S7 Bonus 03: 5 Insights On Asking For More Money

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[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] YD: Welcome to the Travel Media Lab Podcast. I’m your host, Yulia Denisyuk, an award-winning travel photographer and writer, entrepreneur, community builder and a firm believer that every one of us can go after the stories we’ve always wanted to tell with the right support, encouragement, and structure. I’m on a mission to help women storytellers everywhere break into and thrive in the travel media space.

If you’re ready to ditch your fears to the side, grow your knowledge and confidence, and publish your travel stories, you’re in the right place. Let’s go!

[OVERVIEW]

[00:00:38] YD: Welcome back, friends. All this month, we're continuing to share with you a few of my favorite conversations we've held over the years inside our membership, the Circle, as we gear up for the return of seasons eight of our podcast this February. Today, I want to share with you an incredibly important conversation we had during one of our monthly calls. Each month inside the Circle, I set a theme we should focus on for the month. One of our themes was asking for more money. In today's episode, I'm sharing with you the five insights on reframing why we need to start asking for more money way sooner than we think we do. We dedicated the rest of the workshop to the mechanics of how we actually ask for more money, and the conversation and negotiation that I had with an editor when asking for a higher rate. This whole workshop and all of our workshops and conversations are available to you when you join us over at travel medialab.com/circle.

As this episode comes out here, at the end of January 2023, I am actually attending the IMM Travel Media Conference that I speak about all the time on this podcast. This is the conference to be in if you want to get connected to tourism boards and editors in the travel media space. I will be sharing my insights from this year's conference with our Circle members next week. So if you're interested in advancing your own career in travel media this year, now may be a really good time to consider joining us and getting started. All right, let's dive into this conversation.

[EPISODE]

[00:02:16] YD: Welcome everyone, again, to our monthly workshop. This month, in November, the theme that is super important to all of us, super important to freelancers, super important to people in the creative fields. So I'm really excited that we're talking about this. If you have questions, feel free to stop me right away and let's talk about it right away rather than waiting at the end, because there's a lot that we're going to be covering today. So let's do it that way. Sounds good. Bon Appétit. 

The theme for November is asking for more money when we negotiate our rates. Some of you have perhaps seen the discussion that had actually started in the Circle, in our space. That was a preview of my philosophy of it, when I think about asking for more. We're going to go into more detail on it. But to summarize it, in the past, maybe 10 to 15 years, the rates in the freelancing industry, and particularly in the travel media industry have been going down, and down, and down and down. It's a really bad trend and really disturbing trends. There are sort of several reasons for why that is the case. One of them is that the industry as a whole has been really pummeled, the publishing industry as a whole, right? Magazines don't have as much money as they used to have. Prints issues keep dwindling. More and more online is flourishing, but online doesn't pay as much as print used to pay. Meaning, advertisers don't pay as much online as they used to pay for print placements. When a publication doesn't have a lot of money, naturally, it doesn't have a lot of money to pay freelancers, as well. There's sort of this current in the industry. 

Then the other thing that is happening is that, there's a lot more people who are now competing in this industry or trying to work in this industry. And a lot more people are willing to do it for much less money that before. Where before, let's say, the whole pie was, let's say, 100 people, hypothetically speaking. All those 100 people had certain standards or certain rates that they wouldn't go below. Now, there is, let's say, 10,000 people in this industry. The more people you have, the more of the supply you have. The supply and demand principle of economics. You're going to pay less to each of these individual people. When you say yes to a lower rate, then publishers know that, "Okay. I'm able to pay this little and still get what I need." So they learn, and then it's sort of this downward spiral that continues. 

Not only it's important that we ask for more money for ourselves, because we want to increase what we earn, and have better living. But it's also important for the industry, because again, when we say yes to those low rates, we're hurting not only our own earning potential, we're hurting the whole industry, actually, because it's like that race to the bottom. The bottom line is that we need to ask for more money, period. Whenever we're negotiating in any conversations that you guys have, let's say fast forward to five years from now, you're writing a book on your travel experiences, or whatever it is, and you're talking to publishers, you have to stand up for yourself, and you have to ask for more money. Any sort of conversation where it's about financial remuneration, I want us to start thinking in those terms, asking for more money for ourselves.

