airlines have monthly magazines to give to their passengers to read while in-flight. They don’t employ staff, so everything is written by freelancers. They pay well and the editors are always in the market for good, general interest ideas. No controversial or investigative stuff, but you can still write some fun articles and add income.”
Then he rummaged into his briefcase and produced a recent edition of the in-flight magazine he’d carried home from a trip to Dallas. He handed it to me so I could find the contact information inside.
Sufficiently informed, I referred to my list of article ideas and contacted the editor of Southwest Airlines Magazine with several suggestions. He liked the one about the Houston
resident who collected old political buttons—the same “collectors” story I had written for The Post as a staffer and for Ampersand’s banking client magazine as a freelancer. Southwest’s in-flight published my recycled and updated version in its November 1981 edition under the title “One Man’s Election Collection” in what would be the first of many sales to airline in-flights. Southwest in particular would become a regular client for me throughout several of its incarnations into a magazine titled Southwest Spirit during the next 15 years.
Besides learning the value of recycling stories as I had with the “collectors” and the “treasure hunters,” by the end of 1981 I also boasted a rudimentary understanding of the two other pillars of freelancing I mentioned earlier: compensation strategies and clip files.
Identifying the “customers” in my blossoming business model as editors for a variety of publications, I realized they had various ways of paying for my goods and services, which I identified as story ideas and research. Magazine editors essentially purchased ideas based on their trust that a finished, publishable story would arrive. The standard agreement involved a promise from me to provide the finished product and their promise to pay the agreed fee either upon publication or acceptance. Usually, they also agreed to pay what they called a “kill fee” of some smaller amount if the finished article failed to met their standards.
I learned quickly that once I sold the idea, I likely was 80 percent certain of getting paid in full, unless I missed the deadline or really functioned below the reporting abilities I had polished during the last decade of work on newspapers. Most editors worked on a tight schedule with a budget that did not allow them to create much inventory of articles. They did not want to kill anything assigned because that likely would leave a hole in their monthly production.
For budgeting purposes, they also usually paid according to a schedule that reflected the different sizes of spaces they needed to fill. For example, a magazine like Texas Sports would routinely divide into the same sections each month so regular readers could feel familiar with the publication. Reviewing that magazine’s table of contents page for August of 1981, we find it divided into two primary categories of articles; features and
departments. Under the “Features” heading, we see eight different headlines including two stories with my byline—the story of selection of the Oiler’s cheerleading squad and the story about the state’s best high school football coaches. Meanwhile, the “Departments” heading tops a list of eight other sections with less specific identifications like “From the Press Box,” “College” and “Texas Legends.” My “top coaches” article covered eight pages in the magazine, and I received a standard fee of about $400 for that work. But the articles in the various departments likely paid much less for short treatment, perhaps $50 or $100 for a page in the magazine.
When the editor ordered my stories here, he told me the fee and the length he would need to fill the space in his plan for publication. It would be up to me to make that payment efficient. I quickly determined a fundamental truth of self-employment that I would follow throughout the next 15 years: Regardless of the payment scheme, I am always working for an hourly rate because all I really have to sell is my time. To elaborate, any time an editor offered a fee, I had to estimate how many hours I needed to work to complete that assignment in the same way that a carpenter might estimate the time needed to build a table.
As a fan of The Rockford Files television series, I adopted what I called my Rockford Rule. In quoting his fees, Private Detective Jim Rockford always told prospective clients he charged “$200 per day plus expenses.” That rate equates to $25 per hour for the standard eight-hour workday. In 2021, that would be the equivalent of $75 per hour or $600 per day.
Thus, when agreeing to accept $400 to provide a finished article in 1981, I silently told myself I actually had agreed to provide 16 hours of work on that project. All 16 hours would never occur consecutively because a reporter must schedule interviews at the convenience of the interview subjects. I needed to have four or five different assignments working simultaneously at all times to fill my day. Using the top high school coaches article for an example, once I had identified my interview subjects with my unscientific, informal poll of college coaches, I contacted each to schedule interviews. While it might have taken two weeks to complete my interviews, each interview likely lasted only about half-an-hour. The only true consecutive hourly work on any article would occur with the writing, which for the coaches’ article likely took about three hours because I could generate publishable copy extremely fast, thanks to my newspaper background.
