There is possibly no other business in this world where you’d do a job, meet a client’s expectations, be told you’ve met the client’s expectations, and then get paid only a percentage of your fee because the client’s expectations have changed. Yet, in this weird world of publishing, magazines and editors try to get away with this frequently.

Worse, writers let them.

I wrote about my experiences with a certain women’s magazine (in the US) on the blog last week, and a friend commented that he hoped I’d received a kill fee. That got me thinking, and I asked around with a couple of other freelancer friends who’ve faced kill-fee situations in the past, and I realized: the kill fee is probably the most misunderstood term in our industry.

When I explain the term “kill fee” to new freelancers, I often tell them that it’s what happens when you get assigned an article, something goes wrong, the article gets “killed” and the magazine doesn’t print it. I realize now that I’ve missed out an important part in this definition, that is, the explanation of what constitutes “going wrong.”

What happens when a writer meets expectations, the editor is happy, but the article is still killed because of reasons beyond a writer’s control? Should the writer be penalized? What happens when the reasons are completely under the writer’s control and he or she has failed to deliver? Should the publication be penalized? The kill fee clause is put in contracts to protect BOTH the publisher and the writer. This is something I’ve erroneously always forgotten to mention.

If you’ve met your part of the bargain, delivered according to contract, and the editor has been satisfied with your product (such as in my recent example, where the editor actually gave me a compliment), you need to demand the full fee. On the other hand, I can tell you from experience, that I’ve come across several pieces of writing that could neither be improved nor printed and despite rewrites has not been fit for publication. In such a case, the publication has a right to reject the work (with solid reasoning; always get it straight what the expectations on a project are) and pay only a certain percentage of the fee, agreed in advance, to compensate for the writer’s time. The publication shouldn’t have to pay for shoddy work that they can’t use or improve without having to put in hours of in-house time.

Stories get killed all the time, especially in the news business. I’ve had three stories killed in the last year alone by one publication. Just as we were going to print, a company I had written about decided to pull the plug on an amazing concept they’d been promoting. Story killed. I wrote a piece about the feud between the Ambani brothers, but after a certain Supreme Court hearing, the case just stopped being in the limelight, and the editor thought of holding the story instead. The case was resolved, story killed. A story of mine on terrorism, for which I traveled, is still on hold because the key element of the story had some budget issues, and we need to wait for those to be sorted before we can print. I’ve been paid for all these stories, including my travel costs, because their not being published had nothing to do with the quality or substance of my work. The kill fee was never once mentioned.

Similarly, friends of mine have been in situations when companies have changed ownership, editors have asked their friends to critique the work, the magazine has sat on a story too long, or plain and simple changed their mind about the way a story needs to be written or presented. In all these situations, editors have tried to pay kill fees, and in all these situations, my friends have successfully negotiated full payment.

You should too. The kill fee is meant to pay for your time when you haven’t done what you promised to do but have made a reasonable amount of effort to do so. Beyond that, always demand the full fee, whether the piece is printed or not.