[00:06:35] Today, I'm going to share with you, first, sort of five different insights that will hopefully reframe how you think about asking for more money, and why you're able to do it, even at this stage of your career. When you have a very sort of small portfolio, you're just starting out, yes. I'm going to tell you today that yes, you should already start asking for more money at this stage. You don't have to wait until you have bigger portfolio like I do or anything like that. Let this be your – what's the word? Because I didn't have this guidance when I was starting out. I absolutely didn't have this guidance. So yes, I waited. I only started asking for more money, maybe a year, year and a half ago, I made it a principle to negotiate every single time I'm in these conversations with editor and we will get into this in a little bit. But you guys have me, right? You have this community, so use this already. You don't have to wait until that point to start asking for more money. You can start doing it now and we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about the five insights that I've collected for you guys, and then we're also going to talk about the actual way to do it. Right? What does the conversation look like? The most fun part is that at the end, I'm going to share with you actual conversations I've had with editors, and the outcomes and what they responded to me. So hopefully, that will be like a really cool inspiration for you to start doing that already. Again, don't wait. You need to start asking for more money right away when you're in these conversations. 

Okay. The first insight that I want to share with you is that, you cannot accept the very first rate you are offered. So let's say, you sent the pitch. Let's say the editor comes back to you and they say, "Okay, great. I can pay you five pence per word for this article." When you're accepting that first rate that they offer you, you're accepting the lowest rate that they're offering you. They're always going to start at the lowest, because they also, on their end, let's put us in our shoes, in their shoes. They expect negotiation. Some of the people that they work with already, some of the freelancers, they're going to negotiate. So of course, they're going to start at the lowest rate that they can. That's the principle of negotiating. Start low and then sort of you see where you end up. It's kind of like, I'm here in Jordan now, so let's use that example. I go to the shop next door, literally the vegetable and fruit shop. When he tells me how much the fruit and vegetable is, he expects to negotiate, right? He doesn't expect me to take it right away. It's the culture here. The culture is to negotiate for the prices. 

It's sort of the same principle that when you're accepting that very first rate, you are leaving money on the table and you're accepting the very lowest rate that they're going to go with. Okay. Now, there is a caveat to that, of course, because some publications and some editors have more – what's the word? Budget power, let's say. Some of them, they have very strict guidelines on what they can pay. Let's say it's $1 a word for Travel and Leisure. That's across all their editors, across all their publications, that would they pay. Well, if it's $1 a word across the whole publication, and they don't have budget assigning powers, probably not much you can do there, right? But in a lot of these cases, they do have a lot of wiggle room. They actually have quite more wiggle room than you guys probably think. Again, don't accept the first rate you're offered, because that's going to be the lowest that they'll ever go and they accept to negotiate as well, so think about that.

Insight number two, good editors and people that is worth working with, they want to pay you more money. They want to pay their freelancers more money. They know how hard the industry is, they know that the whole pie, let's say, has shrunk over the years. They know how hard it is to be a freelancer in this industry. They probably have been that freelancer themselves at some point or another. Really good editors are going to want to give you more money. I've had – I'm not just sort of taking this out of thin air. It's my experiences that I've had myself. I've had these conversations. People have been apologizing to me. "Yulia, I'm so sorry. I only have this much to pay for this. I don't have more. I wish I did. I would have given it to you." When you're in these conversations, and you're sending that email asking for more money, if an editor comes back saying, "Are you out of your mind?" That's a red flag for you. That this is probably not the publication and the editor that you want to work with. Because good editors who understand how this industry works, they absolutely want to give you more money. So when you ask, their response is not going to be, "Are you out of your mind."

[00:12:07] Insight number three. When you ask for more money, it also signals to that editor that you value your work. That is so important, you guys. That is so, so, so important. Imagine you're in a conversation with somebody at Condé Nast. Imagine for whatever reason that they are in the budget cutting mode or whatever and they're like, "We just need to get the story. We can pay you five cents per word on the story." You say, "Sure, I'll take it. Yes, I'll take it." That is a signal to that editor that you don't value your work that much. You value it at five cents a word. Start thinking about these financial conversations through that lens as well. Because when you're agreeing to a certain rate, this is also a brand building conversation for yourself. That's a conversation that says, "Oh, I know Kim. Kim does work for five cents a word. That's how she values her work" Or "I know Samantha. Samantha only does 50 cents a word is the lowest that she'll go, because that's how much she values her work." 

We use pricing as a signal for the value of our work in many different situations, right? Think of Chanel bags versus a cheap knockoff. It's kind of the same thing, right? We use pricing as a way to understand what is the value of something. When you're asking for more money from an editor, not only you're signaling to them that you value your work more, you're also growing your own brand. Because over time, when you have these conversations, editors will know that Yulia is a person who is not agreeing to a rate below a certain threshold, because that's the work that she delivers. It's depositing into my brand of Yulia who creates quality work, that doesn't work for five cents a word. It's all part of that brand loading as well. 