Of course, I adjusted for some exceptions. If I wrangled an assignment from a prestigious magazine, for example, I could afford to spend more time to produce a superior article even if that lowered my hourly rate because the promotional value of that byline could be worth the difference. Time magazine, for example, paid less than $25 per hour, but the connection offered prestige as well as the security of regular work and reliable payments. Also, I realized my alternative likely was earning $5 per hour at a hamburger joint, so anything more than $5 ranked as the best choice for my set of skills.
In practice, over the course of my freelancing career, I’m certain I earned much more than $25 per hour on most stories written for a fee because I could finish them faster than the editors anticipated. My speed emerged as the special sauce in my recipe for freelancing survival.
Besides standard fees, editors also paid according to the measurement of the article they needed. Magazines measured length in terms of words, and some would offer to pay a certain amount per word. Some newspapers paid by the published column inch. But most were still equating those rates to standard budgeted fees. One of my old contracts from one, for example, offered 45 cents per word for 1,000 words—that was going to be $450 no matter how you describe it. Regardless of the payment scheme, however, I was always figuring it on an hourly rate and asking: How much of my precious time does this editor expect me to give him on this particular story?
In addition to learning payment schemes, I also learned the value of maintaining a large collection of clip files in these days before the Internet, when online search engines would place background information at every freelancer’s fingertips. From my days as a newspaper reporter, I understood the value of a well-organized editorial library, or “morgue” as we called it because it held all the dead stories from the past. So much of newspaper reporting involves updating from an older article, using previously reported information so the reader understands the basis for the information that is new. Often as a newspaper reporter I would add three paragraphs of new information to the top of ten paragraphs of an old story and then move along to cover something else.
So, as a freelancer I started clipping articles from newspapers and magazines to build my own personal morgue. I had no way of predicting what clips I might need in the future, but I knew I had to anticipate some subjects that could prove helpful. It started small, with just a couple of filing cabinets. I would clip articles, identify them as topics and place them in folders, believing some day I could use the information to save time researching a story. For example, at the end of the year I clipped the annual big news story roundup published by the city’s two daily newspapers and the weekly Houston Business Journal and filed those in a folder titled “Houston History.”
By the time I stopped freelancing in 1997, I would have an entire room filled with four-drawer, legal-size filing cabinets holding clippings about subjects as varied as “cannibalism” to “securities fraud.” I never had a chance to write a feature on cannibals, but background from The Smithsonian magazine remained in my files, just in case. The extent of my morgue had become so well known by the 1990s that I occasionally received calls from editors just offering to pay me for background information they couldn’t find on their own. Today they just search on Google or Wikipedia for that stuff.
With my custody case decided and my ex-wife relocated to Central Texas, I started feeling more secure by the end of 1981 in both my personal and professional life. I had guaranteed income from Ampersand and Time, plus variable opportunities from several magazines. I compared my business model with the culture of early humans evolving from hunters and gatherers into civilizations. Ampersand and Time ranked as my vegetable garden and chicken coop while the magazines provided big game whenever I could kill it. Unwilling to take the future for granted, however, I continued searching for new opportunities and realized trouble brewing on the horizon with Ampersand.
As managing editor of Southwest Racquetball and Houston HomeTrade Journal, I hired freelancers myself to write articles, while also writing some of the stories, too. But the women running Ampersand had grand ambitions to produce expensive full color magazines, and that required them to generate revenue through advertising. Somewhere they had received an infusion of cash to start the process, so they hired a staff of about four advertising sales associates and a sales manager to crack the whip on that team. The manager reminded me of every used car salesman I had ever encountered.
Ad sales were struggling, and I was not surprised, based on my discussions with sources in the businesses the magazines sought to cover, particularly the Houston racquetball clubs. I noted a fatal flaw in Ampersand’s business plan: They had no serious audience for the racquetball magazine. They distributed it for free to clubs in five states, leaving stacks on the lobby desks for members to take home and read, employing the same strategy as publishers of in-flight magazines for airlines. Unlike passengers on a plane, however, club members had other things to do while using these facilities. They came there to exercise and could not care less to read about it. Ampersand offered a product it could not even give away for free, club employees told me, noting that members rarely took the magazines home. They sat on the counters until a new batch arrived to push last month’s copies into the trash.
Although that era had witnessed a boom in construction of racquetball and exercise clubs, Southwest Racquetball had little to offer beyond coverage of the tournaments conducted regularly at those clubs. And I learned those tournaments attracted only a small percentage of club members. Once I snapped to this reality, I had to laugh. I could provide articles about fitness and strategy, of course, but the niche market for those articles would be narrow as well.