I think it was Hannah or maybe somebody else who mentioned in our thread that, how do I ask for more money without sounding arrogant, without sounding like I'm way out of my league or anything like that? You have to realize that when you're asking for more money, you're not being arrogant. Again, you're showing yourself them that you're valuing yourself at a certain level. But the thing is you guys, and that's really important is, no one is going to do this work for you. If you accept every first rate that you're offered, if you don't negotiate, if you sort of just take what is. To be honest, nobody's going to stand up for you, right? Nobody is. This is your job to stand up for yourself and say, "No. Actually, my work is valued at not at X, but at Y." What is that actual Y? We're going to cover this later today in this time, but it's also a bit of a moving target. Because I'm going to share with you a conversation that I had with editors, the actual conversations. As I'm looking at these conversations, I'm like, "Man, I need to raise my rates. That was way too low that I've offered them." Meaning that the target is always going to be moving. Right now, you may be at a point in your career where you're like, "Well, I can't be asking for $1 a word rate. That's just too much. I don't have the portfolio yet. I'm just starting out."

Well, in a year or so, you may well be at that point where you're like, "You know what? I've written for this publication, and that publication. I can very confidently ask for $1 rate and be very okay with that. So your target is going to be moving. But the point is that we want to start it high enough. We don't want to start it way at the bottom. Because when you start way at the bottom, again, you're leaving so much money on the table, and I'll show you the actual examples of what I mean here.

Insight number four, is that, very importantly, especially for us women, we need to unlink what we're paid for our work from what we see as our own worth and value. That is what pricing ultimately comes back to. Pricing ultimately comes back to how do you see yourself and what do you value yourself as. And again, what do you value your work as? That's why when we think about asking for more money, oftentimes we feel like we need to be apologetic. We need to be somehow sorry for asking for more money, because oftentimes down below, we don't believe that we are worth that much to be able to ask that much. 

[00:17:39] The easiest way to sort of deal with that is to just decouple those two things. I know it's difficult because ultimately, pricing is a conversation of what am I worth? What does my work worth? But we need to start decoupling that, so try to treat your conversations about rates separate from your conversations about your own worth, and just sort of see it more as a business transaction. That's where it helps to do some calculations on how many articles do I want to write per month, or how many articles do I think realistically I can publish a month. What does that mean for the rates that I can do? Or if you're a photographer, how many photos do I need to submit for each story I publish? What does that mean for how much I want to make for each story? What does that mean for how much each photo is going to be worth, right? If you treat it more as a business conversation, rather than this pricing says something about my worth as a human being, it's going to be much easier for you to start having these conversations. Because, again, ultimately, all pricing always comes back to what am I worth? What am I worth as a human? What am I worth? What is my work worth? Then we need to decouple that. It's going to make it so much easier for us.

Insight number five is that, budget conversations are actually editors' job. It's their job. They do this all day long. So when you ask them for more, to revisit the rate or to increase a rate, you're not doing something out of the ordinary. Again, you're not being irrational, you're not being arrogant. It's a conversation they have all the time. It's part of their job, so they're used to it There's no need to feel like you need to excuse yourself or apologize for something. Oh, it's a very simple again, business transaction, business conversation, conversation that's part of their job. Okay. So when you think about it that way, hopefully, it's also easier for you to start doing that. Okay. The five insights, don't accept the first rate you're offered, because that's the lowest that they'll ever go. That's not how negotiations work. Good editors want to pay you more money. If you have a person that you want to work with, they will try to meet the rate that you're asking. They'll absolutely try and they will be happy when they're able to pay you more. They will literally tell you in the email, yes, there you go. I was able to find that additional money, right?

When you ask for more, it signals to the editor that you value your work, which is really important. We need to unlink those two conversations of my worth with asking for more. Finally, budgeting is their job, so they're used to it. When you're asking for more, you're not doing anything out of the ordinary. Okay, five insights. I'm going to stop here, because then we're going to go into the actual way of how we're going to do it. But so far, does that makes sense, what I've covered?

[OUTRO] 

[00:21:11] YD: Thanks again for listening to our podcasts during the break we took in between our seasons. I am so excited to welcome you back next week with fresh interviews and content we've prepared for you for our season eight. If you've been thinking about joining the Circle, now is your cue. Start this year off on the right foot by getting the support, the structure and the community that we provide inside the Circle to help you start pitching and publishing your own work. Go to travelmedialab.com/circle to learn more. Thanks again for listening and I will see you in season eight of our podcast next week. 

[END]