I even asked Joyce about the market research conducted prior to launching the publication. She said she had a friend whose boyfriend claimed racquetball represented a growth industry. Fitness freaks already enjoyed multiple magazines to help fill their research needs. But I soldiered onward, collecting my $1,500 per month and filling the magazines with articles no one ever saw. The sales staff could not sell ads, and their manager, of course, blamed my editorial contributions as not being attractive enough to draw readership. But Ampersand could not verify readership anyway since it just dumped stacks of magazines at clubs hoping members would read them. Besides that, I made sure Joyce approved everything I did and repeatedly told her to suggest new ideas for coverage.
So, it came as no surprise one day in 1982 when Joyce called me into her office for a chat. Ampersand could not afford the magazines any more, she said, so they would “suspend” publication while seeking ideas for new publications. In the meantime, she did not want to lose me. While she could no longer pay me $1,500 per month, she wanted me to continue to use my office in her building for my freelancing business. I politely declined and decided to move my business into my apartment full time. My transition to a home-based operation took my business model to a new level where it would stay until the end.
Within a year in 1983, Ampersand’s building on Shepherd Drive would become a restaurant called Backstreet CafĂ©. Whenever I dine or drink there, I wax nostalgic about the building’s role in my freelancing business. Despite the failure of the Ampersand magazines, I’ve remained grateful that the opportunity emerged when it did.
I realized the loss of $1,500 would create a substantial hole in my monthly bankroll, but I had prepared. The experience would always serve to remind me the dangers of taking the future for granted and failing to anticipate unforeseen dangers in business. I would approach every publication as one that could vanish with next month’s advertising sales. But I had learned several important fundamentals destined to help me and my daughters survive and even thrive through self-employment over the next 15 years. Ampersand had helped me build a solid foundation, and I say “Thanks” to Joyce, wherever she might be.
Developments in my personal life made that transition to a home-based business more efficient. Winning the custody trial in 1981 and watching my ex-wife leave town had provided an expectation of permanence that allowed me to make some changes. From that point forward, I would embrace my role as the head of a household of three, running the business to benefit me and my two daughters.
By March of 1982, we had moved west to the suburbs of Houston’s Sharpstown-Bellaire neighborhood into a sprawling apartment complex on Hillcroft Avenue, leaving the inner city behind. I had transferred Erin into a different public school where she would stay throughout her elementary years and maintain friendships from there with girls who would serve as bridesmaids in her 1999 wedding. Shannon began kindergarten at a public school in the neighborhood, and then she joined her older sister in the Windsor Village Vanguard program after qualifying for first grade in September of 1983. A school bus picked them up near our apartment and delivered them in the afternoon to another public school for daycare, where I would retrieve them by 6 PM—or earlier if my schedule allowed.
During these years, I developed a couple of fairly serious romantic relationships but nothing destined to last. With extra time available for a while in the day time, I started playing guitar, teaching myself to play a repertoire of about 50 songs and forcing my daughters to endure bedtime performances while I covered songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Simon and others plus an assortment of folk classics like “500 Miles” and “Aura Lee.” I became fairly serious about learning new and challenging material and performing it as well as possible.
On the business front I entered the technological revolution by investing about $2,000 on one of the early Apple home computers, using it primarily as a word processor since digital telephone connections remained a couple of years away. The machine clearly improved my ability to edit my writing without “xxx-ing” out parts of sentences as I had to do with my electric typewriter. Once the primitive telephone connections became operational, freelancing would take another giant leap forward. For then, however, I still needed to print stories on paper and send them in the U.S Mail or, for Time, via Western Union.
Even before my break from Ampersand in 1982, I had cultivated additional clientele destined to fill the gap in my revenue stream for the next 15 years. My book deal on the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas legend failed to generate anything more than the $1,000 advance I had received in late 1980. I finished a manuscript in time, but the over-ambitious publisher closed his business and left town for reasons unknown to me. I eventually published the book myself in 2012 under the title I, the People: How Marvin Zindler Busted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The real estate developer with the publishing ambitions closed that operation before I could write any follow-up to my book about handling divorce.
But assignments from Time grew more frequent, and I continued to land projects from the usual suspects of Shell News, AAPG Explorer, Westward and Texas Sports. While still editing Southwest Racquetball in late 1981, however, I learned that Houston’s city magazine—called Houston City—was getting new ownership with a new editor. In the past year I hadn’t earned any assignments from the old editor, who had been a rival in our newspaper days from the 1970s. Sensing an opportunity, I mailed a list of story ideas to the new editor, and he took the bait.
At that time, regional magazines ranked as the most prominent publications for writers outside of newspapers. In cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, their ability to produce lengthy investigative features and commentary had made them the bright lights of journalism in the 1970s. Founded in 1973, the statewide Texas Monthly had already achieved legendary literary status on a national basis and loomed as the regional behemoth here. But upstarts created in Dallas and Houston had risen by 1980. The golden age of regional magazines would last for the next 20 years before losing out to a number of cost factors that would leave most of them publishing public relations fluff or dying altogether. Of course, New York magazine and Texas Monthly still rank as respected publications, but most of the others resemble only shadows of their former selves.
Although, I viewed these magazines as premier targets for my writing ambitions, I also had been cautious to approach. As a single parent, I needed cash flow more than prominence and feared those magazines would demand excessive amounts of my time. I did not want to blow my opportunities in the prestigious regional magazines marketplace by submitting subpar copy. I lacked the confidence in the beginning to transfer my success in newspaper reporting to legitimate magazines. While newspapers wanted me to make a long story short, magazines sought just the opposite, to make a short story long.
But my success with articles for Westward bolstered my confidence and when David Legge moved from Dallas to helm Houston City, I pounced. An experienced magazine editor, Legge worked for the publishing company that owned the Dallas offering, D Magazine. The company had dispatched him to Houston to remake Houston City in its image. After receiving my article queries, Legge invited me to the Houston City offices and offered a short course on magazine production. Sketching a diagram on a legal pad, he explained what he called the monthly city magazines formula of short department articles, larger feature stories and regular specialty issues through the year.
He liked two of my ideas and assigned them on the spot: Houston’s best poker players and a history of the Astrodome. At this point, these suggestions were just interesting
ideas without any research to show I could produce them. But his confidence boosted my confidence, and the contracts for $1,500 each added incentive. About the time Southwest Racquetball was serving its final edition, my story on Houston’s poker players appeared in Houston City’s February 1982 issues. My story on the Astrodome would follow in June.
My Rockford Rule on compensation did not apply to Houston City because I believed those bylines to be worth considerably more than $200 per day in promoting my name as a freelancing brand. Nonetheless, I’m sure I earned at least $200 per day on those articles despite the extra time I took for research and the extra attention I gave to the writing. I confided my self-doubts with the magazine’s managing editor after he published the poker story, and he expressed surprise. He assured me I had done a great job “infiltrating that community” he had not even known existed in Houston until he read my draft.
During the next 15 years I would continue to work regularly for Houston City through several changes in personnel and for its successor publication, Houston Metropolitan Magazine. I would learn that editors may come and go, but the beast still needs copy to eat. By the time Fred Rhodes took the wheel about 1985 at City, he would be calling me and beginning the conversation, “I know you’re the man to see when I need a few stories.” He would even offer me a full-time staff position later in the decade, but by then I had come to view those jobs as higher risk than freelancing because of the turnover at the top.
The turnover opportunities would become even more apparent when Gabrielle Cosgriff became editor of the fledgling Houston Metropolitan following the closure of City in 1989. She had been editor for Southwest Airlines’ Spirit in-flight magazine and had used me there extensively from 1984-1988, even paying me a monthly fee to produce a business news column in addition to regular features. While her successor at Spirit wanted to use writers he knew, Gabrielle popped up almost immediately running Houston Metropolitan. She called and said, “You’re doing a business column here, now. And anything else you want to propose.”
So, by 1983 I realized I had been freelancing for more than two years without any time available to even look for a full-time job. I recalled my early conversation with Kent Demaret when I experienced astonishment he had freelanced for a decade. But I had to acknowledge that my efforts so far had succeeded in providing a living for me and my daughters. With Ampersand and its $1,500 monthly payment in the rearview mirror, however, I needed to drive ahead in finding new clients to fill that regular income gap.
In the next couple of years, I would do exactly that, connecting with the trio of publications destined to form the core of my enterprise throughout the rest of its run: Money magazine, The Journal of Commerce (JOC) and The National Law Journal (NLJ). By 1990, those publications would be contributing more than half of my annual income publishing my byline hundreds of times.
But I wouldn’t find them overnight, and only one of them would enter my life because of specific efforts on my part to connect.
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